As hip-hop is the most adaptable genre, the production behind the emcee’s words have been experimented with for years. The beats tinge the lyrics, pulling the listener to a different type of high. Some induce an energetic mood, encouraging a hefty pregame or treadmill run. Others have produced an entrancing, shoegazing trip, pushing us to look inside ourselves and down the lyrics with an even stronger chaser.
Marrying the machismo from hip-hop to the vulnerability of R&B, a subgenre emerged that catered to an emotionally comfortable audience; Combining dark electronic production with the soulful crooning of the various Generation X #problems, “PBR&B,” a cutesy reference to the hipster-associated Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Rhythm & Blues, was born.
Within this infant genre, multiple albums have attempted to become the successor, the Dark Knight of hip-hop. Although Kanye West created an honest interpretation of such sorrowful rap on “808s and Heartbreak” in 2008, the album’s cyborg production lacked unrestricted expression keeping it from a longtime residency on most iPods. The Weeknd released three entrancingly dark mixtapes in 2011, but his monotonous collection of whimpering humptunes got to be too much to sit through. Young Money aficionado Drake bought sizable property in this genre in the early part of 2010 with his first two studio albums, adding menacing synths and ’90s old school highhat hits to his often vulnerable lyrics, but his newest real estate is tested to measure up to the humility of his neighbors’—especially when he lives next door to the subgenre’s sincere Frank Ocean and Kanye West, who keep their doors open and their tissues abundant.
On his newest release “Nothing Was The Same,” Drake toggles between a relatable self-loathing lover, dejected son and a taunting, obnoxious bro. One minute he rides like Rick Ross, and the next he’s a crooning Marvin Gaye. As always, Drake is pairing baby-making R&B crooners with whiny rhymes about the various trappings of his “unfortunately famous” psyche: people losing touch with him because he’s so damn rich, hookers giving him emotional baggage, etc. However, Drake’s lyrical lack of composure actually becomes endearing when his words are painted with the brush of Noah “40” Shebib’s entrancingly morose beats. The production’s eerie rhythmic and harmonic instability adds a complexity to the album that no other PBR&B artist has ventured, providing the necessary color and emotion to the story Drake is narrating on the album’s 14 songs. “Nothing Was The Same” might actually be the same thematically, but this version, spiked with 40’s entrancing cocktail, hits home.
Drake’s facelift is thanks to his give-no-fucks confidence reaching new heights, providing a strong foundation for innovation and welcoming the album’s warped haze of emptiness. Where mainstream hip-hop’s new releases pull out the expensive machinery, glossy fills and menacing horns, Drake pulls inward, exquisitely sing-songing his pristine, sharp rhymes above melting hi-hats and piano chords that continue bleeding for six minutes, sometimes sans chorus. He says so himself on “Tuscan Leather:” “This is nothin' for the radio, but they'll still play it though/ Cause it's that new Drizzy Drake, that's just the way it go/ Heavy airplay all day with no chorus … I reached the point where don't shit matter to me.”
The album’s immaculate attention to detail is what provides its long-lasting success. 40’s seamless song transitions, which have always been murky and fuzzy, are more noticeable and delectable than ever. “Wu-Tang Forever" is a sunken glimmer of piano with a tiny glimmer of RZA's voice echoing "It's Yourz," before falling incomprehensibly into "Own It.” On "Started From the Bottom," the bass doesn’t even stick to a singular pitch, it's instead a shifting scale of distorted piano keys. “305 to My City” is aired out completely, a ticking snare serving as the record's only pulse. And the album’s most successful track, the timeless “Hold on We’re Going Home,” carries a bumping groove even Gaye would envy. However, this track's sparkly pop sound is what pushes it out of place on this dimly lit album, which is the darkest, most drugged up of Drake's catalogue.
It’s above the album’s airy production that Drake’s words flow and flutter, stab and sting. On “Own It,” above only a sinking beat that echoes at the intensity of an empty stadium, he laments in a frustrated and piercingly candid tone, “Next time we fuck, I don't wanna fuck, I wanna make love/ Next time we talk, I don't wanna just talk, I wanna trust/ Next time I stand tall I wanna be standin' for you/ And next time I spend I want it all to be for you,” then he shifts to a whimpering falsetto, almost to remove all of his manliness and fall to his knees, the trickling beat still the only thing pulsating underneath his words. On paper, it’s a dorky lyric, but once tied with a forceful thunder of angry throbs, the words are transformed into a tragically doomed plea for there to actually be a next time.
