My Gut Reaction: Drake - Views (April 29, 2016)

Today’s post for Aubrey “Drake” Graham’s fourth album, Views, is a lengthy one designed to mirror the drawn-out promotional run our host put together to goose its sales.

I’m just fucking with you – Drake isn’t worth that level of attention from me. This one’s long just because I had a lot to complain about.

Views was conceived as Views From the 6, named after Drake’s nickname for his hometown of Toronto, a number he enjoys throwing around as though everybody on the planet understands his inside joke. It was marketed as his fourth full-length project, following Thank Me Later, Take Care, and Nothing Was The Same, and the man gave several interviews where he discussed, in earnest, the three-year hiatus in between albums and what compelled him to take such a long break.

Which is a bad-faith reading of Drake’s career, by the way. Sure, there was a three-year span in between official albums, but 2015 saw two separate projects from our host, the “mixtape” If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and his collaboration with Future, What A Time To Be Alive. This is on top of the dude’s multiple guest spots on everybody else’s songs, along with the loose tracks he’d drop at random promoting his lavish lifestyle or attacking friend-turned-foe-turned-friend Meek Mill. So it’s not like the man was on a deserved vacation or anything, nor was the listening public suffering withdrawals from their daily dose of Aubremine. He never fucking left, and not just because all I remember from the guy from 2014 through 2016 is him talking about Views From the 6.

Views (he allegedly chopped the ‘From the 6’ after realizing that the POV presented throughout its twenty tales of toxic relationships and shit-talking weren’t Canada-specific in the least) was the culmination of the lessons he had learned from his previous efforts, along with whatever musical influences Aubrey happened to be obsessing over on the various days of recording. Guests are kept to a minimum, while Drake opted to stick with his usual circle of producers, including Noah “40” Shehib and Matthew “Boi-1da” Samuels, all of whom were tasked with providing our host with melancholy missives designed to anchor attacks on both romantic partners and his mortal enemies within our chosen genre, all while proclaiming his innocence and hand-waving any incellular traits with the qualifier “complex”.

Ugh, that sentence was a slog for me to write, I can only imagine how you two felt about reading it. Apologies in advance for how long this one is, but maybe you want your workday to fly by. Anyway, Views sucks.

1. KEEP THE FAMILY CLOSE

Views kicks off with the sound of a cold wind blowing through the 6. Now this may be just my own personal opinion of Aubrey Graham, but he’s done nothing to dispel any of his nonsense in my eyes and therefore deserves this: Drake is a selfish prick. “Keep the Family Close”, ostensibly a rap album intro, one that features zero rapping and all singing from our host, spends the duration of the (weak) Maneesh Bidaye instrumental whining about a former romantic partner fuck buddy not caring enough about him to check in “when things go wrong” while lashing out at them for not being able to read his mind or something. (“You’re so predictable, I hate people like you / … How you supposed to figure out what I’m going through / You can’t even figure out what’s going on with you.”) Yep, toxic Aubrey is back in full force, but your enjoyment of “Keep the Family Close” thankfully isn’t dependent on how you feel about our host’s ongoing mind games, backhanded compliments, and alleged (emphasis on "alleged"… allegedly) predilection for underage girls – this shit just sucks, period. The music is bad, equating “dramatic flair” with “turning the volume up” as opposed to doing any of the grunt work, and Drake’s whiny vocals make him an untrustworthy, narcissistic narrator, a protagonist you’ll be rooting against right off the bat. Which couldn’t have been what these boys were going for – Aubrey isn’t clever enough to pull that off. I’m beginning to sense why it took me four years to finally sit down and fucking listen to Views.

