For the first time, Drake runs from his feelings
Given that Drake has made his career by putting his most vulnerable sentiments on display, his lack of candour on Scorpion stands out
Drake breaks character only once on his new 25-song, 90-minute double album Scorpion. It comes on the last track, March 14, which addresses at length the fact that the 31-year-old superstar is now a father.
“Sandi used to tell me all it takes is one time/And all it took was one time,” he raps, repeating his mother’s cautionary advice. After that, the deluge: “We only met two times/Two times!” That last phrase — the repetition, the indignation, the way Drake’s voice rises and untethers when he says it — is the only moment of sweat here, the only acknowledgment that the most consummately controlled figure in pop music not named Taylor Swift is still able to be caught off guard.
Not that Drake’s career has been without anxieties and challenges — far from it. But over the past decade he has become the genre’s most sophisticated chess player, a rap strategist who understands the way offence and defence depend on each other. The throneholders before him — Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, even to some degree Kanye West — often appeared above the fray, but Drake’s broadspectrum success has come because of his willingness to be attacked or undermined, his acceptance that part of ascending is the gravitational pull downward.
Reckoning with the responsibilities of new parenthood, untangling a brief liaison that became a lifelong bond — these are the sorts of subjects that would ordinarily animate great Drake music.
But Scorpion is something safer and less ambitious, largely a reprocessing of old Drake ideas and moods. It is the first Drake album that’s not a definitive stylistic breakthrough, not a worldtour victory lap, not an embrace of new grievances. It is, largely, a reminder of Drakes past, and perhaps also an attempt at maintaining stability in the face of profound emotional disruption.
Scorpion is split into two conceptual halves: in the first, largely rapped, men cause him the most agita (professional, but a little bit personal, too), and in the second, largely sung, it’s women (personal, but a little bit professional, too).
Plenty of artists make songs that sound like their old hits, a strategy that effectively concedes creative defeat while maintaining commercial dominance. But Drake does something different. More than anyone else in pop, he is gifted at making songs that aren’t near-exact tracings of his old ones, but rather employ his now-familiar grammar to recall moments you loved so long ago that you’ve internalized them and made their DNA your own. And so when these new songs land for what it is actually the first time, they arrive like a sense memory, not a new feeling.
Scorpion is full of songs like this: Jaded, which oozes moping sentiment; the chest-beating Sandra’s Rose, produced by DJ Premier; Emotionless, built on a fractured Mariah Carey sample. The album underscores how integral the warm keyboards by Drake’s main producer, 40, have been to his success, and how they shore up his career’s throughline, a perfect complement to Drake’s soothing, slippery syllables. Though this album is less preoccupied with new sounds than Drake’s recent work, there are still strong shades of Memphis (Talk Up) and New Orleans (Nice for What) sprinkled throughout.
But Drake is less concerned with fully polished songs here — several feel rushed, with lyrics a notch too plain — and though his last album, More Life, was advertised as a playlist, it felt more albumlike than Scorpion does. The new record’s length — it is very, very, very long — is not an asset, regardless of whether it’s a maximalist streaming strategy, a pointed rebuke to certain artists’ increasingly brief albums, or perhaps the fulfilment of a contractual obligation, or perhaps just the usual bloat. (Drake is not immune to bloat.)
Perhaps most worryingly, the split album conceit relies on a false binary of Drake’s rapping and singing sides, his tough and tender approaches. What made Drake singular upon his arrival, and for the first half of his career, was his insistence that those two impulses were not only related, but necessarily intertwined. Atomizing them into halves — even if it means getting to the end of his contract early — does them both a disservice.
In truth, these Drakes are the same: the agoniste, the uncertain playboy, the tortured boy king. (It’s not an accident that the last words he utters on this album are “I’m changing from a boy to a man,” an interpolation of an old Boyz II Men interlude). Though he’s been involved with some high-profile beefs in recent years, his responses here are largely subdued – teaming with Jay-Z, another titan with a roller-coaster relationship with West, on Talk Up, or 8 Out of 10, which sounds like a taunt at West, lyrically and musically.
In this album’s high moments, vintage Drake feels fresh. After Dark is the peak, a feast of male tenderness that’s a collaboration with Ty Dolla Sign and Static Major (who died in 2008), and anchored by a velvet speech by a quiet storm radio DJ. (He uses an unreleased Michael Jackson sample to less effect on Don’t Matter to Me.) And he is still capable of acute emotional observation, usually of the mirror-staring variety, like on Is There More: “I only tell lies to who I gotta protect/I would rather have you remember me how we met/I would rather lose my leg than lose their respect.”
Here, as ever, he is fuelled by anxiety, sometimes of his own making. His son was born last October, and part of the job of Scorpion is to confirm that news — initially leaked by Drake antagonist Pusha-T — and also to add new fatherhood to the list of existential Drake concerns.
But Drake doesn’t make it central. Only March 14 is wholly dedicated to the subject (“I got an empty crib in my empty crib”), and it only merits a few stray lyrics throughout the rest of the album. Given that Drake has made his career by putting his most vulnerable sentiments on display, the lack of candour here is notable. Maybe, for once, the feelings were too raw.
We take breaking pop culture news and piece it back together at nationalpost. com/arts House on both coasts, but I live on the charts / I have tea with the stars and I swim with the sharks / And I see in the dark, wasn’t this cold at the start / Think my soul has been marked, there’s a hole in my heart. — DRAKE, SURVIVAL