There may be a reason for all this hip-hop nostalgia: The supremacy of rappers who were dominant earlier in the 2010s is waning. In Drake’s case, the decline is partially due to a temporary lull in his release schedule. While he has released at least one new album or mixtape every year since 2014, 2019 has only brought an unremarkable celebration of the Raptors’ victory in the NBA finals.
But there is also a shucking off of creative authority in progress – we no longer live in a universe where Drake can boast “your new shit sound like you do covers of all of my old shit,” as he does on Care Package’s “Jodeci Freestyle.” Up-and-coming R&B singers once imitated Drake, but now they are reaching past his catalogue, searching instead for Nineties hip-hop soul and light sophistifunk.
In February, ‘So Far Gone’ debuted at #5 and was the third most-streamed album of the week. Considering that no major releases came out on Friday, Drake’s ‘Care Package’ may be battling for #1 — probably with Billie Eilish’s ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ and Ed Sheeran’s ‘No.6 Collaborations Project’ — even though the star did not record a single fresh note
At the same time, rising rappers either commandeer the conversation with viral curios or sound like A Boogie wit da Hoodie. Calboy, YK Osiris, Lil Baby and others may be indebted to the rap-singing Drake did when they were 12, but they represent a very different aesthetic. The rapper once boasted that “every song sound like Drake featuring Drake”, but that’s not the case today.
While Drake is no longer pop’s creative North Star, he remains a commercial titan, omnipresent as the air we breathe. He currently makes five appearances on Rolling Stone’s Top 100, including three duets in the Top Ten. His remix of Summer Walker’s “Girls Need Love” is still played over 2,000 times a week on the radio, while “Nice for What” racks up another 500 plays every seven days.
In fact, the demand for Drake’s music is so high that his oldies still outsell almost everything new. In February, ‘So Far Gone’ debuted at #5 and was the third most-streamed album of the week. Considering that no major releases came out on Friday, Drake’s ‘Care Package’ may be battling for #1 – probably with Billie Eilish’s ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ and Ed Sheeran’s ‘No.6 Collaborations Project’ – even though the star did not record a single fresh note.
Care Package is archetypal Drake; so Drake-like that it’s actually surprising that these songs were not included on the slew of full-lengths the rapper released earlier this decade. Drake put out “Paris Morton Music” – a rework of Rick Ross’ “Aston Martin Music” with Ross excised – in 2010; he released “Can I,” an odd song that tries to reduce Beyoncé to a background element, in 2015. Five years make little difference, and the tracks breathe easily next to each other.
That’s because Drake has been refining many of the same ideas for the last ten years. You know these attitudes, the appealingly schizophrenic swings from bruised to blustery, and these stances, preening one moment and curling up in the foetal position the next. You’ve heard Drake enhance his own considerable melodic gifts with samples and interpolations from unimpeachable R&B records or contributions from despondent Englishmen. The production style of Noah “40” Shebib, who oversaw several of the tracks collected on Care Package, is as recognizable and impressive as Mount Rushmore, elegant, unobtrusive and overwhelming at the same time.
Even though the songs on Care Package are old, their official appearance at this moment makes sense in the context of Drake’s discography. He was already looking back on Scorpion, the first Drake album of the decade that suggested a holding pattern. Rather than trying different flows, readjusting the proportion of singing to rapping in his songs, or plugging new music from abroad, he has been retracing his steps, shoring up and polishing past accomplishments. “Jaded” and “8 out of 10” could have come out eight years ago – at times it sounded like Drake’s new shit was covers of his old shit.
Maybe, then, this marks a new stage in Drake’s career. Care Package reaffirms Drake’s inescapability, but it also signals that his career’s first remarkable expansion is over; a storm has given way, for now, to an ebb tide. And after a comfortable period of consolidation, he can set his sights on growth again – if he wants to.
Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-F) Chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who took the centre stage as both…
Senior Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader Ali Muhammad Khan has urged the government to release the…
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk stated on Wednesday that Moscow supports Pakistan's inclusion in…
Hand-held radios used by Lebanese armed group Hezbollah detonated on Wednesday across Lebanon's south and…
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Wednesday received a telephone call from King Charles III of…
The United States has confirmed it will not support Pakistan's ballistic missile programme. "We have…
Leave a Comment