2. 9

Runs for roughly four minutes but feels twice as long, thanks to Aubrey’s creative decision to leave a bar’s worth of dead air after nearly each and every single line during his two verses and hook for “9”, named as such because he “turn[ed] the 6 upside down, it’s a nine now,” which would have been kind of funny had Drake not been playing this one so goddamn straight. Over a poppier 40 production, Drake talks repeatedly about how he would “die for it” (either for Toronto or for hip hop, depending on what the context happens to be at any given moment) and expresses his willingness to engage in rap beefs and “cut ties” as needed: indeed, at the time of release Aubrey was no longer on speaking terms with the likes of Meek Mill (for obvious reasons), Nicki Minaj (Meek’s girlfriend at the time), and Rick Ross (Meek’s employer) and was seemingly proud to have ditched those associations in order to become his own man (even though Minaj was a coworker on their shared Young Money label home at the time). He’s squashed all of these beefs since, but that doesn’t make his declarations on “9” any less believable: that’s something our host does all by himself, with a combination of empty threats and slick double-talk that means fuck-all in the real world. “9” is a prime example of why Drake needs an editor – there isn’t a single other rapper in the fucking world who could get away with recording a rap song where every other bar is blank.

3. U WITH ME?

You know, for a song boasting multiple producers (including among their ranks current presidential candidate Kanye West, who must not have had all that much influence during the studio sessions, seeing as this track carries virtually none of his musical fingerprints), “U With Me?” sounds incredibly hollow, even with the evolving instrumental, and the empty space does not draw the type of attention to Aubrey’s words that he would likely want. Borrowing elements from not one, but two different DMX songs in a weird show of industry dominance over an artist who has gone on record as saying he doesn’t like anything about our host, Drake uses “U With Me?” to toy with the women allegedly interested in him, playing it off as flirty conversation while accusing them of “playin’ mind games” and insisting on knowing whether or not they’re “wit’ me or what”. Problematic isn’t even the right word: “U With Me?” comes across as downright hateful toward the opposite sex in how little he seems to respect the women in his life over his own insecurities. The third verse allows for a bit more in the way of personal detail than the rest, but the fact that the only point he bothers to allow himself a passionate response on the track is when he says, “A lot of n----s cut the check so they can take this flow,” proves, to me at least, how goddamn disrespectful he is of anyone else’s feelings within his bubble, and since I’m writing these words in 2020, I’m including his son and baby’s mother in that description. This shit was bleh, but at least DMX stands to gain something financially from it every time a copy is sold, right?

4. FEEL NO WAYS
Definitely the loudest song on Views thus far, “Feel No Ways” betrays our host’s apathetic intent with a drum machine-heavy instrumental from Jordan Ullman, one-half of the duo Majid Jordan, but while there are certainly moments where he recaptures the 1980’s feel that his prior work on the Aubrey hit “Hold On, We’re Going Home”, the vast majority of this shit feels unfinished, as though Ullman was improvising on the spot, or perhaps allowing a toddler to punch buttons at random intervals. I’d say that it’s rather impressive how Drake manages to sound coherent within this cavern of cacophony, but no, his vocals all stick to his toxic shenanigans, chastising a (former) romantic partner for having the nerve, the audacity, to be angry with him about… well, he conveniently never informs the listener just what it is she’s upset about, hoping to gain the audience’s sympathy while verbally beating her into submission with lines designed to piss her off, such as, “I had to let go of us to show myself what I could do / And that just didn’t sit right with you” (well, no shit, you moron, you made a unilateral decision and essentially cut her out of your life, gee, I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t be all that happy with you, bro!) and even admitting that, “I’ve stopped listening to the things you say,” which, come on, you know he was doing that shit during the courtship, because Drake comes across as somebody who gets bored very easily when he gets what he wants. Kudos to Ullman for at least ramping up the BPM on Views, even of the beat itself isn’t very good, but there are people in this world who hold the same beliefs as Aubrey does here, even going so far as to find them “romantic”, and that should fucking terrify you.

