Drake goes roaming
An album. A mixtape. An audiobook in which he annotates his old scripts from “Degrassi: The Next Generation.”
At this point, it doesn’t really matter what form a new Drake release takes. The Canadian rapper and singer — and former teen actor — is so popular that whatever he puts out is almost certain to attract listeners in record numbers.
But if designations can seem increasingly irrelevant for a superstar at his level — and at a moment when the shift to digital streaming is already turning everything into context-free clouds of ones and zeroes — that doesn’t mean labels are without meaning for Drake.
In 2015, he presented the chest-beating “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late” as a mixtape, proudly aligning himself with hip-hop’s tradition of rushed-to-market trash talk. Yet last year’s “Views” was clearly billed as an album, with all the structure and ambition that term has historically evoked. (Both efforts debuted at No. 1, the latter moving more than a million units in its first week.)
Now Drake is back with “More Life,” a collection of 22 songs that he’s referring to as a playlist and which premiered last weekend on his Apple Music radio show before becoming available to stream and download.
So what’s he telling us with this latest exercise in taxonomy? For starters, he might be managing expectations.
Hyped for months in advance as a kind of grand document, “Views” struck some as too long, too sulky, too loaded with heavy musings on the alienating effect of celebrity in the social-media age.
By calling “More Life” a playlist instead, he’s promising a lighter-weight experience, one not necessarily designed to clarify What Drake Thinks.
But the jargon also goes some way toward justifying the breadth of styles and attitudes here; it gives Drake license to roam as a compilation of various artists’ songs would.
Not that he didn’t go wide on “Views,” which completed his move from rap into clubby, global-minded pop with hits like “Controlla,” “One Dance” and “Too Good,” the humid duet with Rihanna that more or less functioned as a sequel to her Drake-featuring “Work.”