I have no brief with Drake. I'm led to understand he's like Bizarro Lady Gaga: Like hers, his first album Thank Me Later (ha!) was recorded under the largely fictional conceit that he was already a huge star, but the Bizarro element is that in his case his reaction was to complain about fame's dark side and downside rather than dress and act like a post-millennial Ziggy Stardust. That sounds funny to me, but I'm not sure if I'm laughing with him, if you know what I mean. As for his music, Thank Me Later's first two singles rely on dreary but relentless vocal hooks of the sort you hear without trying, without even wanting to. In today's pop climate, that's wisdom: If you want people to remember your music from the 10-second snippet they hear flipping around the radio or playing on someone's cellphone, making it annoying is at least as effective as making it catchy. (He does get off one of the better lines in the wonderfully goofy "BedRock," however. "I thought I recognized her...")

But here's the thing: "Karaoke" is the main reason I know any of that stuff. After discovering it through the mighty Fluxblog--well, it's the sort of song that makes you hit up the artist's wikipedia page. Drake performs this paean to a relationship that ended when his incipient stardom became too much for his beloved to bear against a loping drum beat and gently cooing synths (courtesy of Francis Starlite), his sung vocals echoing around and through them, his rap bouncing insistently up and down on the beat. The overall effect is to carve out a vulnerable, twilit space for his autobiographically direct lyrics. It could have seemed like the sociopathic emotional exhibitionism of reality TV or the dull narcissism of a bad autobio comic (to swipe Fluxblog's comparisons), but instead it comes across like a quiet late-night conversation, when you're too tired to be anything but totally honest.

In fact it reminds me of nothing so much as late-'90s Everything But the Girl, who pretty much perfected that blend of cool electronica and frank small-hours desire and regret. Listen to a track like "Good Cop Bad Cop" or "Before Today": What's striking is the exhausted need in Tracey Thorn's voice, buttressed by blue Ben Watt production that sends the subliminal message "It's okay, you can say this, I can hear this." What I got from EBTG is what I get from "Karaoke," right down to Drake's Thorn-ian use of evocative everyday imagery ("You put the tea in the kettle and light it / Put your hand on the metal and feel it / But do you even feel it?") and the way his description of his plight can be interpreted as a defense of and an attack on both involved parties ("I was only trying to get ahead, but the spotlight made you nervous"). My best guess is that the side of Drake that will become inescapable this year won't be this side, but I'm happy to have found it at all.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)