(Click the audio player on the right to listen to 'Take Care')
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Say what you will about Drake, the 25-year-old Canadian rap superstar whose second album, “Take Care,” comes out Tuesday. Just don’t think you can embarrass him. There he is in a video, donning a slick tux and pretending to marry his friend Nicki Minaj. That’s him, wasted and laughing, rolling down his car window to tell TMZ he’s “one of the best Jews to ever do it.” He’s on “SNL” in a bright Coogi sweater. Get within range and he will probably hug you.
At a moment when hip-hop has taken a turn toward the confessional, Drake has evolved into the genre’s ideal emissary — less conflicted than Kanye West, for whom truth and pain are inextricably linked, and more at ease sharing feelings than his former mentor Jay-Z, an artist who built a career on his reservoir of reserve. Drake bears the spotlight lightly — with a sense of humor, even. He carries himself with the calm of the “Degrassi: The Next Generation” child star that he was.
Once, a certain kind of emotional honesty was elusive in rap, whose artists make a fetish of keeping it real but build identities out of the people they no longer are, or never were. Drake, by contrast, is resolutely himself. He damns himself with élan and equanimity, with a seductive falsetto and the government names of the women he’s avenging himself upon:
Now you’re trying to find somebody to replace what I gave to you
It’s a shame you didn’t keep it: Alisha, Catya
I know that you gon’ hear this
I’m the man
Yeah I said it
B**** I’m the man
Don’t you forget it
The way you walk, that’s me
The way you talk, that’s me
The way you’ve got your hair up, did you forget that’s me?
And the voice in your speaker right now, that’s me, that’s me
Defend or adore this man at your peril: As love songs go, this one, “Shot For Me,” is pure evil. Nor is it an anomaly on “Take Care,” a record that prizes honesty over everything, including political and emotional correctness. One year removed from his debut, “Thank Me Later” — an album-length meditation on the psychological perils of attaining fame — Drake has evolved into a supremely confident and accurate chronicler of his own condition.
In concert with his producer and longtime collaborator, Noah “40” Shebib, Drake has made as good a record as an artist can make about being caught in a particular place, mood and time. “Take Care” is a time capsule of missed voicemail messages, bits of conversation, half-finished drinks on club coasters, snatches of anecdotes from half-remembered nights. Drake’s technique is subtraction; he conjures scenes by reducing them to a handful of moments: “Just throw up while I hold your hair back/ Her white friend said, ‘You n***as crazy’/ I hope no one heard that.”
Over the past year, the muted, watery template of “Thank Me Later” — a derivation of Kanye West’s synthesizer-and-sadness-heavy “808s & Heartbreak” — has become more familiar and influential than it once was. But other rappers are playing on a tilted field when it comes to this sound, which was built for Drake. Here, he and 40 — alongside like-minded producers Boi-1da, T-Minus, the Weeknd confederates Doc McKinney and Illangelo, and the xx’s Jamie Smith — complicate the languorous atmosphere: piano chords, arpeggiated guitars and muffled drums give the “Take Care” mixes backbone. This as much an R&B record as it is a rap one, thriving in the overlap between sounds. The result is alternately tough and yielding, unfamiliar yet soothing.
“Take Care” should end the popular image of Drake as the cuddly platonic best friend of the rap game. “All those other men were practice/ They were practice/ Yeah, for me,” he sings on “Practice,” a murky flip of Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up.” On “Doing It Wrong,” with no less a romantic than Stevie Wonder, he tells an ex, “Cry if you need to, but I can’t stay to watch you.” Never has a Wonder harmonica solo sounded so much like the indifferent dial tone at the other end of the line.
Drake knows it’s his fault, too. Success at his level breeds contempt. “I be yelling out money over everything, money on my mind/ Then she want to ask when it got so empty/ Tell her I apologize, it happened over time,” he raps on “Headlines.” And on “Marvin’s Room”: “I don’t think I’m conscious of making monsters out of the women I sponsor till it all goes bad.” But he’s certainly self-aware — and opportunistic — enough to turn it into a lyric.
