Drake hits his mark with ‘Scorpion’
It’s self-obsessed and overlong, but still fun
Drake has spent the good part of a decade on a meticulous quest for hiphop domination, and with it, his listeners’ time. Flashy Super Bowl spots and “Saturday Night Live” appearances, mixtapes and playlists in the off months in between albums, eagerly timed singles corresponding with song-of-thesummer season — the rapper knows that attention is currency, far more valuable to him than the handfuls of cash he handed out to strangers in his “God’s Plan” video.
That’s why it’s entirely unsurprising that Drake’s new album, “Scorpion,” out now, is 25 songs. It’s almost more surprising that all Drake albums aren’t 20plus tracks. Because there’s nothing more prototypically Drake than believing listeners will happily spend an hour and a half listening to “Scorpion,” and the rest of the day trying to process it. It comes from the same impulse that compelled the rapper to, in “God’s Plan,” buy a grocery store’s worth of people everything in their carts. To Drake, “Scorpion” isn’t just a new release — it’s a gift, an entire extra album’s worth of songs bestowed upon listeners with the expectation that we won’t be able to look away.
And to ensure that his new album would dominate the headlines the day after its release, Drake added the hot gossip that fans were hoping for — news about the child that Pusha-T said Drake was “hiding” in his diss track “The Story of Adidon.”
On “Scorpion,” Drake isn’t hiding anything related to his son, peppering in references throughout the album and dedicating a song to him, “March 14.”
“Yesterday morning was crazy,” he raps, seemingly describing the process of realizing that he was going to be a dad. “I had to come to terms with the fact that it’s not a maybe / That (exple- tive) is in stone, sealed and signed / She’s not my lover like Billie Jean, but the kid is mine / Sandi used to tell me all it takes is one time / (Expletive) we only met two times. Two times / And both times were nothing like the new times / Now it’s rough times/ I’m out here on front lines just tryna make sure that I see him sometimes. It’s breaking my spirit / A single father, I hate when I hear it / I used to challenge my parents on every album / Now I’m embarrassed to tell them I ended up as a co-parent / Always promised the family unit / I wanted it to be different because I’ve been through it / But this is the harsh truth now.”
On “Emotionless,” Drake flips PushaT’s “hiding a child” claim, trying to set the record straight.
“I wasn’t hiding my kid from the world, I was hiding the world from my kid,” he raps. “From empty souls who just wake up and look to debate / Until you staring at your seed, you could never relate.”
Beyond the pot-stirring in “Scorpion,” fans can expect a better album than his chilly 2016 “Views.” While Drake is similarly fixated on rapping about his wealth, his enemies and his self-preservation, he seems to have shaken his dance hall fixation, reintroducing R&B as his sonic template of choice for many of the album’s best moments. The bad news is that the gems are scattered throughout the album’s 25 songs.
The album is split into a “Side A,” dominated by harder, gloomier “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late”-style beats, with the notable exceptions of the now-familiar “God’s Plan” and the rousing Mariah Carey-sampling “Emotionless”; and a “Side B,” the more compelling, R&B-focused half of the album that features a collection of tracks primed for summer, including an unreleased Michael Jackson vocal on “Don’t Matter to Me,” handclaps and ’80s synths on the nostalgic “Summer Games,” the goofy banger that is “Ratchet Happy Birthday” and the bounceinspired tracks “In My Feelings” and “Nice for What,” the latter of which still manages to be listenable after endless loops on the radio.
Drake could lose half of the songs on “Scorpion” and have an excellent album, but he doesn’t have incentive to cut any tracks, considering the massive streaming numbers “Views” did, thanks to its lengthy tracklist and inclusion of his previous singles. Why make a 13-song album for the sake of artistic tidiness, his logic goes, when he can give his fans the movie-length album he thinks they really want?
Still, it’s preferable to Kanye West’s confounding seven-song “Ye,” which left listeners wondering if there were better songs left on the cutting room floor that could’ve redeemed his forgettable album. “Scorpion” is entirely too long, but at least there’s a good album in between its filler tracks, as opposed to “Ye,” which left no margin for error in its 25-minute run time. Drake’s thirst for listeners’ attention may know no bounds, but at least with “Scorpion,” there’s a mostly worthy album that results from it.