Jot down a list of the most well-known and respected rappers currently on the musical scene, and you’ve got Eminem, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Kid Cudi, and Kendrick Lamar. However, not one of them has been so uncannily accessible for mainstream pop radio as the Canadian pop-rapper Drake, who released Views in 2016.
The first thing that’s immediately noticable about this album isn’t the semi-decent production standards, or even the big-name guest stars that occaisonally show up. It’s the boring, repetitive song formulas that the album consistently repeats through its entire 80-minute running time. Sometimes Drake sings, sometimes he raps, and sometimes he even combines both in a single song, but that’s about as creative as he gets here. Most of the time, he’s just melodramatically whining about either his poor-little-rich-kid life or the snooty girlfriends who keep dumping him over a boring pop-trap beat that leaves eyes drooping in a matter of minutes.
Luckily, there are some songs that engage, mainly “Weston Road Flows”, the catchy mega-hit “One Dance”, “Child’s Play”, “Hotline Bling”, and the Rihanna collaboration “Too Good”, although even those are ultimately not enough to reedeem this dreary slog of an album.
