The CN Tower is the perch from which Drake surveys his influence on the cover of his 2016 album Views, a turning-point record that made him the streaming age's definitive superstar. Originally titled Views From the 6, after the nickname of the hometown he claimed to rule, the record and its cover art seemed to channel his desire for a boosted signal and even greater reach: He'd conquered America, but he wanted the whole world. Drake had become a headliner broadcasting stories of romantic misadventure, closed loops and missed connections, and the album's distinctly Canadian creative team — led by engineer and producer Noah "40" Shebib, with whom Drake co-founded his OVO Sound label — built out a diasporic soundbed that pushed his perceptive songcraft to global diffusion. Upon release, Views debuted in the Top 5 of charts in more than a dozen countries. "I made a career off reminiscing," he noted, but the success was just as much about what that perspective opened the door for: a coy aesthetic that used melody as a coded shorthand for sensitivity. Characteristically, the raps were gangly and a bit awkward, the singing a bit strained and anxious. He was a teen soap actor turned regional ambassador turned universal commodity (literally and figuratively). After being primarily an American art form and product for decades, the whole rap business — defined largely by its territorial, homegrown, set-reppin' mentality — had been hijacked by an outlander.
We've been living in a rap world remade in Drake's image for so long that it's easy to forget his pop sorcery began with R&B. In the beginning, he and 40 were imagining hip-hop songs with the more atmospheric hallmarks of rap's sister genre, prioritizing texture and mood. "We didn't set out with a deliberate ambition to completely break the rules and have singing and rapping and motion and melody," 40 said in 2012. "Instead it was more a matter of Drake asking for the drums to be taken out of a track, or for me to 'lo-fi' an entire song, and me initially saying, 'You can't take the drums out, the record won't move,' or 'You can't take all the top end out' — and then me realizing that I could, and that it would give a unique perspective on his message." That unique perspective changed the game, but the message gradually changed along the way, too. Last spring when Kendrick Lamar rapped, "I like Drake with the melodies, I don't like Drake when he act tough," he was pointing to a transformation that had occurred after Drake's historic rise: a regression from sentimental beta male passive-aggression to virulent alpha male antagonism. You could say that inflated sense of self cost him the biggest battle in rap history.
Now, on his first full-length release since suffering nearly a year's worth of resounding losses at Kendrick's hand, Drake dives back into the R&B-infused primordial ooze that birthed him, and away from direct confrontation. The new album's very title, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, implies a soft-pedaled rollout: the release before The Release, designed to both test the waters post-beef and insulate Drake from any potential blow to his earning potential. This is not the statement, the messaging suggests, it's a write-off. Underscoring those intentions, the record is a collaboration with the sexed-up singer and fellow self-involved playboy PARTYNEXTDOOR, the first artist signed to the OVO label; the two appear on the cover in a snowstorm before Absolute World, a skyscraper complex in PARTY's Toronto-bordering hometown of Mississauga. PARTY is first billed, but his true value here is as backup: Drake doesn't have to stand alone amid backlash, and, in keeping with the "us versus them" dichotomy of the season, gets to close ranks with one of his own, someone well-versed in the ways of his realm. In this way he marks his priority, one in line with his recent lawsuits: reestablish his reach and omnipresence, even at the expense of continuity. There is no album Grammy hunt in his future; Kendrick always had the critical high ground anyway. Instead, Drake here makes a calculated play to regain his stranglehold on the record books.
Aubrey Graham is nothing if not skilled in the strategic deployment of collaboration. It's part of the reason the climactic verse on "Not Like Us" lands so hard — the murderer's row of creative partners from whom he has sapped energy overlaps with the endless list of aggrieved associates-turned-foes now attacking him. From the "Yachty can't give you no swag" taunt on "Euphoria" to the "You not a colleague, you a "f****n' colonizer" knockout punch, Kendrick located a resonance in the feeling that Drake's sustained success has relied on the exploitation of American artists, mining their brands and sounds and slang. (Drake's previous collaborative projects with Future and 21 Savage fit neatly into the narrative.) As if to counter this pitch, the swag on $$$4U is very clearly October's Very Own. It has all of the signatures that 40 noted in 2012: lo-fi'ed songs of motion and melody with far more lows than highs — "very dark and quiet and muddy and with the vocals cutting through like a razor." Here, those signatures are even self-referential: in "Gimme a Hug," Drake takes pride in one of Lil Durk's boys revealing he was drilling to the quintessential voicemail R&B of "Marvin's Room," and the anti-trickin' anthem "Spider-Man Superman" samples the Take Care deep cut "The Real Her." As past and present collide, he is leaning into particular Drake-isms and their sensations.
It would be unfair to PARTYNEXTDOOR to call him a non-factor here. After all, this is his lane Drake is swerving into, and he is the stronger, more distinct vocalist, one to whom seduction and manipulation come more naturally. That singing voice often works as a perfect change-up pitch, complementing Drake's, which can grow monotonous in large doses. PND slips in and out of songs, dutifully supporting a return to the toxic lover boy canon he had a hand in pioneering. But on a macro level, this just doesn't feel like much of a partnership. PARTY has one solo song to Drake's six, and he seems to always be following his label boss' lead, stepping aside to make space for the de facto frontman. Drake takes up all the oxygen on the opener, "CN Tower"; PND is reduced to hook man on "Moth Balls" and "Glorious"; and "Deeper," his standalone moment, is followed by nearly 15 minutes without an appearance. He is window dressing, an R&B mannequin staged at the entrance to let onlookers know what to expect within. Once you're inside, the generator of some of the most insidious earworms in pop history takes the opportunity to remind you of his bona fides.
