How to resurrect yourself and carry forward, head held aloft, after the biggest kill shot in hip-hop history? One way might be to hone a single, perfect statement—something narrow and vicious, a shiv to the ribs of the world that cheered your demise as your rival threw a Cheshire-Cat grin at you from the Super Bowl halftime show.
That might have been wise, but Drake has never been wise—or concise. Drake’s career has been predicated on the belief that there are endless ways to rephrase and restate the same two or three vague notions that have been swimming around like goldfish in his brainpan since before the iPhone was introduced: 1) Fame is hard, mostly because it indulges your worst tendencies, which you can always then blame on the heavy burdens of fame, and 2) Why do none of these conniving women and despicable hangers-on trust me?
No score yet, be the first to add.
So here comes two and a half hours of Drake music, spread across three distinct albums that trifurcate his persona: the aggrieved ICEMAN, the lovelorn HABIBTI, and the club-ready MAID OF HONOUR. There was probably no other way for Drake to blast himself out of purgatory: His ideal forum has always been the drunken voice note or the self-justifying Notes app screenshot. He never met an uncomfortable silence he couldn’t smother, and across his three new studio albums, he girds his loins for the longest filibuster of his existence.
Today, we’re only going to be looking at ICEMAN, both for the sake of honoring each distinct project and because we have limited breath to draw here on planet Earth. The cover invokes Michael Jackson’s iconic sequined glove—not usually a heartening sign of an artist readjusting his perspective and seeking firmer ground. But really, what would we do, as listeners, if the character Aubrey Drake Graham played in his music ever encountered “perspective”? He can’t. We count on him not to.
The problem is, all of this insight-free grousing used to be fun, and Drake’s music—his rap music, at least—hasn’t made prolonged contact with fun in a decade. Instead, every new Drake project is a buffet of humiliation, mortification, and self-serving delusion. On ICEMAN, we get a few teaspoons of nourishing hilarity, but mostly it’s a long platter of the cold, lumpy self-pity that made us push our chairs back in the first place.
On “Make Them Pay,” he’s still complaining about inflated streaming numbers. And on “Firm Friends.” And on “Dust.” He won’t leave the DSP stuff alone, and every time he mentions it, it invokes the same sinking feeling as when our in-laws won’t stop bringing up the same conspiracy theory at the dinner table. “I’m fightin’ the man, not suin’ the rapper,” Drake insists on “B’s on the Table,” referencing his dismissed lawsuit against UMG. This is an awkward position to take when he himself is facing multiple allegations of bot-farming and stream inflation.
