news
Sound Advice: Thank Me Later by Drake
Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.
Given that he was once nothing but the Bar Mitzvahed Forest Hill dweller who played the token handicapped black kid on Degrassi, Drake’s current hottest-name-in-rap status sort of feels like a sick prank. Can you really blame the interwebs for backlashing against him? Imagine if critics suddenly hailed Joey Jeremiah as the most venomous voice in metal. On his first proper full-length, the twenty-three-year-old MC at least sounds cognizant of the criminally flukey nature of his Lil Wayne–orchestrated success, acknowledging the transience of it all (“my fifteen minutes began an hour ago”) on the Alicia Keys–assisted opener “Fireworks” and urging fans to “Thank Me Now” since “later doesn’t always come” on the Timbaland-helmed closer.
Drake’s candid self-awareness proves to be Thank Me Later’s strongest quality. On “Karaoke” and “The Resistance,” he kvetches about his struggle to keep it real amid all the fame (“which made me question when I went missing / and when I started treating my friends different”) as well as the pressure of repping Toronto’s hip-hop scene by his lonesome (“carried the weight for my city like a cargo ship”). Elsewhere, he dishes gossip rag–worthy dirt ranging from his sham of a relationship with Rihanna (“I could tell it wasn’t love / I just thought you fucked with me”) to lost loves (“do I ever come up in discussion over double-pump lattes and low-fat muffins?”) to accidental pregnancies (“plus this woman that I messed with unprotected / texting saying she wish she would’ve kept it”). Though we all know Drizzy can’t freestyle his way out of a paper bag (even when reading off of a BlackBerry), he nevertheless pens intimate rhymes rife with enough genuine self-examination to set him apart from his thugged-out competition.
Of course, that’s not to say Thank Me Later’s in short supply of alpha-male aggrandizement. “Show Me A Good Time” and “Up All Night” are littered with bankrolling braggadocio, while “Shut It Down” is a panty-melter on par with “Best I Ever Had.” Yet Drake even tackles this material with refreshing earnestness, relishing in his overnight fortune sans any escaped-the-hood platitudes and crooning about a beautiful girl like a guy who just wants to take her home and give her a foot massage. R&B-tinged, synth-and-string laden beats (courtesy of Kanye West, 40, Swizz Beats, and many others) provide a spacey, slow-burning soundtrack to his introspective (if not navel-gazing) musings, while a buffet of guests (Jay-Z, T.I., Nicki Minaj, etc.) provide A-list ammo to this already high-profile release. Overhyped as he may be, Drake brings heartfelt sincerity to a game cluttered with phoned-in phoniness. Those who get it will thank him now, those who don’t will thank him later; the rest of us will keep wondering why The Zit Remedy didn’t blow up instead.
