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At the peak of the year 2018, Drake seemed ready for a new image. Faced with the criticism of having borrowed audiences from the West Indies, West and South Africa and to make them pimps, he began the year by considering disgruntled customers and returning to the old formula. For Drake, that still means trust bars and R & B – meat and potato stuffs that have never completely disappeared in his genre experiments, but that have been dismissed in favor of sunny and informed pop music from the island Life. This "return to form" is a classic movement from Drake's album – when he wants to be taken seriously, he returns to what had originally led him to the top of the hierarchy of rap.
In January, Drake publishes Scary Hours an unexpected two-song EP that includes the hit "God's Plan". Then in April, he drops "Nice For What", a song that turns Big The rebound of Freedia in New Orleans and a sample of "Ex-Factor" of Lauryn Hill both made slight modifications to the formula which has been proven over the past decade – a glimmer of hope for conventional Drake fans. It was the story that he seemed – one of the most attentive referees of the music picture – to be making his fifth studio album. But even the best plans often do not take beef into account, which means that his words war of June with PUSHA-T – culminating with the apparent revelation that Drake was the absent father of a little boy – threw a key in its attempt to restructure the company. The result of this skirmish is Drake's new album Scorpion a two-minute, 90-minute project that casually revisits its comfort zone.
For an artist who was already subject to long wanderings about his paranoia and the jealousy felt by his peers, a dissent from Push only complicates Drake's original production. But the founder of Rap-A-Lot Houston's iconic rap tag A-Lot and his personal mentor J. Prince would have advised him not to respond directly to PUSHA-T's "The Story of Adidon" , saying it would hurt Drake and Kanye's careers. But it would not be like Drake leaving a series of unanswered slights.
All the side A of Scorpion – the rap side – Drake gives a lot of time to tackle the beef, but a bit like "Duppy Freestyle", the mass can still be interpreted as being geared towards Kanye Where is. On the album titled "Survival" of the album, he recounts quarrels with Meek Mill and Diddy: "I had real Philly Niggas who were trying to write my endin 'plans. / Takin with the goat and talked about plans that we send brawls with bad boys who were not pretending. "In this same verse, he mocks" I dropped a hundred times when I n & # 39; I have not had the credit, "which could also be a shot Kanye considering that Drake is credited on TLOP " 30 Hours "and ye " Yikes. "[19659004] In a recent Rolling Stone report, the producers of Scorpion track "March 14", which offers the most details about Drake's son to date, alleges that the song began to be done in January Drake J. Valler and Malik Yusef collaborators suspect that the title of the song suggests that Drake played A version of the song for Kanye West in Wyoming, and Kanye then played the song for PUSHA-T, which gave him ammunition for The Story of Adidon.
So, if the timeline unfolded like this, lines like "Lead the league in scorin ', dude, but look at my passes / yes I'm with Future but I like to remember" on Scorpion's "Mobb Ties" and "Niggas pulling stuff because they were afraid of rap" from "Non Stop" could be directed to Kanye. On his weekly podcast, Joe Budden speculated that not only was the majority of Side A a direct response to Ye and Push, but he thinks that even the way Drake used "good" was a pun for G.O.O.D. The music. Budden has been known to launch wild rap conspiracies in online conversation, so make this theory what you want, but the smallest details of his analysis resembled one of the few realistic scenarios for which Push has even got information about Drake's son.
In a way, all these rebuttals look like a return to a classic Drake mode. It almost seems to be in a comfort zone when there is a conflict. Paranoia and rage have always suited her. Most importantly, he moves into a new territory when he is able to discuss his relationship with his son.
These feelings come together on the album on March 14th. moments of elevation of the forehead above; Drake does very little to reverse Push's missing father charges (he confirms that he had only seen his son during Christmas). He also uses the song as an opportunity to point out that it had only been twice with the son's mother and that it was more or less the result of a reality that his mother had tried to avoid him during his early years. But by all accounts, it is the most vulnerable moment in the career of the Toronto artist. He spends much of the song expressing his shame at recreating long-distance co-parenting, he was subjected to a child. He is open about the fear of seeing his son worry about which parent loved him the most. It is one of the few moments in Drake's career when he is apparently forced to operate elsewhere than in his pride, although that may be due to the fact that this pride is somewhat broken.
But the rest of Scorpion has nothing like it. Where parts of Views and most of More Life gave the impression that Drake saw the interest of extending his superstar to artists from all over the world. African diaspora with light dances, this new album will return to what works. And, to his credit, many things really work . On the B side dominated by the R & B, which has a little more cohesion than the A side, Drake has uninterrupted space to do the ballads which he has always shown the ability to do.
The Ty Dolla $ ign-featuring, slow-burning "Jaded" picks Drake-is Drake's themes, highlighting his reason for being single to not hurt anyone else. It's corny, but it looks awesome. "Blue Tint" was made for the summer night discs and features some Future choruses. He unearths unfinished songs from Michael Jackson as a flex of his power of purchase (what he does throughout the album) on "Do not Matter". "In My Feelings", has contributions from the Miami Girls duo and interpolates New Orleans flavor just like "Nice For What." The ingredients make him one of the best candidates for a single at the top of his career. All of these add more refinement to Drake's unparalleled ability to create easily digestible pop music that comes from a rap foundation.
On the A side, with his shots on the people of G.O.O.D. Music and pure display of lyrical ability, there are many songs to excite. The first hint that "Emotionless" is a slap in Mariah Carey's hit hit "Emotions," indicates that it will be a star. Coupling that with some of his most bubbling lines on the album about witnessing ancient heroes act more humanly disappointing than he ever imagined to make it one of the best of the world. album. Drake scores a Premier DJ for "Sandra's Rose," a self-proclaimed bop that pays homage to his mother while taking hilarious shots like "Like Charlemagne, I see the light and see the darkest spots." And although it does not help JAY-Z joins Drake on the talk show produced by DJ Paul (and NWA) "Talk Up" – the kind of hip hop moment we should have a lot more to do. As Side B does with R & B, Side A supports his long list of spiritual rappels, but often catty.
Even with all these highlights, the fact that Scorpion is 25 songs and 90 minutes long can not be ignored. So listening to it sounds like a chore once you get to the beginning of Side B, which is unfortunate, as many of the best songs in the album have gone beyond this point. Beyond the length is the reality that the framing of this Drake album unfolds early because what he offers musically does not justify how a lot of music is actually there. He leaves the question that many had after Migos published Culture II earlier this year: how many decisions of the biggest music stars are made with commercialism in mind before artistic integrity? Scorpion could be one of Drake's best albums when he was shaving about a third of his tracklist. Although Views suffered the same length challenges, the insertion of Caribbean and West African music was a skill added to his repertoire and was a way for him to connect with global artists. He took this even further More Life which resembled largely a Drake residence in London. But now we are back to where we had left before 2016. In his review of Views writer Judnick Mayard evaluated Drake's tendency to return to old habits after to have noticed that halfway, he completely abandoned the diasporic flavor of the album. "This feeling of wanting to experiment but understand that there is pressure to repeat past successes is familiar to many" millennia "who know what it is to wait until the game catches up with us while the old pillars fall. "
This still seems to be the case for Drake in 2018. But, how can you say that to an artist who has not experienced many card failures for nearly a decade how to function? Scorpion is full of great moments, but his appetite for domination slows his chance to part with the already existing Drake music.
Follow Lawrence Burney on Twitter.
This article was originally published on Noisey US
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