https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/arts/music/drake-more-life-review.html?_r=0

For almost a decade, Drake has been a star and also a curator, the artist most responsible for hip-hop’s evolutionary changes and the one most likely to spot the next in line for the crown.

He has also been a bit of a formal innovator — he releases albums, and also mixtapes, as well as loosies when the feeling strikes. The traditional album cycle may be on the verge of extinction in the pop sphere; Drake has made peace with that.

His latest project, “More Life” — which had its premiere Saturday on OVO Sound Radio, his label’s weekly show on Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio station, and is available on all major platforms for streaming and sale — is billed not as an album, or a mixtape, but a playlist, a choice that has both rhetorical and business import.

Since Billboard tweaked its rules to include streaming, playlists are eligible to appear on the album chart, something that a handful of record labels have taken advantage of with compilations, but no major stand-alone artist has taken on as a creative challenge — Drake is the first. Having a blockbuster success with something other than a traditional album would encourage other artists to experiment with format. And codifying the playlist as a delivery mechanism for new music, not just for collecting other people’s songs, is a conceptual boon for streaming services, including Apple Music, with which Drake has had a longtime partnership.

But the playlist also suggests an aesthetic shift from the album, which in its platonic ideal form is narratively structured and contained, a creator’s complete thought expressed in parts. A playlist in the streaming era, by contrast, is a collection of moods, impressions, influences and references; it’s a river that flows in one direction, ending somewhere far from the beginning (if it ends at all).

This format — relaxed, circuitous, able to take in both his own work and also work by others — is particularly well suited to Drake, who’s as definable by his taste as by his sound.

And so goes the often captivating “More Life,” a nuanced collection of 22 new songs that recall various stages of Drake’s own development, as well as a tour of other styles and artists that he’s partial to. It is both craven and elegant — a collection that’s well matched to the medium and a logical extension of what Drake has been offering for years.

He doesn’t overdeliver on the concept: “More Life” is the length of a very long album, not long enough to accompany a marathon. Where it differs from a Drake album is in how he comports himself and imports others. “More Life” takes a whole host of voices seriously — not just Drake’s but also guests who are given plenty of room.

“4422” is a full song from the aching soul man Sampha; “Skepta Interlude” is a more or less full brute-strength song from the British grime rapper Skepta; “Glow,” a duet with Kanye West, leans heavily in Mr. West’s direction. The tough grime veteran Giggs appears on two songs, shining with a hilariously lewd verse on “KMT.” Young Thug also shows up twice, delivering mystical singing on “Sacrifices” and showing why he’s the clearest modern-day inheritor of P-Funk on “Ice Melts.”

This is a lot of competing energy, and on a traditional album, it might all have to serve a common purpose. But “More Life” is exciting for its detours, its crevices, its relaxed saunter across the various lanes of forward-thinking hip-hop and soul.

Drake is here, too, of course — saving his best rapping for a more formal project, perhaps, but still wound up about being let down by women and also by men. Drake is still in the paranoid and resentful mode that has dominated the last three years, but even when he’s lashing out, he feels gentler and more resigned. “People like you more when you working towards something/Not when you have it,” he raps on “Lose You.” Again and again, his fatigue is a theme, as on “Jorja Interlude”: “Told me I’m looking exhausted/You hit it right on the nose.” At the end of “Can’t Have Everything,” Drake’s mother shows up in what appears to be a voice mail message, cautioning her son against confrontation and anxiety.

Drake loves to hear people talk, both for what they say and how they say it. A scholar of accents and attitude, he lets other people set the mood on “More Life” in several places with sampled spoken interludes. They’re intimate breaks deployed by an artist who’s often said he’s seeking to provide a soundtrack for his listeners’ lives, to get in their heads. (Drake is, almost without question, the single greatest source of perfectly pitched Instagram captions.)

Mouth-to-ear transaction is the level Drake excels at. Consider what Drake doesn’t do: He’s the biggest pop star not named Beyoncé who doesn’t traffic in the trite big-tent on-the-one dance music that’s chart-dominant and soul-killing. He doesn’t make songs for getting lost in a crowd; he makes songs for getting lost in your feelings.

