Until the last minute, the album was to be called Views from the 6, and it still serves as an ode to Drake’s hometown of Toronto. It confuses loyalty and stagnation, wallowing in a sound that is starting to show its limits.
Spanning an obnoxious 82 minutes, the record goes through several musical and thematic phases, but the overall atmosphere is bitter, petty, worn-down. VIEWS is what happens when venting turns into whining. This might seem like a ridiculous distinction-there’s never any question that Drake is the star of his own show-but it’s apt, and it hints at why this album feels like more of a claustrophobic mindfuck than a collective catharsis. “This album, I’m very proud to say, is just-I feel like I told everybody how I’m actually feeling,” Drake told Zane Lowe in a toothless recent interview, differentiating VIEWS from his previous work. The record is called VIEWS but its perspective is decidedly singular. But on his fourth proper album, he edges closer than ever to a mirrored abyss, a suffocating echo chamber of self. For the past seven years, Drake has expertly glided along that line. But there is a razor-sharp line between self-awareness and self-absorption: Whereas self-awareness can expand wisdom by reflecting it outward, self-absorption often festers, drawing things in only to let them rot. When he turns his woes into anthems, we all get lifted. When he confides his fears, we become a little more fearless. From arenas to memes, Drake has always had a skill for turning his innermost thoughts, feelings, and anxieties into breakthrough group therapy sessions-he articulates what we know to be true and then lets us rap or sing those truths en masse, exalting in common bonds that are as vulnerable as they are revealing.
Know yourself, the theory goes, and you will know all. “I’ve always been me, I guess I know myself.” - Drake He is still undeniably, immovably here.“There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.” - Benjamin Franklin Drake doesn’t quite reach new heights, but he doesn’t fall down either. Limited pruning, particularly in the album’s sagging middle section, could have gone a long way. It’s been two-and-half years since Drake’s last studio album – more than enough time to record too many songs. The result is new patterns, new tones and new pockets of Drake’s secret weapon: empty space. This is glittering, diamond-sharp stuff that sees Drake switch from the dulcet lothario of ‘Take Care’ to the clipped, canine street rapper of ‘If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late’. Tropical club bangers aside, Drake’s fourth studio effort is above all else a headphone album, possessed of an instrumental palette of astonishing depth and variation.
This second camp might point you to ‘Child’s Play’, wherein the multimillionaire asks, quite seriously, ‘Why you gotta fight with me at Cheesecake? You know I love to go there.’ (The Cheesecake Factory, for the uninitiated, is the kind of place North American kids might go for a fifteenth birthday.) Others, again fairly, will wonder why any artist would abandon such demonstrably fecund ground. There will be those who fairly point out that Drake’s self-absorbed shtick is getting, er, less young: the absence of trust, the presence of doubt, the love of mum and money. Sure enough, the affection is palpable: improbable co-signs for questionable local rappers, sly references to criminally slept-on OGs, obligatory condo building shout-outs and, picking up where 2015’s ‘If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late’ left off, a tour through some of the least glamorous locales on God’s grey earth.īut this being a Drake album, if ‘Views’ looks anywhere, it’s inward. There was reason to believe the album formerly known as ‘Views From the 6’ would be Drake’s love letter to Toronto. It was a year that saw him drop two wildly acclaimed mixtapes and the invention of the meme-able hit record – aka the omnipresent 'Hotline Bling'. The prospect of building on his success in 2015 must have been galling for the 29-year old. Drake is undeniably, immovably here – at the top, enthroned and imperious, and with nowhere to go but down.