Beat It

Paul Thompson reviews Drake's trio of new albums through the lens of the Kendrick Lamar beef.

Art by DJ Short

The cover of Iceman, the marquee album among the three Drake released last week, is a picture of a disembodied hand wearing a crystal-studded glove. In 2023, to celebrate matching Michael Jackson’s 14 No. 1 singles, Drake bought one of Jackson’s signature accessories for a reported $123,000, which is exactly the kind of gaudy, slightly obnoxious thing you should do when you have 14 No. 1 singles and $123,000 to spare. But the world that Iceman enters is at least superficially darker than the one we inhabited in 2023: more naked in its cynicism, more transparent in its evil. And while critics, and even many diehard fans, have complained for years about Drake’s circular writing and emotional stagnation, this new album (and its sister LPs, Habibti and Maid of Honour) finds Drake spiraling deeper into ruts that have defined his career going back nearly two decades.

This isn’t always for worse. At times, the neuroses reach the necessary escape velocity to break free from Drake’s preening self-awareness. There are stretches of inventive, intoxicating production, especially on the front half of the dancey Maid of Honour. And while his complete-sentence syntax can still be exhausting, there are stretches of accomplished rapping across Iceman. (Habibti, which strains to recapture the gravity of Drake’s early R&B records, is notable mostly for its smartly chosen collaborators.) The triple-album gambit is brilliant as a sort of airport-bookstore Sun Tzu maneuver, and for the first time since 2016’s Views, there seem to be actual narrative stakes to new Drake albums. Still, there is something remarkably deflating, or perhaps deflated, at the project’s very center.

And so: the glove. Early in 2024, on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That”—the song that made long-simmering animosity fully legible, the point of no return—Kendrick Lamar quipped that Prince outlived Michael Jackson. Both analogues are imperfect, but you imagine they would flatter each man: the genre-mutating visionary and the hitmaker so big he commands the same critical respect as the artistes. Across Iceman, and occasionally on Maid of Honour and Habibti, Drake seems positively consumed by his beef with Kendrick, which culminated in “Not Like Us” and is in many ways one of the most resounding losses in rap history.

What’s frustrating about the way this obsession plays out is that Drake is a prisoner of his own need to seem unbothered. When he confesses, on Iceman opener “Make Them Cry,” that a “big piece” of him died with the feud, it’s not really a confession at all—it’s what Drake prizes most, an engine for grievance. He goes out of his way a few times throughout that LP to stress the severity of the situation; save for the title of and a few asides in “Ran to Atlanta” he is pathologically non-specific about the substance of the beef. It becomes another amorphous cloud of victimization, a chance for him to whinge about those around him not being loyal or upstanding in the ways he seldom seems to be, even in his own retelling of things.

In places this fixation is, simply, embarrassing. How are you going to rap agitatedly about LeBron James betraying you when you have a LeBron James tattoo? That man is drinking red wine and eating salmon fillets and pretending to know the words to late-period 2 Chainz songs. The near-constant flitting between reminding listeners how down and out he was and feigning confusion as to why anyone cared about Kendrick’s disses would be compelling, albeit unintentionally, if the hurt or the indignance scanned as anything other than a get-out-of-jail-and-back-in-vogue pose.

But at least those more embarrassing moments feel human. The one true cardinal sin in art is not to be formally unstudied, or ideologically offensive, or even obviously derivative. It’s to be boring. And Drake’s incessant references to the inflation of streaming numbers and associated payola schemes he alleged in his now-dismissed lawsuit against Universal Music Group are absolutely numbing. First, attempting to recast the suit as sort of Robin Hood altruism (from “B’s On the Table”: “I’m fighting the man, not suing the rapper/You boys is not listening”) is preposterous; more importantly, it feels absolutely impossible to care about any of this. Jumping up and down and screaming that major labels and the DSPs they’re in bed with are fussing with the public-facing numbers to make their stars seem inevitable is like standing outside of a movie theater and explaining to everyone that the train on screen is not actually going to hit them.

While Drake has made a career vampiring up emergent regional sounds, trying to subsume any threats to his chart supremacy into buttresses that support it, he wisely avoids attempting that with contemporary Los Angeles. (He does offer an inferior retread of a Mac Dre classic, but goes no further south than Monterey.) Yet even when he calls Babe Ruth chart shots, Drake allows his records to sag with malformed attempts at retribution. Iceman features—at least—a pair of surefire hits in the glittering “Shabang” and “Janice STFU,” some post-Whole Lotta Red rage formatted for airplane screens. Both songs are obvious successes; both sputter when they get stuck on an enemy Drake claims never bothered him in the first place.