5. HYPE

A message to all of Aubrey’s Angels out there: it shouldn’t have taken five fucking tracks into Views for me to find a song that is even remotely engaging. That’s just poor sequencing on our host’s part. I did actually like “Hype”, though, even with the caveat that there are many songs in Drake’s catalog that sound much better. It helps that our host has switched back to the setting I feel he does best in: smart-ass, aggressive bursts of braggadocio. Instead of the toxicity and palliative pleas to former partners, “Hype” finds our host buying into his own, er, hype, subliminally attacking any and everyone who dared look at him sideways, as he is wont to do, since naming names could go either way for him. (To wit: Drake won a Grammy for a song dissing Meek Mill, which is still just a weird turn of events, while we all know about the fallout from his attack on Pusha T, which is still haunting him to this day.) The beat, credited to both Boi-1da and Nineteen85, is a simple chime loop paired with flimsy trap drums, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as it’s rather catchy, propelling Aubrey’s two verses past the finish line with ease (or, if you’re listening to the remix released shortly after Views hit store shelves, the single verses from Drake and Lil Wayne). The hook plays right into Drake’s strengths as a performer, as I’m sure many a fan gas derived pleasure from chanting, “Me, I’m just done, done, done, done, done…” even when all the rest of the bars aren't anywhere close to being “relatable”. I’m not saying “Hype” is an all-timer in the Wheelchair Jimmy canon, but I wouldn’t skip past it if it popped up on ‘shuffle’.

6. WESTON ROAD FLOWS

Reminded me of So Far Gone’s “Successful”, at least with regard to the slower-paced Mary J. Blige-sampling 40 instrumental and Aubrey’s flow – apparently looking back at his life growing up poor (prior to being cast on Degrassi: The Next Generation, anyway) causes our host to modify his delivery accordingly? Drake’s novella of a one-verse wonder, “Weston Road Flows” (oh wait, now I get it) attempts to find the middle ground between growing up with very little and becoming so successful that you say shit like, “I’m looking at [other rappers’] first week numbers like, ‘What are those?’ / I mean, you boys not even coming close,” and ultimately doesn’t hit the mark, but putting aside our host’s alleged rationale for writing this song, this wasn’t that bad. The beat is subdued, but still much more energetic and embraceable than everything else on Views that isn’t called “Hype” thus far, and our host sounds relaxed and engaged over it, boasting about his wins and shutting down opponents while still carving out the time to croon a bit toward the end, and he’s fully in his element. “You treat me like I’m born yesterday, you forgot my birthday,” may be a bit clumsily written, but it’s still a pretty cold bar. Not bad, but I’m sure Views is somehow about to disappoint me again.

7. REDEMPTION

Real quick: 

That’s Drake in a nutshell: so emotionally unavailable that he’s fully incapable of saying something as simple as “I miss you” because he doesn’t miss you, he misses the idea of having someone, again not necessarily you, there at his beck and call whenever he wants companionship or his dick sucked and that’s it. The fact that there are many Aubrey supporters online who find that line to be romantic is appalling to me. Let’s parse the rest of the verse while we’re here: “I know you’re seeing someone that loves you / And I don’t want you to see no one else.” How controlling is that shit? I get that “Redemption” (which has zero redeeming qualities, by the way: aside from a problematic Drake performance, 40’s beat is also fucking trash) is supposed to illustrate the contradictory feelings our jealous-as-shit host embodies, but this isn’t a good look for you, bro – you’re coming off as a dick that doesn’t believe that your ex should ever be happy. That’s emotionally abusive behavior, folks: one shouldn’t look to Aubrey Graham for relationship advice, like, ever. Ugh. The fourth verse seems to be an entirely separate song, although not an unrelated one, since Aubrey’s obsession with himself reaches across his entire catalog.

8. WITH YOU (FEAT. PARTYNEXTDOOR)

“With You” brings with it the first official guest on Views: Ontario artist PartyNextDoor, who most hip hop heads of a certain persuasion connect with Drake all the time anyway (I mean, dude is signed to Drake’s OVO label), so his presence on this Murda Beatz-produced effort is a no-brainer. (R&B crooner Jerimih also appears toward the end, which apparently wasn’t enough of a reason for Drake to offer him proper credit.) Similar to most of what we’ve listened to so far, “With You” is about a relationship, this time one on the precipice of a breakup, but not if Aubrey and his guest(s) have anything to say about it. PartyNextDoor’s cold Auto-Tuned vocals mask what sounds like a quasi-sincere attempt at expressing love, or at least an emotion of some sort, while Drake takes the predictable “I need you around” route, which, at this point in the game, is something that he should speak with a therapist about. Murda’s beat is much more radio-friendly than the rest of Views has been, but “With You” won’t ever be played on the radio in regular rotation, as it is quite bad. That said, it is fucking hilarious to hear Jeremih try, and wildly fail, to match PartyNextDoor’s vocals on the hook. It honestly sounds like he thought better of the idea halfway through performing the goddamn thing.

