How is Drake's new release?
When Drake tells us approximately 10 minutes into his new album that he’s “exhausted and drained,” it’s clear we’re supposed to sympathize with him. The revelation comes in the song “Emotionless,” just after the Canadian superstar has more or less confirmed widespread rumors that last year he secretly fathered a child.
“I wasn’t hiding my kid from the world / I was hiding the world from my kid,” he insists, going on to describe the fatigue created by a culture in which “empty souls … just wake up and look to debate” the intimate dealings of celebrities like him.
But the only reason the internet is obsessed with Drake’s personal life, of course, is because he’s been singing and rapping about it since he broke out nearly a decade ago.
And here this dude has the audacity to complain about being tired before he’s even finished four songs on “Scorpion”? Imagine how the rest of us feel an hour and 20 minutes later, when he finally brings this 25-track double album to a close.
Released Friday, when it leaped instantly to the top of any streaming-service chart you looked at, “Scorpion” is sure to test the endurance of even the most committed Drake fan. Split into two halves (or “sides” as the musician calls them), the project showcases both Drake the hip-hop blowhard and Drake the R&B sweetheart.
Whatever the setting, though, he clings doggedly to the same storyline, which basically amounts to: Drake has been maligned or misunderstood, and that hurt his feel- ings in a major way — but also he doesn’t care because there’s nothing anybody could do to bring him down (except for soand-so doing such-and-such).
Yet for all its tiresome megalomania,
“Scorpion” is so beautifully rendered that Drake ends up pulling you over to his side, much like Kanye West did on his similarly vexing “Ye.”
“Emotionless” sets those thoughts on the empty souls of the celebrity-industrial complex against a churchy snippet of Mariah Carey’s “Emotions,” which provides a tenderness the song wouldn’t otherwise have had.
“Scorpion” has sounds that suggest Drake and his expansive team of producers and songwriters were reaching for new territory, as in “Summer Games,” a gorgeous synth-pop ballad about the ways people play with one another on social media.
“Scorpion” ends, no surprise, with Drake’s full accounting of the one thing he could be sure folks would stick around for: his unexpectedly becoming a parent with a woman he says he met only two times.
“Sandi used to tell me all it takes is one time,” he raps, referring to his mother.
And for its first few minutes, “March 14” is uncharacteristically raw.
But just as you’re wondering whether Drake might’ve broken through to some new plane of emotional maturity, the hard-knocking hip-hop track transforms into a plush R&B jam in which he quotes Boyz II Men to insist that he’s all alone and needs shelter from the rain.
It’s as self-pitying — and as pretty — as could be.