Credit Drake for being both the most sonically consistent pop star of the last decade and also a work in progress. From album to album, year to year, he draws from a standard palette of moody R&B and puffed-chest rap, emotionally charged hip-hop and muscular soul. But at the same time, he’s always slathering his approach atop new inputs: dancehall, grime, Houston rap, Afrobeats and beyond. Unlike many of his peers, he’ll put his credibility on the line for a chance to absorb and repurpose new sounds.
Which is why “Dark Lane Demo Tapes” — a largely effective album-length odds-and-ends collection but not, you know, an album — may be more valuable as data than as songs. As music, it’s a mostly sharp document of top-dog anxiety and solipsism. But it’s also perhaps a spoiler for the proper album Drake announced will be released this summer, his first since the blustery “Scorpion” in 2018.
“Dark Lane” shows Drake songs at various developmental points — full-fledged experiments in a range of regional and microscene styles, half-cooked ideas from old projects, classicist exercises, formal rhymes, informal rhymes. Omnivorous and osmotic, he feels his way around new production styles and tries out new flow patterns, attempting to make them jibe with the soft-edged style he excels at.
“War” is a U.K. drill song, ominous and sneering and full of deeply studied slang. “Demons” explores Brooklyn drill, a little jumpier than its overseas cousin. (It features two of that scene’s up and comers, Fivio Foreign and Sosa Geek.) “Toosie Slide,” which recently went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 thanks to its baked-in virality, is a quasi-dance song. And “Pain 1993,” a long-promised collaboration with Playboi Carti, is a chance for Drake to ably mimic his collaborator’s chirps.
Drake, far more nimble than any of his peers, deals from different parts of the deck depending on the needs of the moment. Rough drafts presaging sleeker adaptations down the line: This is his version of showing his work. (Most stars of his stature wouldn’t dare tip their hands like this — only Taylor Swift has the confidence.)
But the rough-hewed nature of “Dark Lane” also reflects a keen understanding of the current condition of internet-speed rap stardom, which is that completed ideas (and songs) are less important than consistent ideas (and “songs”). Unless you’re Adele, old-school formal release cycles only leave a vast chasm of time in which people can forget you.
Drake, on the other hand, hasn’t left the spotlight in more than a decade. He ascended to hip-hop’s peak under one set of rules, and now is maintaining his throne under a wholly different one. He is also the first global superstar to acknowledge the uncertain cultural vacuum created by the coronavirus pandemic and proactively feed it with a full album, a boldness many of his peers haven’t dared. (He’s spoken in the past of wanting to be the soundtrack to listeners’ lives, and quarantine certainly could use one.)
For these isolationist times, Drake might be an optimal lyricist — increasingly, his songs ring tragic, his glee at having toppled his competition replaced with the dour understanding that ruling is lonely misery. This album is salted with lyrics both about exacting revenge on enemies and also, on “From Florida With Love,” about what it was like to be on the wrong end of a gun barrel. “Losses” is a vividly heartbreaking song about disloyalty: “You sold me up the river, but I rowed back/You put me on the road without a roadmap/I’m not tryna make no song, these are cold facts.”
“When to Say When” — an updating of the melancholy Jay-Z classic “Song Cry” — is perhaps his most complete statement of deep-sigh success: “33 years, I gave that to the game/33 mil’, I’ll save that for the rain/500 weeks, I filled the charts with my pain.” Later in the song, he doles out advice to aspirants like Tony Robbins, then chuckles with his friends about everyone they’ve lapped.
It’s a majestic track, though it does differ from Jay-Z’s version in one crucial way: Drake is feeling sorry for himself, while Jay-Z was feeling sorry for someone he’d hurt. This is the central midcareer Drake conundrum: someone who used to sing and rap about his flaws and made it safe for a generation after him to do the same is now playing emotional defense. The dull agony, on “Chicago Freestyle,” of love-and-run romance (“Galleria credit card swipes/I don’t even know if she a wife”) and the anxious skepticism on “Desires” are thematically thin. That goes double for “Not You Too,” a limp collaboration with Chris Brown.
Curiosity about the world around him has been the hallmark of Drake’s sound. But it always means more when he’s curious about what’s happening inside him, too.
Drake
“Dark Lane Demo Tapes”
(OVO Sound/Republic)
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