9. FAITHFUL (FEAT. PIMP C & DVSN)

Other than Drake’s professed love of the late Pimp C, something I can’t fathom would have ever been reciprocated had the man not passed away in 2007, is there any fucking reason why this posthumous verse would appear on “Faithful”? It has absolutely nothing top do with the alleged theme: addicted to falling in love, Aubrey professes to his latest gal pal that, “I won’t have affairs, I’m yours, girl,” mostly because “that pussy knows me better than I know myself”, which, okay Drake, calm down. 40’s beat is thin and aimless, a programmed drum track that exists solely for the words to have something to bounce off of but serving no musical function otherwise. OVO duo dvsn close the track out with a verse that is as bland as Pimp C’s is inappropriate (given its surroundings here), but none of this matters, because Aubrey has long been in a position where he can throw random parts together, call it a “song”, and his fanbase will hail him as an artistic genius because they’ve never heard any other music in their lives ever. Moving on.

10. STILL HERE

Human beings are complex creatures, most of them capable of holding two or more opposing viewpoints simultaneously and understanding the nuances of each. We tend to contradict ourselves constantly with our actions or words as we continue to learn and grow. And yet that explanation doesn’t explain Aubrey’s dichotomy as presented on “Still Here”: his very first bar, sung-rapped as he does, goes, “Me and all my n----s well, doin’ well, dog,” which plays into the overall theme of family, biological or otherwise, on Views, it being the most important think in one’s life. Not even two bars later, however, Drake counters with, “Did it by myself, by myself, dog,”, and later in the Daxz production (which isn’t terrible – at least it’ll keep you awake) brags about how there is “nothing mutual about my funds.” So he’s a massively successful artists that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon, one that worked hard for everything he has, but he’s unable to decide if claiming that he did it all alone or with the help of his friends (let’s be real here, he’s had a ton of help, and I’m not even talking about the ghostwriting shit: Aubrey’s not exactly known as a monster behind the boards, and those songs aren’t producing themselves, so...) is the right move for his persona, so he chooses… both? “Still Here” is otherwise yet another ode to how much better Drake is at this shit than your fave ever could be, which is par for the course in hip hop, but there’s helping your family and friends, and there’s taking from your family and friends without offering proper credit, and Aubrey would be wise to stop doing the latter.

11. CONTROLLA

Although “Controlla” sounds like exactly the type of song Young Money would release as a single after the success of “One Dance” (which we’ll be getting to in a bit here), it actually dropped before “One Dance”, albeit in a different form. Prior to the release of Views, “Controlla” leaked to the Interweb as a well-received collaboration with dancehall artist Popcaan, both men singing and rapping, respectively, about loving the one they’re with, or at the very least wanting to fuck them all the time, but aside from parts of one of the guest’s verses, it’s much more radio friendly than that description reads. “Controlla” appears to be universally liked online, so obviously Aubrey would see fit to change things, since Popcaan was receiving most of that acclaim, which is how the album version ended up replacing the guest’s contributions with… an extended sound bite lifted directly from Beanie Man’s “Tear Off Mi Garment”. Not even Beenie Man: a sound bite of Beenie Man. (Yes, I’m aware that the actual Beenie Man appears on the outro to the album take on “Controlla”, but as it plays after the song had already faded out, it could easily stand in as the intro for the next track, so for the purpose of this argument it doesn’t count.) Drake’s lyrics remain unchanged, as does Boi-1da’s instrumental, which is catchy and low-key, perfect for playing for your lady friend who loves Drake but hates rap, but the sudden shift of focus to our host is disorienting for those of you two familiar with the O.G., as this song sounds rather incomplete. Of course, if this is your first time ever listening to “Controlla”, you’ll notice no such issues, since this is a Drake album and why wouldn’t he be the focal point, right? “Controlla” is a decent listen, as there is nothing objectionable about it, but to me it’s no…

