He’s the city’s most ambitious and successful MC and yet is unable to let loose to his own dancehall beats – hardly a Toronto-specific story.With his Views From The 6 album looming heavy on the collective conscience of the rap game, Drake‘s been suspiciously quiet as of late. Still, it’s interesting to think about what makes this album particularly Toronto. Perhaps that’s why Drake dropped “the 6” from original title Views From The 6 days before the release. Views is more about a state of mind than a particular place. “Them girls, they just wanna take my money” goes the refrain on Controlla. The best songs tend to be the most pop and eclectic – Feel No Ways, Rihanna duet Too Good and summer jam One Dance – but these “upbeat” moments are tempered by a sense of restraint. This is not a new sound for Drake, but Views is so heavy on melodic flow patterns you wish he would just go for it as an R&B singer. Often these warm and emotionally vivid songs are suppressed or relegated to the background in the sound mix – save for the Blige sample, which is used in predictably nostalgic fashion on the autobiographical Weston Road Flows. Much in the way 90s-era producers nodded to old-school R&B and soul to create wistful moods, Views continually calls back to 90s and 00s R&B and hip-hop by incorporating samples from DMX’s How’s It Goin’ Down, Brandy’s I Dedicate (Pt. Though heavy, none of these songs are insta-bangers the beats are sluggish and mirror Drake’s fatigue with superficiality. “I hate a rapper especially / They feel the same, but they hide it / They just discuss it in private,” he raps on Hype.
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The more hard-hitting songs are in line with hip-hop’s aggressive posturing – Hype, the Future-featuring Grammys, Still Here, Pop Style – but are also expressly about the aggressive posturing of American hip-hop and the celebrity bullshit that comes with that. Occasionally, he and his army of producers – led by Noah “40” Shebib – shift the dial away from the bass-rattling aesthetic of American hip-hop and toward more eclectic sounds: a dusty drum break on the pop ballad Feel No Ways, and house-y dancehall, Afropop and UK funky in the album’s “summer” section (Controlla, One Dance, Child’s Play and Too Good). What immediately jumps out is the succinctness of sound and the intense melancholy of Drake’s singing and rapping. The mood is pensive and weighty, and the emotional highs don’t feel as triumphant. Views is essentially a longer and more refined and subdued version of last year’s mixtape, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. “How are you supposed to figure out what I’m going through / You can’t even figure out what’s going on with you,” he asks. The embittered opener Keep The Family Close sets up his familiar theme of disconnect that plays out in different ways over the 20 tracks – between Drake and women, between Drake and other rappers and with everyone and themselves. Listening to him sing and rap about trust issues, an inability to maintain romantic relationships and the tightness of his close friendships, it also feels like on Views he is similarly dancing around an overarching emotional issue. Much in the way the 29-year-old hip-hop superstar takes subliminal shots at other rappers in his lyrics, Drake implied the existence of a massive problem without directly acknowledging it. In an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, he explained that Views’ emotional pattern follows Toronto’s seasonal weather changes: “Winter to summer and back to winter again.”Īnd so we have Toronto’s first post-climate-change concept album. There is something tacitly downbeat in the way Drake has described his fourth album.
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DRAKE Views (OVO Sound/Young Money/Universal) Rating: NNN