I've Had Sex Four Times This Week
Paul Thompson reviews Drake's trio of new albums through the lens of the artist's shifting sexual politics.
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. Just a few weeks ago, Universal released Michael, an Antoine Fuqua-directed biopic produced in cooperation with the Jackson estate. The movie comes at a time when the country is in the throes of a panic about pedophilia—and at a time when public figures, up to and including the president, have reached levels of posting through it never before thought possible. When people decide that shame causes too much wind resistance and can be jettisoned entirely, they can get away with almost anything, as long as they’re selling something that others want to buy. So you sit in AMC while people dance to one nephew or another.
It cannot be forgotten that this is the context in which the biggest rap song of the decade calls Drake a “certified pedophile.” America, like every society across human history, is rife with the sexual abuse of children; the subtext of Justin Bieber’s recent Coachella headlining set, which saw him sing along to videos he put online as an adolescent, was that even the act of making a child the object of allegedly chaste commercial adoration has grotesque undertones. In the last decade, culminating with the release of the so-called Epstein files, both major political parties have wielded the fear of pedophilia as a cudgel. Your kids’ teachers are going to molest them right before they make them transition genders; the walk-in freezer at the restaurant around the corner is actually where the Clintons keep the tiny bodies of their victims.
Some caveats in both directions. First, while it is an incredibly inflammatory thing to say about another person, that has always been central to rap beef, and “Not Like Us” did follow “Family Matters,” where Drake alleges that Kendrick beats his wife, and that one of his children is not biologically his. Second, just as there is no evidence of domestic abuse on Kendrick’s side, Drake has never been accused of having sexual contact with a minor, save for a much-publicized on-stage stunt from 2010 during which he hugged and made lewd comments about the figure of a 17-year-old girl. There are rumors; there are always rumors. There is Baka.
The wrinkle in “Not Like Us” is Kendrick’s obvious, yet never really explicated baggage around sex: He’s an (at least) small-c conservative on the subject, and despite the Toronto reference, it seems awfully odd to condemn a grown man for being “a 69 god.” Yet for some reason, rather than assailing Kendrick for claiming something so outlandish, or mocking Kendrick’s evident repression, Drake responded, smugly, that “This Epstein angle was the shit I expected.” Fair, maybe, but not exactly solid crisis comms advice.
From the time he debuted, the sexual politics of Drake’s music have been dissected, usually to uncharitable ends. In the 2010s, his lyrics were correctly cast as representative of the misogynistic nice guys who pervaded every social circle in that era. But in the 2020s, and starting especially with 2023’s For All the Dogs, his music has had a strangely bitter streak in the way it addresses women. There are still the moments of ostensible yearning, but those are mostly blotted out by a sense of women has scheming, contemptible, and interchangeable—a development that coincides with and is accentuated by Drake’s drift toward 40. Some have pointed out that this shift coincides with the rise of the so-called “manosphere,” an arena of online content by and for men that is openly sexist and reactionary; while Drake has palled around or references some of those figures in his music, he is hardly unique among rappers or other male celebrities. But while he may not be unique, there is an undeniable trajectory in his writing that as of now points in a pretty obvious direction.
The women Drake raps and sings about, especially on Iceman and Habibti, are familiar to anyone who has listened to him: they accept the condos he pays for but keep their romantic options open; they should be commended for partying so longs as it’s with him; they were unquestionably adoring until they weren’t. When these girls are presented as foils to his happiness, as they generally are on Iceman, the whole project groans, seems rickety: how childish, how predictable. But when he taps into something seedier, as he frequently does on Maid of Honour, it seems that there’s still some new libidinal territory for Drake to tap into.
It is admittedly strange to make an album about how much you like to fuck—an album with an opening song called “Hoe Phase”—and put your mother on its cover. That’s between Drake and his therapist, who he admits he finds “very attractive.” But what’s most bizarre about Maid is that it is basically his circuit-party album: the answer to the question How can Drake inject life back into his music? was apparently a resounding Get gayer—and fast. The truly manic “Outside Tweaking” is the most interesting he’s sounded in a decade: harried, horny, barely there. It was not the shit I expected.