Not that he eschews the dance floor. Instead of aiming for dull festival grandeur, he emphasizes the movement’s black roots — he’s partial to house music (as heard here on the sensual “Passionfruit”), dancehall, Nigerian Afrobeats. His range is as musically meaningful as the one demonstrated by Beyoncé on “Lemonade” — her investigation was intranational, delving into country and slashing rock; Drake’s is international and diasporic, with a keen ear for how the internet has brought even closer black music from North America, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa.

Increasingly, Drake is as much ethnomusicologist as outright collaborator, a shift from the days when he would wield his influence by helping shepherd artists like Migos and Future out of regional acclaim into something wider by appearing on a remix. But even at this more advanced level, he is still scavenging for the latest sound, as heard on “KMT,” where he borrows the jaunty staccato pattern found in the current viral hit “Look at Me” by XXXTentacion. Drake is a teacher to many, but he’s still a hungry student, too.


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https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/drake-is-making-background-music-and-its-burying-us-alive/2017/03/20/5f509b64-0d7d-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html?utm_term=.2575573431b4

Drake, Drake, Drake, Drake, Drake, you sadistic little mesomorph. Are you trying to kill us, guy? Only an omnipresence this drunk on his own blood, sweat and tears could summon the hubris to stuff a pillowcase with 81 minutes of table scraps, smother our faces with it and call it “More Life.”

The highest-selling pop star of 2016 is also calling his half-alive, entirely overlong new album a “playlist” — as if to suggest that it should be weighted differently in the official Drake canon. What matters more is how “More Life” will be measured on the platforms that began streaming it on Saturday.

As streaming becomes our dominant mode of listening, Billboard has begun measuring success song by song, stream by stream. In turn, pop albums are expanding. The more tracks an album contains, the more coin it can generate, the better the album can perform on the charts. As the container changes shape, so does the stuff that goes inside. And not necessarily for the better.

Check out the Weeknd’s latest, “Starboy,” an 18-track album that feels not just long, but tedious, too. Like “More Life,” it aspires to cool uniformity, presumably in hopes that brain-chilled streamers won’t hear any weird noises and decide to change the proverbial channel. Shrewd move, at least in the short term. Because no matter how handsomely Drake and the Weeknd stand to profit from their new background music, they’re still global superstars responsible for making foreground music. That’s why attentively listening to all 22 tracks of “More Life” might make you feel as if you’re being waterboarded with Febreze.

You might ask, Hey, what about Future? Isn’t he playing the same games? It’s true, the great Georgia psychonaut (and occasional Drake collaborator), has already released two sprawling albums in 2017, “Future” and “HNDRXX,” 17 tracks each, chart-toppers both. But the rapper’s stylistic steadiness doesn’t feel like an attempt to stay on-message so much as an odyssey through his own fogged psyche. The Future songbook is an ectoplasmic river of dreams. The Drake songbook is a self-replicating brand strategy.

Which means that anyone hoping to hear a few renegade thoughts or melodic loop-de-loops on “More Life” is hoping for far too much. Instead of responding to the heavenly sounds of “Madiba Riddim,” in which a twinkling guitar riff tiptoes through a computerized Caribbean pulse, Drake recycles some signature boohoo: “I cannot tell who is my friend,” and then, “Teach me how to love you again,” and then, “My heart is way too frozen to get broken,” and then some more sad-bro lines that wouldn’t pass the Turing Test.

He seems even more oblivious deeper in the proceedings during “Lose You,” a song that allows the most successful rapper alive to wonder why he isn’t being properly congratulated for conquering the world: “I don’t get a pat on the back for the come up?” Moments later, he’s working through his latest radio-eater, “Fake Love,” whining about how the respect he gets is superficial and untrue. Is there anything more irritating than a man on top of the world complaining about how he just can’t win?

Not when they’re sitting this still. Pop music has long provided shelter to the perpetually aggrieved, but artful grousing is acceptable only when the artist is pushing against something. Drake has been plopped in the same aesthetic papasan since 2013, generating a supersaturation of sameness that threatens to erase all the good music he made once upon a time in 2009 — back when his vulnerability communicated his humanity more than it stabilized his brand. Maybe he knows this. In the very last line on “More Life,” he promises to shut up for a while: “I’ll be back 2018 to give you a summary.” Cool, cool. But not a minute sooner. Please.