I’m
allergic to long albums. Upon seeing that Scorpion
was 25 tracks long, I almost broke into anaphylactic shock there and then.
Drake’s last album was 20 tracks long and my biggest complaint with that was that it was too long. How would I get
through this without falling into a coma?
Two
things pulled me through – the fact that I’ve liked a few Drake hits in the
past enough to tolerate him for two hours and the fact that Drake is now a
daddy and we all needed to hear him confront the topic. Celebrity scandal
usually isn’t my thing, but anyone who listened to that scathing diss
track from Pusha T knows that Drake needed to respond to the allegations that he was ‘hiding
a child’ – if he wanted to preserve the good guy persona he’d so willingly tried to prove in the video for ‘God’s Plan’, he needed to come clean about it.
And
Drake does just that on this album, saving it for the final track ‘March 14’,
which ends up being a truly deep insight into the life of a single dad
following reluctantly in the footsteps of his father: ‘but this champagne toast is short-lived/ I’ve got an empty crib in my
empty crib’. It’s the hip hop icon and human meme’s most personal and
moving song to date (the first time I almost cried at a Drake song. ALMOST) – but
it’s right at the end of the album, no doubt shoehorned in last minute, so that
we have to listen to the remaining 24 tracks of Drake drivel.
Admittedly,
this wasn’t supposed to be an album about fatherhood, and the rest of the
lyrical content is an improvement from Views,
which was largely him resenting women with a few corny bars thrown in. In fact,
there are some very personal tracks on Scorpion like ‘Jaded’ and ‘Emotionless’
that are practically cornball free. I even enjoyed Drake getting mean on ‘Nonstop’
as he spits ‘yeah I’m lightskinned, but I’m
still a dark n***a’.
It's great to see Drake confronting the topic of duality on this album, which seems fitting
for a double album. After all, the half-black/half-white, half-Catholic/half-Jewish,
Canadian-American dual citizen rapper-singer knows a thing or two about having a
mixed identity. It’s also interesting to see Drake divide the album into one
half of mainly rapping and one half of mainly singing. The album certainly has
a theme.
Sadly,
it’s musically dull as dishwater. The 25 tracks may delve into genres as diverse
as gospel and trap, but few of the songs actually have much direction. There
are few beat changes and very few hooks – as a result each song gets dull after
about 30 seconds. Only when Drake pulls out the more ambient and experimental beats
as on ‘Emotionless’ does he keep things engaging and that’s largely due to the
help of the personal lyrical content. Some of the guest vocalists are also able
to spice things up by adding new vocal tones – particularly Michael Jackson on ‘Don’t
Matter To Me’, who I wasn’t expecting to be resurrected for a Drake feature –
but most of the time its just Drake rapping or singing in the same tone,
showing us that it’s probably best that he continues to combine the two rather
than trying to focus solely on one.
Scorpion’s
marathon length hasn’t stopped it receiving more Spotify streams in a day than
any other record (although the excessive promotion on Spotify definitely helped,
as he appeared as the thumbnail of every playlist including totally inappropriate
playlists such as Great British Breakfast and Indie Argentina). What makes
Drake’s new album so streamable is perhaps the fact that it makes great
background music. The lack of hooks and beat changes make it the perfect album
for zoning out to. Only when the lyrics get ultra-personal does Drake pull the
listener in and I have my suspicions that most of these tracks were only thrown
in at the last minute anyway (ironic, as they're some of his best). It’s an album with a lot of promise, but
ultimately Drake’s biggest dud.
★★☆☆☆
★★☆☆☆
TRACK TASTER: