In 2016, when Canadian rap legend and "October’s Very Own" Drake released his fourth studio album "Views," I felt like he was standing at a fork in his career’s road.
"Views" would go on to become one of the top five best-selling hip-hop albums of the decade, but to me, there wasn’t really a whole lot to love about it. None of its rap bangers hit as hard or stuck with me as long as anything from his 2015 mixtape "If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late," and its sweet moments couldn’t match those on "Nothing Was The Same."
Words like “boring,” “rehashed,” “bloated” and “commercial” come to mind.
Many of Drake's subsequent releases have suffered from these same issues, but I held out hope that he may one day rediscover the form and sounds that made me love him in the first place.
Would Drake continue to go commercial, or would he finally return to being original?
Then, on Sept. 3, Drake released his sixth album "Certified Lover Boy," and all my hopes died.
At over an hour and 20 minutes long, "Certified Lover Boy" sees Drizzy abandon all pretenses of making original, interesting music. Instead he opts to lazily recycle sounds, beats and themes from every one of his previous releases, while simultaneously managing to sound like he’s falling asleep on many of the album’s songs.
The album’s opener, “Champagne Poetry,” samples the beat from the 2017 song “Navajo” by Masego, who sounds infinitely more interesting — and awake — in his use of the beat. The very first bar on “Champagne Poetry” sees Drake make a strong assertion: “I been hot since the birth of my son,” and we need to talk about this.
If you remember, Drake did not publicly unveil his son Adonis Graham to the world after his birth. No, that revelation came at the hands of Virginia rapper and Kanye West associate Pusha T, who was beefing with Drake in May 2018 and exposed him for being an absentee father on the diss track, “The Story of Adidon.”