12. ONE DANCE (FEAT. WIZKID & KYLA)

This is one of those instances where the single also ends up being one of the best songs on the album, if not the best. (Although I haven’t finished listening to all of Views yet, of course.) “One Dance” is also a goofy choice for a single, since it could potentially trick the intended audience into believing that Views consists solely of dancehall-lite Afrobeats fusion, which, obviously, it doesn’t. But I enjoyed “One Dance” back when it dropped, and I still like it today: Nineteen85’s instrumental is simple but contagious, and Aubrey’s harmonizing focuses on a singular concept (dancing with someone at the club and how that can be a transcendent experience) serves him well, as his vocals sound fine. (He does manage to slip in a hilariously out-of-place, “Streets not safe, but I never run away”, which, the fuck?) The guest list is a bit of a cheat: Nigerian artist Wizkid does pop up (most memorably during the breakdown, my favorite part of “One Dance” and it’s not even close), but British singer Kyla appears only through vocals sampled from a remix to her song “Do You Mind”. Although yes, it’s super club- and radio-friendly, “One Dance” still holds up, and it sounds a lot better to me today than a lot of what Aubrey’s pushed out into the world since Views. Yeah, I liked this one. Fight me.

13. GRAMMYS (FEAT. FUTURE)

Welp, this one was bad. “Well, I could have told you that without even listening to it,” you may say out loud to yourself because odds are I’m not anywhere near you when you’re reading these words. Well, I did listen to it, because I do try to give everything a fair shake, and… well, this shit sucks. The Drake and Future collaboration What a Time to Be Alive couldn’t have prepared me worse for “Grammys”. Mostly because I could find some stuff on there that I liked, whereas on here Aubrey and his co-star are performing vastly different songs regardless of the shared 40 and Southside instrumental (which is bland as fuck, by the way). Drake and Nayvadius each come out swinging with their boasts-n-bullshit, but Aubrey manages to connect with one couplet and one couplet only (“Most n----s with a deal / Couldn’t make a ‘Greatest Hits’”) which is kind of amusing, but he then vanishes without a trace, leaving the rest of the audio track to Future, who fills the dead air with… complaints about the Grammys? Who the fuck cares about that shit? Future’s druggy, slurred flow sounds pretty much the same as always, meaning that he’s never felt the need to adapt to the newer hip hop climate, and as a result he sounds instantly dated, and I imagine this was the case even back in 2016. His chorus is mind-numbing, and his verse may as well be a part of the chorus, as there is no line of demarcation. So much fuck this song.

14. CHILD’S PLAY

Known around my house as “the Cheesecake Factory song,” because that first bar of Aubrey’s first verse made me laugh the first time I heard it, even though the rest of “Child’s Play” (really leaning into those industry-wide whispers of hooking up with minors, huh, Drake?) is utter garbage with no sense of direction. The first verse plays out as a one-sided argument, while the second acts as an empty declaration of love, which, sure, could have worked, narratively speaking, had the rest of the hollow 40 beat not been used up with lines such as, “Bounce that shit like ‘whoa’” and, “She ride that dick like a soldier.” Tonally an editor’s nightmare, “Child’s Play” is for no existing audience, and yet people seem to enjoy this one for some ungodly reason. Drake is capable of more, and indeed he has actual good songs in his catalog, so there’s no need for anyone to glom onto this shit.

15. POP STYLE

Like “Contriolla”, “Pop Style” famously hit the Interweb prior to the release of Views with guest stars attached. Unlike “Controlla”, however, the early version was officially issued as a single: “Pop Style” created a buzz online because of the feature credit given to The Throne, otherwise known as the duo of Jay-Z and Kanye West (both of whom retain writing credits on this album version). Hov only spits two bars, which is fucking trolling of the highest caliber, but it seems like that had a lot to do with Shawn Carter refusing to pick sides in the Drake / Meek Mill beef (Aubrey’s partnership with Apple also caused some friction with Jay’s TIDAL streaming service, too), so the bulk of the Sevn Thomas and Frank Dukes instrumental (which is much darker and soulless than expected for a song ostensibly designed to celebrate a decadent lifestyle) is dominated by Aubrey’s “I’m over this rap shit, bow down before me, peasant”-style rhyme flow, one he uses a lot these days where he sounds half-asleep and too bothered to run through a second take (which that “Chain-ing Tatum” line definitely needed), and West’s slightly more excitable verse, the better of the two by far, exhibiting flashes of the humor found on The Life of Pablo, released in the same year, along with that Street Fighter II sound bite (you know the one). So I liked “Pop Style” when it dropped – it isn’t perfect, and it’s an utter waste of a Jay feature, but it was fine. For Views, however, Aubrey, once again, wants the focus to be solely on him, so The Throne have been dropped entirely, with our host reciting Jay-Z’s two bars himself and delivering a new verse to replace ‘Ye’s (one where he at least increases the energy level a bit) over the exact same instrumental, and the end result is… utterly meaningless. Without Kanye’s voice to break up the monotony, “Pop Style” has turned into a fucking slog, one that you won’t be able to resist skipping past. Seriously. Do it now.

