Pitchfork writer Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, weird tweets, fashion trends—and anything else that catches his attention.
If someone released 100 gigabytes of videos and images of you, how much of it would be embarrassing or awkward or goofy or uncomfortable? For me, at least 75%, and I’m probably low balling. At minimum, there would be footage of me in college doing some sloppy ass shit while the Chainsmokers are on in the background. Not Drake. This week, out of boredom, or maybe as a way to add some nostalgia-laced distance from being accused of pedophilia on the most overplayed song of the summer, he uploaded 100 gigs of data composed of three OK songs, a bottomless well of behind-the-scenes material from studio sessions and concerts going back to the Take Care days, unused album artwork, and B-roll of him chopping it up with his friends in exotic locations. In pretty much all of the bite-sized snippets, he is extremely cool, chill, funny, and thoughtful.
That’s right. 100 gigabytes of Drake being a nice dude that everyone loves hanging around who is also in love with his art. He smokes hookah and drinks wine and cracks jokes. Studio nights are intimate and nearly spiritual. Women aren’t really around, but when they are—like during the portion filmed at the Houston strip club Area 29—they’re smiling.
That’s not all. He leads a prayer session. Does cute dad stuff. Steph Curry joins him for a night of ping pong and basketball that mirrors a wholesome childhood sleepover. On an island somewhere, while getting into the back of an SUV, he moves his security guard aside so that he can gas up a local boy who’s trying to impress a girl. He’s humble in his interactions with artists in his orbit: showing love to French Montana and Slick Rick during an impromptu, iced-out photoshoot; giving glowing praise to Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” verse at a show in New York while Virgil Abloh and Luka Sabbat are DJing; big upping Lil Yachty’s “Poland” by saying, “Nobody is that free of a thinker.” He dances to Drakeo the Ruler. Sits in a candlelit room and listens to soul music (with that dumbass heart from his Certified Lover Boy era shaved into his buzz cut). He has an easy breezy day on a grass soccer pitch drinking and taking cracks at penalty shots with longtime Chelsea left-back Ashley Cole. (Of course, Drake doesn’t miss.) He has meandering conversations with 40 and Boi-1da, the only real takeaway being that these guys are genuine friends with a shared dedication to their craft.
I had some fun clicking through the archives, but I also noticed that these are the exact sort of clips a politician might leak of themselves after they were caught muttering a racist remark or banging their assistant. The footage is presented as a raw hard drive dump, but in reality it’s as curated and manicured as any other self-made popstar documentary, formulated to reaffirm the loyalty of diehard fans. Surprisingly, there are no videos of Drake kissing babies and volunteering at a homeless shelter on the weekends.
Drake became a star because of his vulnerability and goofiness. It felt like you knew him even if you actually didn’t. Sure, he was a lead on a Canadian teen soap opera, but at his core, he was a rap nerd as plugged into the blogs and music forums as anyone. “Marvin’s Room” isn’t the definitive Drake song because the singing is amazing, but because it’s melodramatic and more insane than he probably even realized. The flaws are Drake; the uncoolness is Drake. For an artist who started out so embarrassingly transparent, looking back at it all with censors just feels wrong.
Especially in the aftermath, or rather intermission, of Drake’s beef with Kendrick Lamar. Even with Lil Yachty out there running a PR campaign for Drake, getting off bullshit like, “He didn’t give a fuck…he was genuinely unfazed,” we know that “The Heart Pt 6” was not made by an unbothered man, living like a bluesman touring with his boys and breaking hearts along the way (sort of the plot for the 1980 Willie Nelson movie Honeysuckle Rose). He’s obsessed with his image and status, and with staving off the inevitable fall-off that comes for every rapper eventually. His fear of losing the top spot is what fuels him—sometimes for the better (his prolificness) and sometimes for the worse (have you heard For All the Dogs?). The footage portrays Drake’s drive with the uplifting tinge of a sports movie, as you would expect.
There is one clip that shifts the tone slightly. It’s an almost 10-minute interview with Drake’s longtime engineer OVO Noel, from sometime before CLB (I’m ready to reassess CLB at any time, by the way), in Barbados. As the trees sway in the background, the interviewer asks Noel about Drake, “How do you think he would handle not being number one?”
“That’s an odd question,” Noel responds, tightening up. Then, he hesitates. For a moment, it seems like he might be genuinely imagining a version of Drake brought back down to Earth. But after the interviewer presses again, Noel goes back to tiptoeing, offering meaningless platitudes about using it as motivation. Right there, I knew this whole hard drive dump was nothing more than 100 fucking gigabytes of fan-service.
Keep me far away from M. Night Shyamalan’s Spotify playlists
There are a lot of choices that don’t work in the new big, dumb M. Night Shyamalan serial killer thriller Trap, especially the music-related ones. Among them are casting his daughter Saleka Shyamalan as the popstar Lady Raven. Not only is about a quarter of the movie forcing us to listen to her knockoff Billie Eilish balladry, but when the flick turns into a face-off between her and the killer (Josh Hartnett as The Butcher), she has absolutely no juice. (I would buy the theory that Lady Raven talking like a Disney-trained cyborg is commentary on the hollowness of pop stars if it was anyone in the role but his daughter.) There’s also Kid Cudi’s The Thinker, Lady Raven’s loudmouthed musical collaborator with the long blonde hair of Legolas, who doesn’t really do much—that said, I’d still put the role a tier above Man on the Moon 3: The Chosen.
What I’m most fixated on, though, is the role of Parker Wayne, the male pop-rap heartthrob who makes all the teenage girls lose their minds like he’s the newest Tiger Beat cover star. That guy is played by Russ. Yes, Russ. M. Night even tries to sexy him up by making him lose a few buttons on his shirt and give Mysterious Bad Boy eyes to the camera. It is the most egregious part of a movie full of egregious parts because it is Russ, who I just can’t take seriously. But it does make sense that M. Night would be in the bag for Russ, a real thinking man’s rapper where the “thinking” isn’t ever as interesting as it seems. I’ll be on the lookout for Trap 2: No Way Out where Lady Raven is dating Cordae.
Neednoname and SME Taxfree: “Late September”
When I first heard Houston’s Neednoname, I thought he sounded like Diet Veeze. To be fair, I still believe that. But there are much worse things than being a B-version of the guy who made Ganger. It helps that he’s got a sharp ear for laid-back beats to go with his rush of slurred punchlines. On “Late September,” the beat feels like you’re at a debutante ball where everyone is drinking out of styrofoam cups, and Neednoname’s bars have some zip to them (even if Veeze’s would be funnier). I like “Late September” a lot, and it doesn’t hurt that there’s a slick guest verse from SME Taxfree, the Milwaukee star who is on a hell of a mixtape run right now. Now that’s a rapper who won’t have you daydreaming about anyone else.
Guapo: “Self”
New Jazz’s interstellar SoundCloud funk. The extreme pitch-shifting of “Free Lil Onion.” Screw tapes. “Flatbed Freestyle.” TisaKorean’s “Got Me Trippin.” The druggiest songs on Loe Shimmy’s Zombieland 2. That’s the mini-moodboard that comes to mind when I listen to Guapo’s “Self.” In the last several months, Guapo has landed on a groovy sound with lots of vocal effects that feel both trendy and indebted to his Houston roots. Here, high- and low-pitched tweaks spice up otherwise basic raps (credit to “Yo’ jewelry came from Temu,” though) because of how they layer on top of one another. If the beat weren’t so relaxed, Guapo would sound possessed—and all of this vocal tinkering is done without ever losing his wobbly Texas drawl.
