Genre: Toronto R&B // Trap Soul // Manchild Pop
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[SHAMELESS PLUG] For a kinder perspective on the album, listen to my AROUSE broadcast episode with DJ ISD and Ani Halkatti.
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A few weeks ago, a gift graced my timeline: a clip of Drake sweetly lilting a rendition of Donda’s heartfelt “24” at the Free Larry Hoover Concert — another timeless pop culture episode that already feels so long ago. This hit like a bittersweet Snapchat Memory or a manipulative lovebomb to keep you hooked on an abusive partner as I was reminded that Drake can actually sing when he wants or feels inspired to. Like clockwork, my gullible self made the mistake of getting excited for a Drake release.
Drake cemented himself in the zeitgeist with the Grammy-winning Weeknd-assisted album Take Care, but a lot’s happened to the male R&B scene since then. You have the derivatives of Frank Ocean like Steve Lacy, Blood Orange, and Jordan Ward, the sea of Brent Faiyaz clones, and the infinite well of lullabying trap soul singers scattered around between them. Apart from Canadian bard Daniel Caesar, women are graciously carrying contemporary R&B in the mainstream. I have many guesses as to why — from the decline of church-going choir boys to the rise in melodic rap. Take your pick. $ome $exy $ongs 4 U encapsulates my personal gripes with this trend.
Jumping from 2011’s “The Real Her” to the new “SPIDER-MAN SUPERMAN” or “Marvins Room” to “SOMETHING ABOUT YOU”, it’s clear Drake’s singing voice has not held up (maybe from poor maintenance, lack of consistent practice, and/or too much smoking), and the engineers need to drown the pair’s vocals in autotune like a soiled pancake for some reason. I don’t mind a little autotune as seasoning, but there comes a point where you start to question why an R&B project needs so much mechanical overcompensation. On So Far Gone, it felt like a refinement over the evolutions of 808’s & Heartbreaks, but here, it comes across like an attempt at smearing the line between effortless and lazy.
Sitting through the project feels like an overdrawn and suffocating hookah date too late at night where you’re lowkey realizing you don’t like hookah or the person you’re with. It’s not bad. Just boring. I can give tracks like “CN TOWERS”, “MOTH BALLS” and closer “GREEDY” a pass, but they just outright lack the passion and emotions I typically like to see in R&B tracks like Leon Thomas’ “MUTT” or “YES IT IS”, for example. It speaks to the lack of chemistry between Drake and PARTYNEXTDOOR. In the rare moments they do actually complement each other, how they finish each other’s bars feels almost homoerotic — like a couple looking for a third to spice things up. But I can’t name anything spicy about this.
If I say imagine a corny ‘indie sleaze’ pop rapper who originally wasn’t accepted by hip hop culture for being too soft until proving themselves with a classic record, half of you would imagine Drake and the other half would picture Childish Gambino. Ironically, their trend in quality across their careers is almost exactly opposite. On Glover’s farewell album last year, he spits ”Man the blog era over, takin’ all our stars” on alleged Drake diss “Yoshinoya”. While we learn what it looks like for blog-era icons to mature and either transition into legacy artists relying on touring rather than album promotion – like Childish Gambino and Beyonce – or somehow rebound to unprecedented heights via the craziest second winds in history – like Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator, – Drake still leans into this Predatory Sugar Daddy image where he croons about collecting and financially ‘saving’/manipulating women who are just now leaving their parents and howling about how girls hang with him because he’s Drake but leave him… because he’s Drake.
Of course, Drake offers a different product. Not all music has to stimulate. Sometimes, we need vapid escapism… but in moderation. In the current landscape, the role of an artist to highlight the importance of free creative expression remains more paramount than ever. One of the biggest musicians in the world taking every opportunity to deride meaningful art as “free the slaves music”, complain about how “you can’t shake ass with a dictionary”, and use A.I. to puppet dead people feels like one of the fastest ways to ruin art’s reputation, lower people’s standards, and manufacture consent for authoritarians and capitalists to take away expression and defund art. I hope Drake stays the only person in history who will get called the GOAT or the LeBron of Rap while simultaneously having his biggest fans say “It’s just Drake” and actively lower their expectations for each of his releases as a rebuttal to critiques.
While $ome $exy $ongs 4 U features some relatively experimental cuts (by Drake standards) like the karaoke-staple “Nokia” or Yebba-penned Jordan Ward-parody “Die Trying”, I just found it dry. Rather than setting the mood for Valentine’s Day sexytimes, it feels more like stale background music for playlisting when the mood has already been set and you just need something to cover the noise. Or, more accurately, a sex playlist for people who don’t have sex. Granted, I could just not be the target demographic since I’m not lightskin or Canadian.
But that begs the question: who is the ‘U’ in $ome $exy $ongs 4 U? Drake says he’s “tryna get lit for the b*tches”, but what woman would listen to this? Take Care took a play out of Prince’s playbook and made quality music for women because “that’s where the money is” and men will listen to whatever, but $ome $exy $ongs 4 U rings like a manosphere-core album for men who think they know women better than actual women.
With $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, Drake gives us the Vultures III that nobody wanted or deserved: a declining pop rap idol singing aggressively sexual songs with a sidekick who tags along but never really finds his groove, with topics such as buying women or barely tolerable TikTok gimmicks like “Meet Your Padre”. This is an unholy two-man in musical form.
Is this attempt at nostalgia bait enough to keep him relevant? So far, seeing the immense drop-off in replay among general listeners and his (slowly but surely physically, but perhaps not mentally) aging fanbase, it’s anyone guess where Drake can go from here. Will he flee abroad like the exiled rapper who shall not be named after “saving” Taylor Swift from Beyonce, lock in, and serve another classic? Or keep pacifying us with even more playlist-oriented bar muzak?
With $$$4U, Drake tests the waters to see if his audience still even cares before a likely roll-out of Scorpion II, with all the TikTok-oriented pop singles you’d expect and a probable full PR run with more Mr. Beast-style giveaways — this time boosted by Stake ads and manosphere gurus and streamers like Adin Ross. If it flops, he can say “the industry is against him” or blame his mishandling of the beef. If it succeeds, he can gloat accordingly.
In short, after getting publicly dubbed by Rihanna, Drake gave up on settling down or ever growing as a person, and it’s really starting to show with these manchild jams where every song drips with insecurity and fragility — especially on the super senior anthem “GIMME A HUG.” With each bloated, infantile, overly-generic, autotune-soaked release, it feels more and more like music is Drake’s mind-numbing 9-to-5 that he lost all hunger for years ago but still wants to coast on for as long as possible. With the aura and enthusiasm largely drained, the party [next door] ended forever ago, and he just still here.
Verdict: $ome $kips 4 U
Sole Standout: Nokia
Other Decent Tracks: Spider-Man Superman, Small Town Fame, Raining in Houston
Hit for the Locals (other than Nokia): Gimme a Hug
Worst: Meet Your Padre, Celibacy, Glorious
Rating: 56/100
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