In the context of a personal life, these sentiments are borderline contemptible, but Drake’s point is that he doesn’t have a personal life. Like Kanye West, an inspiration turned rival — the acid second verse of “We’ll Be Fine” seems aimed squarely at him — Drake’s project is to forge a unity between his experience of fame and the work that’s made him famous.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the title track, a collaboration with Drake’s ex-girlfriend, Rihanna. Over a liquid revamp of a Jamie Smith remix of a Gil Scott-Heron recording, Drake addresses his old flame: “When you’re ready, just say you’re ready/ When all the baggage just ain’t as heavy/ And the party’s over, just don’t forget me.” And Rihanna seems to respond in kind: “I know you’ve been hurt by someone else/ I can tell by the way you carry yourself/ If you let me, here’s what I’ll do/ I’ll take care of you.”
But those words aren’t hers — or even Scott-Heron’s. They were written by the ’60s soul singer Brook Benton, and covered innumerable times since, including by Scott-Heron, whose melody Rihanna quotes. What seems like two real-life exes talking to each other in public — what is two real-life exes talking to each other in public — is also a cover of a cover of a cover. “Take Care” is pop music about pop music, unabashed exhibitionism as hitmaking.
So it goes with Drake, who is a resolutely pop artist, not just in ambition but in technique. He borrows flows and rhythms from other rappers, interpolates the music he likes into the music he makes. “Shot For Me” contains an atmospheric sample from SWV. “Cameras” absconds with the downbeat mood and the voice of the R&B veteran Jon B. The skewed “Crew Love” is more or less an unassisted showcase for the Weeknd, Drake’s Canadian compatriot, whose dramatic falsetto is a close — perhaps too close — foil for Drake’s own. Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross and André 3000 are all given chances to steal songs — Ross, a warm, goofy presence, is a particular relief on the titanic, Just Blaze-produced “Lord Knows.” He’s the lone funnyman on a record that is constantly on the verge of taking itself too seriously.
This is ultimately the knock on Drake — that he’s so mired in the details of success, power and privilege to realize how good he has it. But “Take Care” is far less ambivalent about fame and what comes with it than any of this artist’s past work. Though Drake remains a keen observer of his own increasingly compromised emotions, there’s no sense of regret here — only, perhaps, the knowledge that one day he’ll wake up and it will all be so familiar that he’ll have nothing new to say. “It’s been two years since someone asked me who I was,” he raps on “Underground Kings.” It’s a boast. It’s also a warning. Soon Drake himself will stop asking. But not yet.
Download from iTunes
Say what you will about Drake, the 25-year-old Canadian rap superstar whose second album, “Take Care,” comes out Tuesday. Just don’t think you can embarrass him. There he is in a video, donning a slick tux and pretending to marry his friend Nicki Minaj. That’s him, wasted and laughing, rolling down his car window to tell TMZ he’s “one of the best Jews to ever do it.” He’s on “SNL” in a bright Coogi sweater. Get within range and he will probably hug you.
At a moment when hip-hop has taken a turn toward the confessional, Drake has evolved into the genre’s ideal emissary — less conflicted than Kanye West, for whom truth and pain are inextricably linked, and more at ease sharing feelings than his former mentor Jay-Z, an artist who built a career on his reservoir of reserve. Drake bears the spotlight lightly — with a sense of humor, even. He carries himself with the calm of the “Degrassi: The Next Generation” child star that he was.
Once, a certain kind of emotional honesty was elusive in rap, whose artists make a fetish of keeping it real but build identities out of the people they no longer are, or never were. Drake, by contrast, is resolutely himself. He damns himself with élan and equanimity, with a seductive falsetto and the government names of the women he’s avenging himself upon:
Now you’re trying to find somebody to replace what I gave to you
It’s a shame you didn’t keep it: Alisha, Catya
I know that you gon’ hear this
I’m the man
Yeah I said it
B**** I’m the man
Don’t you forget it
The way you walk, that’s me
The way you talk, that’s me
The way you’ve got your hair up, did you forget that’s me?
And the voice in your speaker right now, that’s me, that’s me
Defend or adore this man at your peril: As love songs go, this one, “Shot For Me,” is pure evil. Nor is it an anomaly on “Take Care,” a record that prizes honesty over everything, including political and emotional correctness. One year removed from his debut, “Thank Me Later” — an album-length meditation on the psychological perils of attaining fame — Drake has evolved into a supremely confident and accurate chronicler of his own condition.