This is what makes him so appealing and this album so undeniably successful: behind his tortured lyrics, there’s a living, breathing human being. If we compare the albums of mainstream hip-hop artists as abstract paintings of their chandeliers, lenses into how they view their luxe lifestyles, Drake’s is the most understandable. He is, as he says on the R&B groove “Furthest Thing,” “somewhere between psychotic and iconic.” He’s half Jewish and half black, an emcee who didn’t come from a criminal background but instead from the middle class. He can boast about having diamonds and all the while his disconnections with lovers, and can juxtapose his early rap career with his glossy experience starring on the teen drama TV series Degrassi: The Next Generation (something he could do even more of.) A refreshingly relatable change of pace for the machismo that seems to have swallowed his competitors' cocky and commercialized 32-inch-rimmed hip-hop albums, Drake’s a regular dude who yes, three albums later, hasn’t quite figured it out—not unlike most of us listeners. Just like the times I’ve found myself trying maintain my pride by hiding my personal troubles underneath my successes, it’s humbling to hear the album move in a similar arc; to hear him first brag that he’s on it, he’s “started from the ‘bottom’ now he’s here!” When, nine songs later, he coughs up the truth behind his relationship with his dad.
Drake has toyed with both personas: we left off in 2011 with his phenomenal “Take Care” that depicted an alone and dejected Drake in his gold-plated mansion; on “Nothing Was The Same” he’s not only up, but he’s soaring above the ground. “I really think I like who I’m becoming,” he cautioned us on last year’s “Take Care.” Now, he’s screeching, "I'm on my worst behavior" over a blast of chomping synths and machine-gun bass, courtesy of DJ Dahi, on “Worst Behavior.” The track provides the angriest and most blatantly careless version of Drake yet, sputtering "muhfuckas never loved us" between an impressive extended riff off Ma$e's verse on the Biggie throwback "Mo Money Mo Problems.”
The album hit the Internet four days early and with the draw of the lyric “The one that I needed was Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree” he sent an ex’s social media haywire. Sharing specific details of unresolved conflicts on a soapbox only he has access to, he’s relentless, and doesn’t feel a need to change, either. Although sharing specific details of his past adds a “real life” touch to his lyrics (not different from another ex’s voicemails he illegally sampled on 2011’s “Marvin’s Room”) today’s stalkerish bloggers combined with his notoriety provide an unavoidable access to her life, and is a step too far. But who am I besides someone who loves to watch Drake make poor decisions?
At the end of the album, the song “Too Much” featuring SBKTRT’s crooner Sampha provides everything that pundits like DeRogatis wanted from a new Drake album. Drake performed this track on Jimmy Fallon, precursored with an apology to his family, queuing to the lyrics: “Money got my whole family going backwards/ No dinners, no holidays, no nothing/ There's issues at hand that we're not discussing.” He’s always been honest, but his increased fame has pushed him to be more cutthroat and unaffected than ever. And this honesty is easy to miss between some of Drake’s gawdy bro lyrics, but if taken under the production’s drug, it’s clear he isn’t faking anyone with his over-confidence, not even himself.
Although Drake isn’t your most technically skilled rapper, his complex lines and clever wordplay let his lyrics climb up the walls and leave bitemarks on your skin through his conversational tone. Here, his smirky lines and $20 phrases sometimes fit within the same breath: "I wanna take it deeper than money, pussy, vacation/ And influence a generation that's lacking in patience/ I've been dealin' with my dad, speaking of lack of patience/ Just me and my old man, getting back to basics/ We been talking about the future and time that we wasted/ When he put that bottle down, girl, that’s amazing," he raps on "From Time." He runs at the mouth atop tracks that similarly ebb and flow, pushing the listener into a hazy trip of his relentless insecurities so dense as if he's trying to move through us through peanut butter—to the point of near-exhaustion by the time the 14 songs are over.
Although Drake is still sharing similar chapters of his diary, the entries are so relatable it’s as if he’s reading our own past aloud over entrancingly morose production.
