Certified Copy
Paul Thompson reviews Drake's trio of new albums through the lens of obsessive imitation and suffocating nostalgia.
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. Ah, there’s the referent—something on which we can all agree (good) or something about which the public is starkly divided (even better). The “Macarena” interpolation; there are the Easter eggs for songs I knew in high school; there’s Lykke Li and Mac Dre and the “Cha Cha Slide.” Finally, I can breathe again.
Thirteen years ago, when Drake was getting ready to release his third album, Nothing Was the Same, he sat for an interview with Billboard during which he talked about sitting with 40 and his other collaborators and sanding down the edges of each line, hoping that it could be repurposed the world over as an Instagram caption, a slogan for a t-shirt, something to be scribbled on whiteboards before high school hockey games. The idea was to retain the aw-shucks persona, but to mete it out in perfect little morsels that were specific enough to remember yet general enough to invite projection. These three latest albums, and especially Iceman, are the culmination of a related, but meaningfully divergent strategy: to make social media feeds light up with bars that people post in delighted disbelief that Drake could be so goofy, so obvious, so Big Sean-in-2012. The beef is so pressed it’s panini, and so on.
I’ve seen this cited by critics as evidence of atrophying skill or creative limitations. I think that’s both (creatively) uncharitable and (commercially) naive; this is a core part of Drake’s style—one he’s very good at executing—and thoroughly calculated, in the same way PETA knows you’re going to see an ad urging you to imagine yourself as a turkey being stuffed on Thanksgiving and tweet “omg i wish.” All press is not necessarily good press, but clicks are agnostic, and Stake.us is owned and operated by Sweepsteaks Limited, registration number HE436222, registered address 7 Patrikiou Loumoumba, Block A, Office A13, 7560 Perivolia, Larnaka, Cyprus. Contact us at support@stake.us. For press inquiries, please contact press@stake.us.
Where Drake was once notorious for, well, biting everything and everyone in sight, the calculus seems to have shifted a bit. He’s not osmosing nearly as many contemporary flows into his own work; he’s no longer issuing singles that sounds like xeroxes of others by smaller artists. That plan has been replaced by one intended to trigger little jolts of recognition, and to flood his verses with gossip. He’s not the worst offender on the latter point—plenty of A-list rappers today rely on quasi-TMZ crypticism to generate buzz about their records, and at least Drake is trying to back that up with honest-to-God hits. But it can be hard to listen to even the most formally loose songs on Maid of Honour and not imagine them being engineered for engagement time, trained on our lizard brains rather than our heads or our asses.
It’s cynical, but that’s worked for him before. In an effort to put 2024 behind him, Drake is aiming not for reinvention but for a return to ubiquity, and that’s likely what he’ll get; these records, taken as an unstructured whole, actually feel like his sturdiest album-level venture since 2016’s Views, and are markedly more successful on a song-by-song basis. The titles of the four songs that give Iceman its organizing structure—“Make Them Cry,” “Make Them Pay,” “Make Them Remember,” and “Make Them Know”—could live in PowerPoints forever, and they probably will.