eMusic Review 0
Drake shot to the upper echelon of hip-hop fame by bypassing nearly every single rule of traditional cred-getting, and none of the ensuing jokes about his role as Wheelchair Jimmy on DeGrassi: The Next Generation or his own penchant for soft-batch hashtag-rap have knocked him back down. If anything, sophomore album Take Care actively doubles down on the things that make him so contentious among traditionalists — the emotional exposure, the singsong delivery (now manifested more often as straight-up R&B singing), the lyrical focus on relationships — but infuses them with a subtle dose of self-aware ambivalence.
He still acknowledges success — the first line on the album is “I think I killed everybody in the game last year, man” — while “Underground Kings” and “Crew Love” are human-scale acknowledgments that he can afford nice cars and expensive vacations. Yet he still carries himself as though his main concern is connecting with other people without letting status obscure his intent. Most of the people in question are women; they get romantically flattered (“Make Me Proud”), ruefully drunk-dialed (“Marvin’s Room”), anxiously reconciled with (“Take Care”) and coldly, then regretfully, dumped (the Stevie Wonder feature, “Doing it Wrong”).
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