16. TOO GOOD (FEAT. RIHANNA)

Ranks significantly higher than the album version of “Controlla” for me, although it’s still a distant second to “One Dance”. “Too Good” is the kind of love song where Aubrey’s toxicity is tempered into a sentiment that a lot of songs, from both male and female artists, feature prominently: the belief that you’re the one doing all the work to maintain the relationship. It’s still weird, don’t get me wrong: no healthy relationship should ever be about your scoring more points than your partner. But at least the concept is relatable and not so much “icky”. “I feel like the only time you see me / Is when you turn your head to the side and look at me differently,” Aubrey explains, exasperated, at one point. Perhaps my attitude toward the Nineteen85-produced “Too Good” is cushioned by the presence of frequent collaborator-slash-former girlfriend Rihanna, who delivers basically the same lines as Drake (kind of robotically, at that), but the combination of the two works better than had Aubrey tackled this subject on his own. The instrumental is also contagious as shit: when he wants to, Drake picks some pretty good pop beats. Not sure how I feel about our host throwing Popcaan a bone by sampling a good chunk of his “Love Yuh Bad” toward the end as opposed to, oh, let’s say, leaving the original “Controlla” alone, but this wasn’t bad for what it is.

17. SUMMERS OVER INTERLUDE (MAJID AL MASKATI)

Surprisingly, Aubrey cedes the spotlight to his employee, Majid Al Maskati (the other half of Majid Jordan), who croons for the length of “Summers Over Interlude”, a soulful concoction that has much more warmth than any other beat from Views even though its placement toward the end of the project is intended to signify a shift into the colder months on the calendar. The vocals are pleasant enough, but a bit too low to not be overpowered by the music, and the overall product is far too short to give that much of a damn about, but still, it was nice of Drake to give his boy a platform.

18. FIRE & DESIRE

I feel like I’m not even listening to the same Views as Drake stans online have – how can I explain how fucking lame 40’s instrumental for “Fire & Desire” is when the kids on the Interweb refer to it as “epic” and “flames”? I know I expect a hell of a lot more from my music, even before I started writing these godforsaken reviews, but the disparity here is motherfucking unsettling. It’s pathetic that a song with a title like “Fire & Desire”, two things that invoke passionate responses, plays out so fucking monotonously that it doesn’t even matter what our host says, it won’t land regardless, but that’s what happens here. Aubrey spends the duration trying to convince a woman already in a relationship to leave her man and be with him instead, but insisting that he doesn’t want to force the issue because “you a real-ass woman and I like it,” which of course begs the question: why write a whole-ass song about it if you weren’t trying to force the issue? But I digress. Drake sticks to his theme and opts not to resort to the mind games he’s played throughout the rest of Views, for which I’m grateful, even though this song is tedious to sit through. If “Fire & Desire” were a color, it would be plain.

19. VIEWS

Views ends the regular portion of its evening with its title track, a Winans-sampling affair that finds our host on his boasts-n-bullshit once again, and to his credit, he sounds awfully comfortable spitting these bars. Maneesh Bidaye’s instrumental reminded me of Just Blaze’s work on Take Care’s “Lord Knows”, at least in its energy if not its tempo, and I mean that as a compliment. “Views” has a long chunk of empty space in between the verses, as though our host rushed this one out of the studio without laying in a planned chorus, and there are some outright corny lines here (“Like it’s going in the trunk, I put it all behind us”; “N----s quick to double cross like both of us Christian”), but at least our host sounds more in his element than on some of the other bullshit presented tonight. I’m not recommending anyone seek out “Views” unless you want to hear rappity-rap Aubrey Graham, but it goes by briskly enough.

