Drake
More Life

Drake is a Canadian single who always seems to be in a lousy mood, but somehow manages to get into a relationship 8 times a week and then takes advantage of it to write dramatic lyrics about his turbulent Tinder experiences. Yet, Drake is also someone who has the courage to make mistakes and move on, without worrying too much about criticism.

In 2009, I was naive, and the only vaguely rap/RnB thing I might have heard was perhaps Estelle's "American Boy." But in Toronto, the former actor from the (terrible) TV series Degrassi, Aubrey Graham, was beginning to create the prototype of his music and persona. He didn’t come from the ghetto, wasn’t a real gangsta, and didn’t use the female figure just to show off to his friends, but with a vocoder and a sugary production and a hybrid of rap and RnB, he finally came out with Thank Me Later.

That album is rightly buried in the young and naive era of 2009-2010, and over the years, Drake has undergone a musical metamorphosis: somewhat of an "outsider" in the rap game regarding content and language, some innovation (the spread of singing in rap, for better or worse, is partly his doing), and a stunning production, with slow and at times nearly "ambient" rhythms. At the same time, Drake racks up numbers, with a billion views for Hotline Bling.

With a couple of solid projects under his belt, now comes More Life, not a true album nor a mixtape, but a "musical playlist of your life" as he calls it himself. And indeed, unlike VIEWS, More Life is a more kaleidoscopic project and less heavy compared to its predecessor, which suffered from excessive length and some not-so-brilliant tracks. Here, instead, we have a fine array of sounds and styles that encompass Drake's entire musical journey: it starts with rap and ends with rap, but in between, there’s a lot of fine RnB, pop, and many dancehall and trap sounds already experimented with in the previous release, plus the ethereal and ambient style of producer Noah "40" Shebib. Here and there are some great guest appearances that raise the overall quality bar, like Quavo from Migos, Kanye West, and Travis Scott... definitely better than the somewhat lacking features of the previous project.

Drake's merit is in not creating too much confusion (as happened with Kanye West's album), but all 22 tracks are nevertheless homogeneous and fluid. Yes, we are still talking about 22 tracks but as already mentioned, this isn’t a real album but a semi-mixtape. Plus, it’s available for free on Spotify! (You can find it here.)