The only featured guest rapper on Views was Future, which, after WATTBA, was hardly exciting. Songs like “Hype” and “Pop Style” were misguided concessions to his fanbase, and they play as such, all “Chaining Tatum” bars and zero introspection. I was having trouble trying to make rap music where I was able to peel back the layers.” “I was an angry yute when I was writing Views,” Drake admits on the album’s confessional closer “Do Not Disturb.” He went further in his recent interview with DJ Semtex, explaining that the success of “Back to Back” wasn’t without consequences: “To be completely honest with you I was having trouble figuring myself out in rap.I was a very defensive individual just coming off the situations that I’d come off of. As for the rapping? The best it’s been since summer 2014 through If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. But where “One Dance” sounded stitched together from somewhat unwieldy parts tailor made with Dubai rooftop parties in mind, "Get It Together" is basically a cover of a song Drake really likes (remember OVO Sound Radio episode 1?) and feels all the more finely crafted and seamless for it. But the references to Aubrey’s back catalog run deeper, from the fakeout beat switch on “Since Way Back” that evokes Thank Me Later’s “Shut It Down” to shades of the “Cece’s Interlude” college-lust fanfic that colors “Teenage Fever.” The #SummerFridays dancehall vibe that gave Views its high points gets a suite here, from tracks three to seven (excluding “Jorja”). The recirculation of Stevie Wonder’s mournful harmonica from Take Care’s “Doing It Wrong” for “Jorga’s Interlude” is the most obvious. This entire project can be understood as one long examination of the critical response to Views. It’s more of a photonegative of that project, bright and light where the other was dim and dark, relaxed where the other grasped too tightly for masterpiece status.
Who else would be so hilariously arrogant to answer complaints of a bloated album with a successor that’s just as long? More Life is a rebuke of everything that was wrong with Views, a revival of everything that was missing last time around-and, smartly, one that doesn’t try to erase it from history. Faced with the challenge of critically reasserting himself as the best out, he rose up. Luckily for Drake, the action is the juice.
Problematic, for an artist whose appeal is built on over-sharing, commiserating, and relating.
Aside from the jaded disdain of “9,” or the self-aware but shameless pettiness on display in “Redemption,” Views sounded vacant, like a fighter jet aimed at the highest reaches of the atmosphere, only Drake ejected before it reached its destination, leaving us to contemplate a distant empty vessel. The king best not miss, and he certainly cannot disappear for a sabbatical after releasing lifeless, autopilot Sunken Place music-which is exactly what we got last year. When you angle to be known as “top five but really top two, and not two,” the work you put forth is judged and criticized all the more stringently. But, as Ricky Rozay put it so poetically once upon a time, “You wanna be the hottest but that shit be complicated.” He tells us plainly on the final lines of his new album, er playlist-let’s just call it a studio project- More Life. I’ve said it, you’ve said it, and the 6 God, ever the silent, omnipresent internet peruser, heard us.