Back in 2014, Drake still spoke his petty truth to power.
He was 28 years old, Kanye West was 37, and the latter had a punchline problem bad enough to be addressed on the public record.
“There were some real questionable bars on [Yeezus],” Drake told Rolling Stone. “Like that ‘Swaghili’ line? Come on, man. Even Fabolous wouldn’t say some shit like that.”
But Drake’s criticism didn’t stop there. A 45-year-old Jay-Z—fresh off a Samsung software update disguised as an album—also caught a quick stray: “It’s like Hov can’t drop bars these days without at least four art references.”
For years, Drake’s career was defined by these inane, generational cold wars. He was an avatar of youth, full of piss and Canadian vinegar. He’d rather die than be out of touch, always a conduit to a new and untapped cultural wave. No regional act was too small, no patois too troublesome to replicate. He saw everything, wanted you to believe he worked harder than anyone, and wasn’t afraid to set the record straight on the results. His peers and their raps weren’t just worthy of ridicule (e.g., Pusha T, Diddy, Common, Ludacris)—they were the past. The Boy was the present and future.
Fast-forward nine years, and Drake is now the same age Kanye was when he rhymed “D-League” and “Swaghili.” The very things that hobbled his idols and dulled their raps—time, fatherhood, diversified portfolios—are no longer distant concerns. He’s rhyming “Yugoslavian” with “checks-owed-slovakian” while his son is all up in the video like ’90s Puff, proving artistic rigor isn’t self-sustaining or immune to time.
For All the Dogs, Drake’s 14th project in 14 years, sounds like a haggard gasp of impending, middle-aged exhaustion. To be clear, Drake being on the verge of 37 isn’t his problem. It’s his stature and the middling creative returns that happen when you operate at such a massive scale.
In 2023, Drake has more in common with an embattled CEO like Bob Iger than he has in common with Lil Yachty. He’s the head of a multimillion-dollar enterprise saddled with the type of bloat that comes with having too many stakeholders. A global, intergenerational, multi-genre fan base is rarely where artistic ambition thrives. It’s hard to stay adventurous and nimble when your competitors are the Beatles and not Meek Mill. It’s even harder to be the arbiter of youth when you’ve become the system.
For half a decade, Drake albums have struggled to rise to the level of art or semi-coherence. Since the blog rap days, he’s bristled at the confines of the format and the diminishing returns of being an “album artist” in the 21st century. His most critically acclaimed and adored works are often distinguished as “mixtapes” or “playlists” (e.g., So Far Gone, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, More Life). The good albums (i.e., Take Care and Nothing Was the Same) are known just as much for the brilliant songs they left off as the ones that made it to the final tracklist. Since 2016’s Views, streaming ubiquity has taken precedence over everything else. Making an artistically satisfying body of work is vague; Spotify and Apple Music numbers aren’t.
Thus, For All the Dogs’ only unifying characteristic is Drake. There’s no narrative, conceptual, or sonic through line. Despite Drake’s promise that FATD would be a return to “the old Drake,” the album unfolds like it was made by an artist unsure of what made him unique in the first place. Despite Lil Yachty’s quasi–executive producer role—he has five production credits, almost tied with chief collaborator Noah “40” Shebib—the album is amorphous and anonymous. At 26, Yachty belongs to the exact demographic weaned on the Canadian’s vision of Instagram-infused narcissism. He should be plenty capable of pointing his wayward collaborator in the right direction, yet the recovering “King of the Teens” comes off as another enabler.
In the past, Drake was a neurotic music student, endearingly desperate to show his homework. You could tell what musical region caught his fancy: Memphis, the U.K., Jamaica. It wasn’t enough to relegate DJ Screw to an interlude, he’d build entire songs around his admiration for a specific locale’s sound and how it informed his own. There was specificity and lineage to his R&B ballads. You could trace how Aaliyah’s conversational, diaristic vocal delivery helped build his own vision of half-sung R&B on songs like “Marvins Room.” If there was a sample to mine, it wasn’t enough for the flip to be known (think Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like” or Frank Ocean’s “Wise Man”); it had to be something to which Drake could add a new texture and understanding. What his albums often lacked in substance, they made up for in atmosphere.
By comparison, Drake sounds disjointed and meandering on For All the Dogs. Chemistry is often an afterthought. At his peak, there was a symbiotic relationship between Drake’s primary collaborators—Lil Wayne, Partynextdoor, Rick Ross, Rihanna. In contrast, the majority of the features on FATD operate as surefire streaming bets (J. Cole, SZA, Bad Bunny) or “How do you do, fellow kids” olive branches (Teezo Touchdown, Yeat, Sexy Redd).
