The hip-hop artist known as Drake has become one of the most interesting stars of the moment, and has done it in an unusual way. The typical route to pop innovation is to introduce alien or aggressive sounds that provoke people who otherwise would have paid no attention. But Drake’s music has become more subtle over time. His brilliant new album, “Take Care,” sounds, in passing, like gauzy R. & B. and, occasionally, ambient electronic music. But it is decidedly and firmly hip-hop—if there is any firmness left in the genre.
“Take Care” is likely to be one of the year’s biggest-selling albums. What is exciting, beyond the music itself, is how “Take Care” shows that hip-hop (and pop in general) is in a period of transition in which formal constraints have dissolved almost entirely. How do you even know whether something is hip-hop? Its characteristic rhythms and sounds can be found everywhere in pop these days. We may finally have reached the moment when breaking popular music into genres is pointless.
By hip-hop’s rules, the twenty-five-year-old, who was born Aubrey Graham, has done a variety of things backward, but this approach seems only to have made him more popular. Hip-hop culture, long obsessed with a kind of authenticity and credibility derived from familiarity with street crime and violence, has embraced Drake, even though he doesn’t fit the traditional type—he’s a biracial Canadian Jew who grew up in an affluent suburb of Toronto and starred on “Degrassi: The Next Generation.” He sings as much as he raps; at certain points in his career he has given up rapping entirely. In 1992, the New York rapper and tireless pedant KRS-One pushed the group P.M. Dawn off a stage—an act ostensibly in “defense” of hip-hop—simply because the ensemble sampled a melodic pop song and sang. The incident was small-minded at the time; Drake’s success now makes it look as reactionary as the 1979 burning of disco records at Comiskey Park.
Drake came to the attention of the Southern rap star Lil Wayne in 2008, when Wayne heard one of his homemade mixtapes. In an era when rappers typically work with a range of prominent producers, Drake has recorded almost his entire catalogue, from early mixtapes through two studio albums, with Noah (40) Shebib, a close friend from Toronto. (For his part, Shebib has produced almost exclusively for Drake.) Their collaboration is similar to that of eighties and nineties rap duos like EPMD and Gang Starr, in which the producer stayed within the confines of the partnership for years before taking on other artists and becoming more famous.
Drake is signed to Lil Wayne’s label, Young Money, and the two have traded some mild barbs with Kanye West and Jay-Z. Indeed, their collaboration mirrors that of the older pair: West once looked up to Jay-Z, eventually produced for him, and then eclipsed him, releasing adventurous and popular music while Jay-Z was busy being a C.E.O. Similarly, while Lil Wayne was incarcerated for gun possession, Drake rose to fame with his major-label début, “Thank Me Later,” which was released last year. Wayne and Jay-Z are both rappers in the classic mold, adept at a range of rhythmic variations and wicked puns and metaphors. West is a more confessional type, though fond of good one-liners, and has expanded the musical framework of hip-hop beyond the beat and the rhyme, creating epic, clangorous soundtracks. In some ways, Drake has gone farther than any of them. His music has become increasingly inviting and plush, rejecting entirely any boilerplate ideas of hardness. In a genre known for its narrow definition of masculinity, Drake clearly states, on the song “Lord Knows,” that “showing emotions don’t ever mean I’m a pussy.”
He is less dependent on metaphor and wordplay than perhaps any major rapper in memory—he often simply narrates his own life. Like West, he is happy to admit his faults, and although he discusses sex and money as enthusiastically as any rapper he shares West’s willingness to point out how empty and complicated all of it can be. The boasting that has always characterized hip-hop still pops up, but the stakes have changed: Drake is entirely willing to discuss his talents, but he feels no obligation to say he’s a good person, or invulnerable. With his cardigan sweaters and his elevated taste (he has said that he plans to start a fragrance line), he swiftly established honesty and clarity as the coolest qualities a rapper could exhibit—a radical notion. Most centrally, along with West and the Odd Future collective, Drake has made the therapeutic confession a new staple of rap. (Reality television, with its inevitable pairing of fame and subsequent downfall, lurks in the background.) The age of the tough guy is over.
“Look What You’ve Done” is typical of the combination of soft sounds and hard truths on “Take Care.” Over a gentle piano figure, and backing vocals by the little-known but widely respected R. & B. singer Static Major, Drake raps quickly and nimbly about the support that he received from his aunt, sneaking into her pool after school dances, borrowing her Lexus, and discussing with her his ambivalence about an acting career. He eventually pays back the money he and his mother borrowed—their “checks bounced, but we bounced back.” Imagine Will Smith losing his sunny disposition and rapping about suburbia with a straight face, and being convincing enough not to sound soft.
Drake is not above hubris—one of the album’s most radical-sounding tracks, “The Ride,” begins with him dismissing his own fans, saying, “I hate when people say they feel me, man. I hate that shit. It’ll be a long time before y’all feel me, if ever.” And he’s already jaded about fame: his alleged peers won’t understand him, he says, until their “famous girlfriend’s ass keep getting thicker than the plot does” and they get waved through airport security just by virtue of being stars. The song is co-produced by Abel Tesfaye, who sets up a series of trembling falsetto wails. Drake talks on, with some acutely selfish asides about a woman whose breast implants he hopes won’t interfere with his good time, and about layovers in airports. It’s a very Drake trope: we hear all the details of what the high life feels like, stripped of any sense of majesty or even enthusiasm. Drake resembles Charlie Brown, permanently resigned to all success being fleeting and all pleasure being provisional.
The song “Marvin’s Room” was leaked before the album was released, and it embodies how dizzy and unusual “Take Care” feels. We hear a woman over a speaker, but she’s hard to decipher. Slipping in and out of singing, Drake is getting increasingly drunk and calling a woman who is ignoring him. The echoey and distorted female voice returns. “Are you drunk right now?” she asks. Drake thinks he can convince the woman of his interest by telling her that he’s had sex four times in the past week and is having a “hard time adjusting to fame.” As unappealing as such pronouncements can sound, Drake is perhaps making good on the age-old challenge tossed back and forth between the sexes: “Why don’t you just be straight with me?” But those words rarely lead to light or easy talk, and such honesty is usually avoided. After four or five listens, the title of this album turns out to be cautionary advice. It would be fitting, though unlikely, if Drake were the first pop star to amass a sizable young audience who grew up with no desire to copy their hero. If “Take Care” is post-hip-hop, it is also post-fame. ♦
