Album Review: Certified Lover Boy by Drake
Album Review: Certified Lover Boy by Drake
It’s hard work to be the hottest when Drake released this dreck.
Taken from Phil’s defunct blog, The Wax Report, an extensive review of the most important albums, covering everything from production to lyricism and overall cohesiveness.
“They never told me when you get the crown/It’s gon' take some getting used to,” rapped Drake on “Used To” back in 2015. It was perhaps the last moment when the Canadian Boy still had something to prove to the world. From then on, his discography reads like an Ikea catalog. Views, Scorpion, and Certified Lover Boy: Various packaged editions of the best-selling brand Drizzy Drake, which differ only in how abhorrent their covers are and what new records they break.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. If you have a commercially great-functioning recipe for success as Drake, it would be stupid to keep it from warming up every year. The only problem is that Drake seems to be making less and less effort. Characteristic of this is the fact that every new album since If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late is missed as a low point in your career that can no longer be undercut, only to have to correct this opinion later an album cycle. Views and Scorpion are also not good retrospectively, but they still have qualities that are difficult to reject, especially if you compare them to an LP like Certified Lover Boy.
The unorthodox-unexcited and supposedly self-ironic rollout for Drake certainly gave hope. Since the most successful rapper in the world shaves a heart in his hair, calls his album Certified Lover Boy, and releases it with a cover on which he can play with his future baby mama’s [censored]. It really seemed as if Drake was fully aware of his role as a late-pubescent, sentimental, corny heartbreaker and wanted to skillfully break it ironically. Almost gives the haters an overdose of the image with which they have been fooling Drake since Take Care. But no, no, and again no! Drake’s sixth album is finally the sobering admission that the man is incapable of making an album that can gain new aspects from his established sounds and content.
It is the same lament about too much sex and too little love, false friends, and being alone at the top that Drake has been singing for ten years now. Only he rarely sounded so uninspired and bitter. Trying to maintain his status no longer sounds like fun or passion but only like hard work.
“How much I gotta spend for you to pipe down?” For example, he asks impatiently on “Pipe Down.” You can literally see him in front of him as he throws rows of Louis Vuitton bags and Gucci shoes after her, after him, after renting an entire football stadium for a date, to get them in the box with the roaring horniness of a pubescent boy. At the end of the evening, Drizzy ends up in the strip club (“TSU”) anyway, where he, the kind-hearted donor he is known to be, wants to help an orphaned stripper get her second career rolling. That sounds like that. “I give you this bread; you run me some head/And then you go glow up a bit.” Charming.
If Drake raps about women, it quickly becomes unpleasant. This is nothing new either. But songs such as the lesbian-fetishizing “Girls Love Girls” or the groupie orgies crooner “Fucking Fans” set new standards in this regard. “Say that you’re a lesbian, girl, me too.” Trash. Horrible. “Most times, it was my selfishness and your helplessness that I took advantage of.”Yikes! Drake is not a Certified Lover Boy; Drake is a lonely, manipulative 35-year-old man in a midlife crisis who still considers it necessary to send his audience regular status updates about how his sex life is going. If you believe this album, it's not even going very well.
Also musically beats Certified Lover Boy in the same notch as Drake’s previous output (surprise!). It is noticeable that he increasingly seems to lose track of what makes him so unique, which sound suits him particularly well, and what his fan base prefers to hear from him. The pop-rap smash hits, the attempted R&B ballads, and ice-cold freestyles: Drake tries once again to bring them all under one roof but forgets to create a solid foundation. As a result, the Certified Lover Boy collapses like a house of cards.
Again and again, when the LP is about to find a vibe, you stumble over songs such as the completely out of place, albeit successful Memphis-worship “Knife Talk,” the toothless Kid Cudi duet “IMY2” or the soulful interlude “Yebba’s Heartbreak,” which all stand in the way of the coherence of the LP and prolong the running time unnecessarily. No hip-hop album in the world has to be 21 tracks long. Especially none of Drake.
It should be emphasized that the productions of 40, Dez Wright, Supah Mario, TM88, and Oz are still responsible for the sometimes most interesting moments. The melancholic-dreamy Beatles flip on “Champagne Poetry,” the Bun B-sampling, Future-assisted “N 2 Deep,” the subtly-building beat switch on “Fair Trade,” the beautiful Afrobeat melodies of “Fountains.” They all steal the show from a little motivated Drake in passing. The same applies to a large number of invited guests.
“You Only Live Twice,” which seems like a desperate attempt to revive the magic of “The Motto,” is probably the prime example of this. Only when Rick Ross shows an energy that does justice to the great beat, and Drake does the exact opposite a little later, it becomes clear how much he sucks the life out of his own songs. Lil Wayne pulls the cart out of the dirt in the back, but on other songs, such as “In the Bible” or “Love All,” this undertaking proves to be fruitless even for a legend like JAY-Z.
However, apart from all this, what is perhaps the most shocking finding of Certified Lover Boy: Drake has forgotten to write a hit. No matter how good or bad albums such as Views or Scorpion are, it is difficult to resist the hit DNA of songs like “One Dance,” “Controlla,” “God’s Plan,” or “Nice for What.” Even if Drake regularly puts a leg on himself with far too long track lists and lyrical missteps, he has always been confident that at least one single on a Drake album will be given to his pop star status.
Even the EP with which the Canadian Certified Lover Boy tasted in the spring had a higher hit density than his long-awaited sixth studio album. Of course, there is no question that almost all songs on Certified Lover Boy will do gigantic numbers. Basically, none of them deserved it this time. Almost no song in the tracklist is extraordinarily bad, but even fewer are just as memorable as the highlights of his last outputs.
Perhaps the only song that has a certain hit potential is both the most exciting and confusing moment of the entire album. “Way 2 Sexy” is a crazy, trashy trap banger that doesn’t subtly interpolate Right Said Fred's macho anthem “I’m Too Sexy,” but is, precisely for that reason, a lot of fun. Three guys rap for almost four minutes about how horny and potent they are and are aware of the craziness of the whole thing from the first to the last second.
This song is the blueprint for an album with the title Certified Lover Boy. For what Drake’s hard stretch could finally have ended after albums like Views and Scorpion. Instead, the song goes down in an ocean of mediocre, self-initiating horny jams that no one will remember in twelve months. What remains is the realization that Drake has reached a point in his career where he can afford both a beef with Kanye West and an album like this without fear of any consequences. This is just as impressive as it is frightening.
Subpar (★★☆☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Champagne Poetry,” surprisingly “Way Too Sexy”