Take care: Drake offers decade’s best album
Drake’s work an impeccably tasteful masterpiece, Calum Marsh writes.
On the evidence of several recent embarrassments — garish sports bar and sushi restaurant in Toronto’s Financial District, Rolls-royce Phantom with diamond-encrusted hood ornament, the largest championship ring in NBA history — it is tempting to conclude that Drake has bad taste.
The million-dollar suits and the rose gold Patek Philippes, the six-figure necklaces and the private jumbo jets: He has a lot of money, and he doesn’t know how to spend it. And yet, it’s precisely taste that’s Drake’s greatest asset as an artist. As a singer and MC he has always been at best a moderate talent. But as a curator — of guest verses, of sequencing, of producers — his brilliance is unmistakable. The airplanes and the eateries show poor judgment, clearly. But Take Care — his second studio album, released in 2011 — is a masterpiece of impeccable taste.
It starts with structure. Take Care has the shape of a novel or Hollywood screenplay. It has momentum and direction, and is sequenced for maximum enjoyment. The Times was pilloried last month when its pop music critic credited Drake’s early mix tape So Far Gone with having pioneered rap-singing in 2009. Perhaps he overstated it — but if anything can be attributed to Drake, it’s his intuitive command of rap-album structure, which after Take Care proved widely influential.
Before Drake, hip-hop records were digressive and overlong, thronged with skits and superfluous filler. Take
Care established a new model. It’s an album of introductions and conclusions, thoughtfully arranged and carefully paced. Over My Dead Body, the album’s silky opening, couldn’t have been placed anywhere else.
The second track, Shot For Me, couldn’t have come anywhere but second. The whole thing feels that well-defined.
At 80 minutes, Take Care is hardly concise. But it is cohesive, and its seamless flow makes it extremely listenable in a single sitting. Minor details and subtle creative decisions only hint at the effort made to bring this together. There is the brief instrumental outro that connects Shot For Me with lead single Headlines; the addition of Buried Alive (featuring Kendrick Lamar before he broke out
with Good Kid M.A.A.D. City) as a kind of epilogue to Marvins Room before the transition to greater intensity with Underground Kings.
There’s also Drake’s occasional spoken-word interludes between tracks. He even ends, playfully and almost teasingly, with a salutary reference to his own album title: “My sophomore they was all for it/they saw it,” he raps at the very end of The Ride. “Junior and senior’s about to get meaner / Take care.” For an album of symmetry, it’s the perfect sign-off.
In recent years, Drake has apparently lost his touch for album structure — or maybe simply lost interest in adhering to it.
His last several records were overstuffed and tedious; he indulged where before he exercised restraint, and the resulting albums seemed fatally doomed by hubris.
If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late was dense.
Views was a slog — an organizational blunder that drags and meanders terribly.
Take Care remains the benchmark for modern rap-album structure, remembered as much for the narrative arc it followed as for the leagues of wonderful music traced therein. It’s not merely the greatest album of the 2010s, but the most immaculate, so exact that it seems in retrospect unimprovable.
As a collection of songs it is an excellent record. As a work of storytelling it is perfect — a standard as gold as Drake’s gaudy jewelry.