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Sporadic thoughts on "Take Care" and DrakeNov 07 '11 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line That 'Somebody said that I fell off' line always gets a smirk outta me
Just took a concentrated first listen through the leak Drake’s “Take Care.” Not gonna front, this is the first Drake project I’ve intentionally gone through. What’s prompting this isn’t how official the final product is (Though I will say it’s much colder than I expected). What makes me want to type out my thoughts on it is the amount of hate/ridicule that Drake’s been getting from everyone, mainly people calling him too sensitive, a woman and other less flattering phrases taken out of context. Despite the horrid album cover, ‘Take Care’ is pretty fresh. Top of the line production, provided mostly by <B>40</b> and above average lines from Drake, who shows the reason he kills so many 16-bar features is because it’s easier to craft a smoking sixteen when you’re capable of spitting hook-free for three straight minutes (“Lord Knows”). There are some albums, especially ones with this much hype, that almost parody themselves with their pre-ordained ‘classic’ status. It’s a fine line between epic sincerity and bumbling aspirations but ‘Take Care’ walks that tightrope almost perfectly, even with spoken word interludes that, contraty to my gut reaction to retch over, see Drake summing up, concisely and unpretentiously, his emotions and the worldviews of a majority of his listeners. I’m also pleasantly surprised how limited the number of features here are. This is some of my own bias coming out, but Drake seemed to me like the kinda guy who would need a boatload of features and fellow emcees to keep his project afloat. But out of 17 tracks, only 6 guests step in the booth with him (Wayne stops in twice, once for the excellent “The Real Her” and twice for the stereotypical, annoying “HYFR”). What I’m trying to understand is all the criticism directed Drake’s way. Maybe it’s because of the specific niche he’s got himself embedded in…this kindof evolved R&B that strives to be 4-legged hip-hop until it realizes that it can fly easier, quicker and higher without that extra weight bearing it down. The LP is front-loaded with the average amount of womanizing, hedonism and excess for a mainstream project with an added side of Drake’s more sincere self that he gets to unmask more often than the heart-broken/sick/longing R&B chart toppers because of his styling as an emcee. Remember, this is evolved R&B. Maybe it’s because I’ve also been listening non-stop to <b>116 Clique’s</b> “Man Up” EP since I copped it over the weekend, but does all these attacks at Drake being a woman just give more evidence of a twisted/ever-changing perception of what being a real man truly means in our culture? Or does it just speak more to the ruthless critique of an emcee that’s prolly more of a knee-jerk reaction to his high profile and obnoxious pre-teen fans than his actual content? Just questions that kept knocking in my head as I was drifting through ‘Take Care.’ The project itself isn’t legendary (although, to be fair, it’s had no time to grow on me) and I think Drake will do projects in the future that will define him better than this one. But, it’s like he said himself (after quickly pronouncing his haters irrelevant) on ‘Lord Knows:’ “My story is far from finished.”  |
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