The following is marked as a bonus track on Views.

20. HOTLINE BLING

The actual first single released during the lengthy run-up for this project was “Hotline Bling”, a pop hit relegated to bonus track status since it dropped nearly an entire goddamn year before Views and likely didn’t fit the theme of the project during its evolution, but was too large a hit for Drake to ignore entirely. I want to hate “Hotline Bling” because without it, there would be no parody of its infamous accompanying video (Aubrey in a light box dancing like Goofus and Gallant had a child) on SNL normalizing the racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, apathetic germaphobe currently holding the highest office in the land. But without that, we wouldn’t have so many Drake memes, which, you know, is just another reason for this shit to just go away already. Sadly, I feel “Hotline Bling” is effective in its contagiousness and Nineteen85’s Timmy Thomas-sampling groove is fairly appealing, but, because human beings are complex and I happen to be a human being, I found this song to be problematic as fuck. The song consists of Aubrey scrolling through his ex’s Instagram feed, lamenting their failed relationship while taking offense at the mere idea that she’s moved on and could be happier without him, and that behavior is troublesome. It’s not “conflicted” or even representative of “jealousy” here, as some people have noted in order to give him a free pass – it’s a “toxic” and “controlling” incel response, placing all the blame on the woman who is literally doing nothing to warrant any of it. This is your hero, Drake stans? Just because the song is catchy doesn’t mean this kind of men’s rights horseshit should ever be condoned – block your ex and move on with your life, Aubrey. It’s healthier.

Also, Drake absolutely ripped this song off from D.R.A.M.’s own “Cha Cha”, and that fact shouldn’t be swept under the rug.

THE LAST WORD: For an album the guy allegedly spent a great deal of time working on, Views is an incredibly subpar effort from Drake. It’s not only that its overlong - every single track is dragged out until any resemblance between the ending and its beginning is purely coincidental. Many of the songs are similar sonically, which means every conceivable direction is covered multiple times throughout Views, which makes for an awfully redundant listen. Have I mentioned that it’s too fucking long yet? There’s no reason Drake should be allowed to go on for twenty goddamn tracks when he doesn’t really have all that much to say – the subject matter here is extremely limited, which makes sense since these are Aubrey’s Views, but the source of the material doesn’t automatically make any of this interesting for the listener.

To be clear: I don’t hate Drake. When he wants to rap his ass off, he does a pretty good job, mixing braggadocio and sarcasm with aplomb. (I’d rather not get into the ghostwriting stuff in this review, but I will say this: yeah, we all know he doesn’t write all his own rhymes, but he does seem to recite all of them, and does so well.) He’s at least partially responsible (alongside Kanye West and Kid Cudi) for hip hop opening itself up to feeling actual feelings, and a lot of his musical choices are in service to his role in that shift. But a lot of his songs just don’t appeal to me at all: failed relationships aren’t always potent fodder for music, especially when it seems pretty obvious that Drake’s the party at fault in every single goddamn one of them (an interesting way for this to go, given that Views is limited to just his perspective, which one would assume would find our host to be blameless). There’s no growth to be found here – Drake isn’t learning from his mistakes (at least not at the time Views was recorded), as he’s too enamored with love in the abstract, never bothering to take the steps necessary to build a proper relationship, satisfied instead with quickly growing bored of fucking the same woman. It’s difficult to maintain anyone’s interest with that mindset for five or so tracks, but across twenty? Fuck that noise.

There are some songs on Views that I genuinely enjoyed (I’d list them here, but then you wouldn’t read the review), enough to fill out a very short EP, but that’s a terrible batting average for someone generally considered to be one of the most popular rappers in the fucking world. What are the kids hearing on Views that I’m not? Are the low-tempo beats on here filled with musical flourishes recorded in a frequency too high for my old-ass ears to detect? Or are we all in agreement that Views just isn’t a good album? Discuss.

-Max

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Catch up on the Aubrey “Drake” Graham narrative arc by clicking here.