As Drake's first move after seeing the game-over screen for the first time, $$$4U seems to reveal what attributes he considers most essential to his music: the mildness and flirtation that defined his early work, its appeal to women, and a softness toward his paramours that felt unprecedented in mainstream hip-hop. Maybe this was the humbling he needed to reevaluate how his songs became, as the rapper and longtime Young Money adversary Pusha T put it, so "angry and full of lies." In the decade since "Hotline Bling" went diamond and "One Dance" became the first of many Drake chart-toppers, the rapper's snowballing momentum has produced a self-centered music of hostility, less in his feelings and more about knife talk. The tentpole singles built his wall of numbers so high they served as fortification for the rest of his prickly songs, which sneered at anyone looking to stand in his way; his narrative voice grew increasingly myopic and paranoid, reflecting the closed-off self-obsession of a streaming dictator. Initially a pop-rap alchemist pushing a very specific self-pitying romanticism, he has become noticeably apathetic, pessimistic and scornful in recent years. More often than not, the targets of his sardonic verses have been the women he used to pine for.
Once upon a time, there was "Bria's Interlude" and "Cece's Interlude," Alisha, Catya, and Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree — "landmarks of the muses that inspired the music," Drake called them. By 2023's For All the Dogs, he seemed to be done with those tailored stories and messages, instead framing the women in his call log like line items in a ledger. "I search one name and end up seeing 20 tings," he rapped on "First Person Shooter," "man, I pack 'em in this phone like some sardines." Suddenly, there were no muses at all, much less landmarks for them — only nuisances, schemers and harpies; text threads that moved like fencing matches; defending himself from backstabbers with a metal-plated vest. The broader aggression in his lyrics was mirrored in the music, which largely abandoned softness and ambience for stabs at Brooklyn drill, BNYX rage, icy trap and even Griselda soul. Only in the wake of the Kendrick beef, an onslaught that made him out to be a sexual predator, has he seemed to soften his posture.
For most of its runtime, $$$4U oscillates between low-lit foreplay, pillow talk and club-night two-timing, considering the nuances of the many noncommittal relationships in which the two men are very clearly emotionally invested. Calling these songs romantic would be a stretch, but they certainly aren't for all the dogs. Much of the album is about being the other man in a love-triangle situationship; "Crying in Chanel" and "Lasers" both bemoan an ex-boyfriend's lingering presence in a budding fling. The closer, "Greedy," feels like a summation of the vibe, an insatiable appeal for more love — or maybe just more recognition. The "all things to all people" mandate of the rapper's empire has some inevitable pitfalls, and it isn't a coincidence that straying from the comforts of home leads to some of the worst songs. "Meet Your Padre" is so stilted and cringey it feels like an SNL sketch, and "Die Trying," a pop-rock ballad built around PND earnestly belting out "I'm just a caring and passionate guy," would be completely lost if not for its brief but sublime Yebba postscript. The exception in this lot is "Nokia," a Y2K floor-filler so tacky it's catchy, which follows through on the "keep making me dance, waving my hands" gauntlet that Drake's nemesis threw at his feet last year.
Given Kendrick's stated desire to watch Drake's party die, you could take the deposed Toronto kingpin's attempts to revive it as a subtle act of rebellion. Or, maybe, it's an attempt to assert his influence where it's greatest. "F*** a rap beef, I'm tryna get the party lit," he squeals on "Gimme a Hug." The song, among the album's best, is telling, teasing out where the last Drake sanctuary might lie: the strip club. He finds comfort in the embrace of the dancers, whom he notably cites by name — Princess, Gigi, Pooh, Pink, Luxury. Come to the stage and show him some love, he requests. As the Magic City dancer Diamond put it in the 2015 documentary Inside the Atlanta Strip Club that Runs Hip Hop, "The DJs and the dancers are more like A&Rs. We know what we like to dance to, and we know a hit when we hear it." One can safely read $$$4U as a move to reconnect with those tastemakers, and to establish them as Drake's true allies in the industry. The song has a big crescendo, shifting from agitated tantrum raps to the devotional hymnal of Aaron Hall's "I Miss You." As he migrates gradually from one to the other across three different beats, it's apparent where he feels most at home.
But there isn't a radio-silent bunker on earth truly free of "Not Like Us," which forces this album to confront a new reality. Because Drake hasn't yet been willing to openly acknowledge defeat nor retreat into self-reflection, the songs on $$$4U are imbued with a residual resentment. The rapper has spent sleepless years guarding himself against a slew of lurking, faceless character assassins; now that the prophecy has finally come to pass, he can't just move on, nor would the world let him. "Lost a lot of brothers to this dog-ass game / What am I supposed to do with all that pain?" he yelps on "Small Town Fame," his bereavement tinged with annoyance and disbelief as he returns to the safety of subliminals. "Funny how it's only b**** n****s that are waiting on the boy's obituary / 'Cause if I die, it's these n****s that become the sole beneficiary," he raps on "Gimme a Hug." "And what the f*** are they gon' do with it? / Have the girls up at 29 on stage twerkin' with a dictionary?"
That's quite the spin; I laughed out loud when I first heard it, both because it's a great joke and patently absurd. The strongest case Drake can currently make for his incumbency is that you can't shake ass to DAMN. Honesty is slowly starting to creep back into his perspective as a songwriter on $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, a buoy beside a sinking ship, but there is no future if the man can't be honest with himself. Some soul-searching is required to figure out how he made a career of reminiscing in the first place.
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