Drake's 'Take Care' and the Hype Machine

Drake's sophomore album Take Care has been released and overall the reviews have been pretty positive from all sorts of publications. Pitchfork included in it's completely meaningless 'Best New Music' album category, Rolling Stone gave it 4 out of 5 stars, XXL Magazine gave it an XL (also known as 4 out of 5 stars, get a real rating system XXL). Overall, but particularly from publications that are not exclusively about hip-hop, the reviews have been real solid. But I'm not sold.

Hip-hop has long been a genre focused on boasting, a form of lyrical competition. With its foundation rooted in taking old records and cutting them up to create a backdrop for that lyrical virtuosity, it has been a unique genre that has been famous for its lack of musicality in the traditional sense. To this day, you will find a large population that believes that hip-hop is not music because it lacks the traditional markers of the art form; there often is no melody, no instruments, just lyrics and countless variations of lyrical styling. Of course the beat played an important role, but it is usually supplementary to the lyrics where the artist's expression created the listeners impression.

However, this has started to change and it began in earnest with Kanye West's 808's and Heartbreak. It was one of the first albums where lyricism took a backstage to musicality and was able to pull it off to some degree. I distinctly remember upon first listening to the album thinking that I hadn't heard an album where the lyrics in itself weren't so much descriptive but instead were simply a part of the overall mood that was set up by the production. The overall mood, of course, was one that was not boastful and exuberant but sentimental and introspective. Of course, the single on Drake's new album is none of these things and Drake crooning about how someone talking trash about him will make him 'catch a body like that' is something that might not ring very resonantly and perhaps why it's mainly left out of any discussion of the album overall.

Drake ~ Headlines (Official Video) from OctobersVeryOwn on Vimeo.

In many ways, hip-hop needs some degree of sentiment and could be more introspective. But what many review heralding Take Care have failed to realize is traditional hip-hop albums have accomplished this feat without compromising lyrical content. The perfect example is Nas' Illmatic and it has been held in such high-regard because of its ability to be introspective without being over-dramatized and self-involved. Further, Nas was able to encapsulate mood on songs like 'N.Y. State of Mind' without ever making his lyrics secondary. Instead, he uses his lyrics not for punchlines so much as a way to create a portrait of the world he is attempting to convey. This is something that is and has always been a halmark of a great rapper but it is also something that has become very rare as it is both hard to do as an artist and had to market as a record label.

Lucky for the modern day rapper, they have been given another avenue to greatness. Rappers have been infatuated with indie rock (and rock in general) for some time now. Jay-Z claims to love every indie-rock band of the moment, Big Boi said he can't get enough of Mumford and Sons (the banjo, specifically) and wants to collaborate with them, and Kanye West featured Bon Iver prevalently on what was perhaps the greatest rap album of the past few years. When Kanye collaborated with Jon Brion for for the production of Late Registration, it was groundbreaking and the influence has only spread from there.

But there is a reason 808's and Heartbreak is pretty much unanimously considered Kanye's worst album. It's just not as interesting as his other work. The problem in making hip-hop a sonically centered genre is that it is trying to shove a square peg into a round hole; it just wasn't meant to be.

And this is the overall problem with Take Care. It's incredibly shallow. There isn't the joy that you get with other great hip-hop albums where you discover new things about it weeks, months, even years after it was first released. It is what it is, and what it is more often than not is over-sensitized drivel and no where is this more apparent than in the most overrated song on the album, 'Marvin's Room'. Never has a song where a forlorn twenty something male croons about a lost love while drunk been so over-hyped.

And herein lies the problem. No one ever questioned that a drunk dial to an ex-girlfriend couldn't be, on some level, entertainingly visceral. But this isn't a genre where such an act can carry an album on its own and being viscerally self-exposing only gets you so far in hip-hop unless you have some lyrical talent behind it to provide the backbone. Take Care is sorely lacking in this regard. It should be noted that the greatest lines on the album are the lines in which Drake pays homage to other great rappers by using some of their famous quotables.

This isn't even to say I don't like the album really because on the first listen or too it sounds great. I think it has it's time and place, albeit that time and place is very limited. But to pretend this is something that is forward-looking that will remain interesting even weeks from now is erroneous. Pitchfork even took the monumental step of comparing the current Drake album to Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear which is beyond hyperbolic.

In the end its not that Drake doesn't come off as genuine, because he does, and it's not that the album is completely terrible because it's not. It simply lacks substance. Other artists have done what Drake attempts to do in Take Care in making a brooding, introspective album focused on the insecurities of the album's creator. The only problem is many others have done it much better.