Drake is the frog that’s been struck by lightning.
The rapper on the losing end of the most high-profile rap beef in recent memory has spent the time since his public beatdown at the hands of Kendrick Lamar licking his wounds, promoting online gambling and accusing his victorious opponent of working the refs. Across months of promotion leading up to a surprise triple-album release last week, the hitmaker worked hard to sell an image as a cold-hearted emperor who’s taking a moment to gather his thoughts before delivering the definitive statement on how it felt to be embarrassed in front of millions.
So, how does Drake feel about being called a “pedophile” during a sing-along at the most-watched television broadcast in the Western Hemisphere? The same way anyone else would. Drake is smarting, and he spreads that hurt across more than an hour in the trilogy’s marquee album “Iceman.”
Drake turns the frigid, isolated mansion rap that’s become his trademark toward relitigating the last half-decade of petty squabbles and minor slights. The paranoid chart-topper lashes out at his close associates and rivals alike. He notes that his grudge-holding is unbecoming of a man who’s pushing middle age before going on to attack his longtime producer Noah “40” Shebib. His repeated attempts to flex expensive restaurant bills and hardman tough talk land like a waterlogged handkerchief after he’s spent song after song cataloging all the specific ways we’ve all hurt his feelings.
The worst part? If you make it through all that, you still have two more albums to go. “Maid of Honour” would be a fun mixtape curio – a writing exercise that touches on Jersey club, soca, bounce and house music, jumping between floors in a club the same way 2017’s “More Life” went island-hopping – if it weren’t sandwiched between the pathetic “Iceman” and the barely there “Habibti.” Taken as a whole, Drake’s album dump is a deeply unpleasant slog. It’s also the perfect soundtrack for this moment.
We live at a time when popular opinion seemingly matters less than ever. Almost no one likes the job that President Donald Trump is doing in his second term. Few people want the U.S. to continue supporting Israel’s war on Gaza. Even fewer believe in the mission of the U.S. war on Iran. None of that moves the needle. No amount of grumbling or street protests can counter the cold math of our calcified legislature and ideologically captured Supreme Court. The imperial machinery, built in an earlier more democratic era, hums along without our input.
Drake knows that a coherent worldview isn’t something he has to worry about. He understands better than most that the inertia of superstardom in this surprisingly stagnant quarter-century will protect him
And so it goes with Drake. Despite his public embarrassment and supposed fall-off, he’s still the most-streamed rapper on Earth. The songs on “Iceman” follow the muted-soul sample and mid-song beat switch formula that made him the king of drunken voicemail rap, coasting on the goodwill Drake built before he ever thought to make fun of Lamar’s small feet.
Drake’s always been a bully, throwing stones from his frigid fortress of solitude and hiding his hand in a diamond-encrusted glove he won at auction. On “Iceman,” he covers an attack on DJ Khaled with a tossed-off “free Palestine.” Offering a layup to politics writers, Drake briefly wonders if the ire he’s earned through decades of digs and questionable interpolations of other artists’ songs is actually antisemitism.
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“Is it the fair skin or the Jewish roots?” the half-Jewish rapper asks. “Why people wanna not see (Nazi) me on top of the mountain like I do the Dew.”
But he knows that a coherent worldview isn’t something he has to worry about. Drake understands that the inertia of superstardom in this surprisingly stagnant quarter-century will protect him. How else can you explain such a tone-deaf album name — one already co-opted by the Trump administration — other than expressing a feeling that he can’t be harmed?
All that aside, the album does have its moments. The songs sound lush and expensive because they are. Drake still has an impeccable ear for production and an incredible talent for hook-writing, much in the same way that Trump knows how to make rambling sentences sing via his unorthodox delivery. And like Trump, he’s completely aware that very little he says into a microphone matters.
In both cases, the hits will still debut at the top of the charts and the money will keep on flowing into their bank accounts, regardless of whether anyone actually enjoys anything they’re hearing.
Trump will carry on being president, his actions validated by the fact that he’s the one doing them. Drake will continue to be the biggest name in rap, because no one can muster up the energy to imagine the radio without him. The near-total dominance of a trio of weak albums is a sign of a geriatric culture with no interest in slowing its decline. Our politics are trapped in amber, our culture is frozen in ice.
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