This is no longer the ambitious Drake who tried to be “the best rapper alive.” This is the Drake who sings “billboard melodies.” Songs like “Can’t Have Everything,” “KMT” (which is a fairly obvious XXXTENTACION ripoff) and “Free Smoke” suffer from this mind-numbing lyrical style. There is no passion behind the words, no interest in the delivery. Drake raps like someone’s holding a gun to his head and forcing him to talk. This terrible flow is coupled with a delivery that seems absolutely bored. Each line ends on a hard rhyme to the line before, creating this almost lullaby-like rhythm (“Twinkle, twinkle, little star / How I wonder what you are”). Drake raps the simplest verses I’ve heard in a while on this project. Notice the repetitive, maddening rhyme scheme. Notice the recycled topics: Drake continuously talks about growth and becoming the man. “I had some different priorities / Weezy had all the authority / Women I like was ignorin’ me / Now they like, ‘Aren’t you adorable?’ / I know the question rhetorical.” Here is a standard Drake verse, off the first song of More Life, “Free Smoke”: Recently, Drake seems to have taken the parts of each style he finds successful and diluted them into this lazy, meandering, couplet flow that is thoroughly boring.

A couple years ago (around the time of Migos’ “Versace”), Drake adopted the Migos triplet flow. Then, when punchline-rap became the law of the land, Drake made songs like “The Motto,” where each line ends on a quick witty, memorable, word.

During his first years, Drake was Lil Wayne’s protégé, so he rapped a lot like Weezy did, with a quick, rambling delivery, tripping across rhymes casually. Drake’s rhyming style has shifted many times over the past few years. The biggest disappointment of this project is that Drake doesn’t rap particularly well. More Life is this hyper polished, austere, hyper-produced collection. if Untitled Unmastered had a soulful, impromptu, unpolished character. This would be Drake’s version of Kendrick Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered. This isn’t “Mixtape Drake” or “Album Drake” This is just a random collection of Drake tracks.Ī more apt and accurate name for this project would be Views – the B sides Collection. In fact, it seems that the “playlist” designation is just a strategic move to minimize the legacy of this project. While there are a fair number of features, and the cover advertises this as a product of the October Team, this is still just a longer Drake album. ahem, playlist, More Life is more evidence of Drake’s movement away from personal, witty rap toward flat, homogenized, commercial dance-pop.īased on the rollout of this project, many assumed that this could be the OVO Sound version of the GOOD Music Cruel Winter tape, yet that didn’t turn out to be true. It is almost as though he forgot what emotions feel like, having become this commercialized music-making machine.

He seems to have left his mortal body behind in the Thank Me Later days. Perhaps this explains why Drake’s recent music is so. He is the image of wealth, success, cool. He has exceeded pure stardom He has exceeded hip hop fame. He is a global superstar, one of the most recognizable faces of the past ten years.

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