On “First Person Shooter,” Cole launches into the song like he’s battle rapping at 97 Scribble Jam, while Drake lists every woman in his contact list in a cartoonish menace that’s more McGruff the Crime Dog than DMX. Teezo Touchdown’s shaky, lovelorn croon on “Amen” is perfectly fine in a vacuum, but Drake’s disaffected tone renders it inert and cloying. The album’s two SZA songs are hampered by a similar problem, despite both artists sharing similar strengths (lyrical wunderkinds, vibe setters) and weaknesses (vocal range and dexterity). The two biggest R&B artists of their era should be able to conjure a sense of longing, regret, or passion. Instead, “Slime You Out” relegates each artist to their corners, with SZA filling an empty Pro Tools slot instead of interacting with Drake at any point on the song.
If there’s any spiritual core to FATD, it’s all-consuming bitterness. Yes, Drake has always been bitter. But on his latest, the Boy takes it to loathsome extremes that derail otherwise good songs. Predictably, the antagonists fueling Drake’s ire haven’t changed.
Drake takes his “He-Man, Woman-Haters” shtick to its misogynistic extreme on “Fear of Heights,” a thinly veiled screed most fans have deduced is about Rihanna. The song starts with Drake pondering why the world still thinks he’s hung up on an unnamed ex. So, to prove he’s unbothered, we’re inundated with boorish lines that have the interiority of a barn owl. “Sex was average with you,” he raps. “I had way badder bitches than you.” He finishes by taunting the Rihanna figure by claiming her man probably takes her to Antigua, which disregards the fact that the Fenty mogul is a billionaire and Drake is not—so affordable vacations are the least of her concerns.
On “Calling for You,” Drake raps over the type of sprawling, gothic beats that became his calling card. The Fridayy sample that anchors the song is peak Drake-core, so indebted to So Far Gone and Take Care it could’ve been a loosie left on the cutting-room floor. And yet halfway through the song, we’re treated to an insufferable 90-second skit about a woman dissatisfied with flying economy and jerk chicken. If you’re thinking, “What does this have to do with Drake?” well, it’s most likely a convoluted Pusha T diss based on his American Airlines tweets—a.k.a., nonsense shit.
Meanwhile, Drake’s worst missteps on the album are Pop Crave tweets disguised as bars. Why do I need to know that your Toronto goons will send a finger to my mom if I dare joke about your friendship with Millie Bobby Brown?
But what seems to bother Drake most are the things his historic success can’t buy him. He wants 21-year-olds with “one-of-one” bodies, but bristles at the idea that these same women care more about his wealth than his personality. His competition has less hits, capital, and frequent-flier miles than him, and still he struggles to comprehend why these things aren’t building blocks for lifelong romantic bonds.
Drake’s incessant need for respect and fealty has derailed more songs and albums going back as far as 2018’s Scorpion. His 2023 squabbles with various members of the media (Elliott Wilson, Charlamagne tha God, Bobbi Althoff) have gotten longer traction than any song he’s put out. The most recent example arrives courtesy of Joe Budden.
Last Saturday, clips of Budden mercilessly roasting For All the Dogs began circulating. The now-viral moments showcased Joe’s flair for saying the quiet part in the most incendiary and hyperbolic terms:
“You are 36. Your birthday is in 20 days. I Googled that, too. You’re going to be 37 years old.”
“Stop fucking these 25-year-olds.”
“I don’t give a fuck about you and Kai Cenat. Go find some niggas your fucking age.”
Predictably, Drake took the bait on this mostly one-sided, nearly decade-long beef, because nothing says you’re happy with the reception of your new album like a 248-word Instagram paragraph addressed to Joe Budden. In Drake’s blog-length response, he called Budden the “poster child of frustration and surrendering,” imploring all the artists out there to not “let these opinions affect your mindset.” The message would likely hold more weight if Drake didn’t imply that Esperanza Spalding—a jazz musician who won 2011’s Best New Artist Grammy over him—was irrelevant because she failed to reach his commercial heights.
So yes, as of this writing, one of the biggest pop stars in the world remains locked in a scorched-earth campaign against a podcaster. There’ve been IG poems, jokes about Best Buy microphones, and stories devoted to dunking on podcast engineers. A man worth $250 million resorted to digging up negative posts from the 2011 HNHH comment section for Take Care to bolster his point.
Drake has no incentive to change or mature; very few millionaires do. No amount of middling reviews or Budden barbs will blunt his momentum. If projections hold, FATD will sell less than Views or Scorpion—450,000 versus 852,000 and 732,000, respectively—but still more than anything else in its realm. It will go no. 1 and spawn top-10 hits. The streams will be astronomical by any metric besides Drake’s own. Other than Drake’s version of 4:44 being a bad idea in the macro, in the micro, there’s enough data to support the reality that very few people would want that shit. The last time he took a creative risk—last year’s tight, quasi-house record Honestly, Nevermind—the reception was lukewarm to outright hostile. Drake has a dozen no. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and I’ll let you guess how many of them are introspective or ambitiously experimental.
Being a consumer of late-era Drake is an exercise in exhaustion. He wants the respect bestowed on the greats, but the grace and leeway afforded to emotionally stunted underdogs. The “old Drake” couldn’t return even if he wanted to, not when stasis is this lucrative.