He collaborated with Chris Brown after pronouncing his love for Rihanna over and over again, and he meandered his way through beef after beef with Meek Mill, Pusha T, Kanye West, and others. He could also get petty, cruel, and malicious. ( Drake beat his own record earlier this year for the most simultaneous top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100.) He glided around a vacant, frosted mansion to promote “Tootsie Slide” last year, a track primed for TikTok he fumbled at an acknowledgment of… something with “Girls Want Girls” from his latest album, Certified Lover Boy, calling himself a lesbian with no discernible sense of irony.
“I got more slaps than the Beatles,” he bragged on a Meek Mill collab, before getting a tattoo of the band to commemorate breaking their chart records. In his later music, he would test the limits more, sounding bored of his predictable success. “We threw a party, yeah we threw a party,” he brags on “ Marvins Room,” sounding smug and self-satisfied, only to beg the woman on the other end of the phone seconds later: “Talk to me please, don't have much to believe in.”ĭrake knew what he could get away with. Nothing was mutually exclusive in Drake’s world: He could be bracing and brazen and broken, crooning and spitting, drenched in gold on the cover of his album but wallowing in his head, drinking to his accomplishments and wailing about how they would never be enough. There are brassy rap bangers here - “Headlines,” “Make Me Proud,” “HYFR” - but there’s also a stretch of slower songs in the album’s final third that showcases Drake’s singing.
Drake cracked open the conceit of clearly defined genre on Take Care. Without Drake, we wouldn’t get the wave of melodic SoundCloud rappers, the beat switch-happy blare of pop artists trying on rap and vice versa, Billie Eilish slipping through hip-hop aesthetics and electropop blazes, Taylor Swift sluicing from country to Max Martin-powered pop to muted indie albums.
But it’s clearer now how he catalyzed, or continued, a path that would obliterate genre entirely.
Critic after critic wrote at the time about how Drake wobbled between pop and rap.