Photo courtesy of October’s Very Own on youtube.com
What’s the deal with Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late? A six-year anniversary present commemorating his 2009 breakthrough mixtape? A metaphorical middle finger satisfying a contractual obligation to an imploding Cash Money Records? Merely something to lift a young Jonathan Manziel’s spirits?
Whatever the reason, the self-styled 6 God saw fit to drop a haymaker of a surprise album-mixtape hybrid — smack in the middle of a Kanye West fashion show-cum-concert media extravaganza. Disrespectful as hell, certainly, but perhaps earned?
After all, Toronto’s finest export had just come off a 2014 that cemented his status as rap’s most pervasive tastemaker. In a gap year that saw just a lone Drake single, a trio of throwaway B-sides, a few bones tossed his floundering mentor’s way and a barely listenable Young Money record, no co-sign held quite so much sway, no stacks stretched quite so far and, of course, no Instagram feed boasted as much cultural capital as Aubrey Graham’s.
With this tape, then, we get a portrait of the artist as a not-quite-so-young-anymore man, one who’s long paid his dues and staked his claim among the genre’s elite. At once icier and angrier than Nothing Was the Same, a (for all intents and purposes) radio-unfriendly stylistic leap from Take Care, IYRTITL makes that 2011 album look like chamber pop by comparison.
Working with a bevy of up-and-comers on the production side along with longtime co-conspirators Noah “40” Shebib and Boi-1da, Drake pushes the envelope with a host of experimental beats. The electronic influences first embraced on the Grammy Award-winning Take Care are still present, but the bulk of the mixtape pulls from Nothing Was the Same’s frosty side, excising the darkest bits, interludes and beat shifts and tugging them to their breaking points.
As far as bars go, Drake reaches a degree of irateness rarely glimpsed since “Worst Behavior.” Between firing barbs at ascendant trash rappers — “Act your age and not your girl’s age,” ahem, Tyga — and alluding to mounting label drama, he elects to throw some serious shade. Nowhere is that frustration felt more clearly than Bring the Burner to Work Day anthem “Star67,” which opens with an oddly prescient 2007 studio rant from Lil Wayne and a hotheaded verse ostensibly directed at Cash Money founder Birdman: “Brand-new Beretta/ Can’t wait to let it go/ Walk up in my label like, ‘Where the check though?’”
Yet for all the bravado and bluster, the Drake who first won hearts airing out his vulnerabilities in a piano-backed croon isn’t gone — just obscured behind a relentless rebranding effort. Underneath the cherry-picked flows, street patois and Jamaican ad-libs, there’s still a twenty-something with all the millennial insecurities of his target demographic, the stripper fetishist with a heart of gold first introduced six years ago on So Far Gone.
“Jungle,” featured in an atmospheric short film by the same name released Thursday morning, finds Drake musing over ivories in a relationship retrospective that would’ve felt perfectly at home on Take Care — say, sandwiched between “Doing It Wrong” and “The Real Her.” “You & The 6” reprises the mother-son exchange of Take Care’s “Look What You’ve Done,” dispensing with the latter’s celebratory spirit in favor of a late-night venting session.
There’s a definitive lack of ex-girlfriends’ voicemail audio, and you won’t find him spitting about banging out his babysitter on a posse cut, but the overly intimate details inherent to Drake’s work haven’t disappeared, either; copious address- and name-dropping remain a discography staple (Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree, eat your heart out).
Actually, you won’t find a posse cut at all. Beyond a Wayne verse on “Used To” — which alone merits a mercy-killing of the embattled Young Money kingpin — there’s just a duo of tracks featuring OVO it-boy PARTYNEXTDOOR and “Company,” an absolute firecracker starring Houston trap lord Travi$ Scott.
Closer “6PM in New York” wraps things up with a four-minute thinkpiece on the state of the game, including shots at Kendrick Lamar and Kanye and insinuations that Watch the Throne should’ve been a trifecta effort. Four years removed from Take Care, though, Drake fashioning himself a rap god who can stand toe-to-toe with the likes of Lamar and West no longer seems so far-fetched.
In all, it’s no less a towering monument to aesthetic than the definitive soundscapes of 2013 and 2011, but IYRTITL feels like more of a heat check than a painstakingly curated labor of love. Fortunately for Drake, it’s still hot up in the 6.
