They don’t quite get there, but they did a damn fine job trying.Īfter the opener I’ve already discussed, the following songs essentially act as prelude to the real meat of the album. Could Drake really be that honest with us or, perhaps more realistically, play that character so convincingly for us over a whole album? Take Care responds with quite a resounding “hell yeah, fuckin’ right” as Drake, 40 and his rotating roster of guests try their damnedest to create a pop rap album that can compete with Kanye West’s monstrous My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Here he was, one of the most successful musicians of 2010 by nearly any measure moaning over the same girls he’d known before he was famous, the same problems he’d had as an upper class suburban teen. Despite all his success, Drake seemed on the edge of losing his mind. So, as Drake mounted the hype campaign for Take Care with the player hater anthem “Marvin’s Room” and “Trust Issues”, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly how perfect Take Care could possibly be. Much like his original mentor, Phonte of Little Brother, Drake was a guy who could flip the rap/R&B switch near-perfectly, and wasn’t afraid to tell us what was on his mind even at the expense of being taken seriously. At some point over those seven or eight months I’d come to connect with Drake on a lot more levels than I had when Thank Me Later first dropped. After a long hiatus, I returned to the album this summer and was flabbergasted to discover it was actually one of my favorite hip-hop releases of the past couple years. But those beats and those hooks had me coming back over and over again during the summer, with me slowly finding more respect for the awkward honesty Drake wanted to share - not to mention simply huge collaborations like “Light Up” and “Miss Me”.
Initially I was fairly ambivalent about that album: nice hooks, some clever raps, catchy beats and a whole lot of Drake-being-soft. Let’s detour back to Thank Me Later for a moment. Which is to say, if you thought Thank Me Later was Drake playing it safe on the heels of So Far Gone‘s runaway success, Drake heard you.
The opening number is centered on a gorgeous little piano melody and Noah Shebib’s signature low pass filters, both of which support Drake dancing between rapping and alto vocals more nimbly than ever during verses that lead us towards a chorus from a woman married to Our Lady Peace’s Raine Maida. But hip-hop always found its roots in bass, in at least a measurable amount of grit and mean-mugged struggle. Sure, rap artists have said beautiful things, featured beautiful choruses and, at the very least, introduced video viewers to a litany of beautiful women. In fact I’m nearly positive it’s never really been attempted before. Doesn’t it sound funny to you, too? It’s a weird thing to say about a hip-hop album. There’s something fun you can do when discussing Take Care with people that grew up in a different era of hip-hop, or just hate pop music.
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