In concert with his producer and longtime collaborator, Noah “40” Shebib, Drake has made as good a record as an artist can make about being caught in a particular place, mood and time. “Take Care” is a time capsule of missed voicemail messages, bits of conversation, half-finished drinks on club coasters, snatches of anecdotes from half-remembered nights. Drake’s technique is subtraction; he conjures scenes by reducing them to a handful of moments: “Just throw up while I hold your hair back/ Her white friend said, ‘You n***as crazy’/ I hope no one heard that.”
Over the past year, the muted, watery template of “Thank Me Later” — a derivation of Kanye West’s synthesizer-and-sadness-heavy “808s & Heartbreak” — has become more familiar and influential than it once was. But other rappers are playing on a tilted field when it comes to this sound, which was built for Drake. Here, he and 40 — alongside like-minded producers Boi-1da, T-Minus, the Weeknd confederates Doc McKinney and Illangelo, and the xx’s Jamie Smith — complicate the languorous atmosphere: piano chords, arpeggiated guitars and muffled drums give the “Take Care” mixes backbone. This as much an R&B record as it is a rap one, thriving in the overlap between sounds. The result is alternately tough and yielding, unfamiliar yet soothing.
“Take Care” should end the popular image of Drake as the cuddly platonic best friend of the rap game. “All those other men were practice/ They were practice/ Yeah, for me,” he sings on “Practice,” a murky flip of Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up.” On “Doing It Wrong,” with no less a romantic than Stevie Wonder, he tells an ex, “Cry if you need to, but I can’t stay to watch you.” Never has a Wonder harmonica solo sounded so much like the indifferent dial tone at the other end of the line.
Drake knows it’s his fault, too. Success at his level breeds contempt. “I be yelling out money over everything, money on my mind/ Then she want to ask when it got so empty/ Tell her I apologize, it happened over time,” he raps on “Headlines.” And on “Marvin’s Room”: “I don’t think I’m conscious of making monsters out of the women I sponsor till it all goes bad.” But he’s certainly self-aware — and opportunistic — enough to turn it into a lyric.
In the context of a personal life, these sentiments are borderline contemptible, but Drake’s point is that he doesn’t have a personal life. Like Kanye West, an inspiration turned rival — the acid second verse of “We’ll Be Fine” seems aimed squarely at him — Drake’s project is to forge a unity between his experience of fame and the work that’s made him famous.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the title track, a collaboration with Drake’s ex-girlfriend, Rihanna. Over a liquid revamp of a Jamie Smith remix of a Gil Scott-Heron recording, Drake addresses his old flame: “When you’re ready, just say you’re ready/ When all the baggage just ain’t as heavy/ And the party’s over, just don’t forget me.” And Rihanna seems to respond in kind: “I know you’ve been hurt by someone else/ I can tell by the way you carry yourself/ If you let me, here’s what I’ll do/ I’ll take care of you.”
But those words aren’t hers — or even Scott-Heron’s. They were written by the ’60s soul singer Brook Benton, and covered innumerable times since, including by Scott-Heron, whose melody Rihanna quotes. What seems like two real-life exes talking to each other in public — what is two real-life exes talking to each other in public — is also a cover of a cover of a cover. “Take Care” is pop music about pop music, unabashed exhibitionism as hitmaking.
So it goes with Drake, who is a resolutely pop artist, not just in ambition but in technique. He borrows flows and rhythms from other rappers, interpolates the music he likes into the music he makes. “Shot For Me” contains an atmospheric sample from SWV. “Cameras” absconds with the downbeat mood and the voice of the R&B veteran Jon B. The skewed “Crew Love” is more or less an unassisted showcase for the Weeknd, Drake’s Canadian compatriot, whose dramatic falsetto is a close — perhaps too close — foil for Drake’s own. Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross and André 3000 are all given chances to steal songs — Ross, a warm, goofy presence, is a particular relief on the titanic, Just Blaze-produced “Lord Knows.” He’s the lone funnyman on a record that is constantly on the verge of taking itself too seriously.
This is ultimately the knock on Drake — that he’s so mired in the details of success, power and privilege to realize how good he has it. But “Take Care” is far less ambivalent about fame and what comes with it than any of this artist’s past work. Though Drake remains a keen observer of his own increasingly compromised emotions, there’s no sense of regret here — only, perhaps, the knowledge that one day he’ll wake up and it will all be so familiar that he’ll have nothing new to say. “It’s been two years since someone asked me who I was,” he raps on “Underground Kings.” It’s a boast. It’s also a warning. Soon Drake himself will stop asking. But not yet.
