Drake's Fair Trade
Certified Lover Boy packages tried-and-true Drake sounds beneath a provocative front, pursuing safe commercialism in place of creative risk.
[Note: Review updated March 2022 to better address long-term impact of album]
As a mixed race, Canadian-born Jew from a middle-class upbringing, Drake never matched the typical profile of a rapper, let alone one who would go on to harness an unmatched influence on hip-hop over the past decade. Instead, he would have to craft an entirely new personality, tailor-made for the Internet age and the eminent role social media plays in how we consume content.
The Toronto native found success toward the end of the 2000s through a string of releases that introduced him as a highly sensitive, introspective figure, drawing a sharp contrast with the street-hustling “gangsta rappers” that dominated hip-hop in the 90s. Over the next few years, his emotionally bare content—centered on relationship dynamics familiar to Millennials—would transform him into a pop culture icon, culminating in “Drake jokes” and still-running “Hotline Bling” memes.
Yet Drake was always an unusual fixation for an Internet culture that supposedly prizes authenticity. In recent years, he has increasingly been described by observers as “calculated”; his lyrics reveal an anxious, overly self-aware persona, and his every move—from hitting dorky dance moves while crooning over a past lover to packing music videos with staged embarrassments—appears engineered to stay buzzy. As Vice puts it, “Drake makes himself a trending topic effortlessly, just by understanding exactly what fits the image of him as a meme. Drake knows what he’s doing.”
It seems inevitable then, that Drake’s carefully strategized public image would face a blunt reality check. In 2018, longtime rival Pusha T released “The Story of Adidon,” a Kanye West-produced diss track that charged Drake with fathering an illegitimate child and denying him out of shame and selfishness1 (“You are hiding a child, let that boy come home / Deadbeat mothafucka playin’ border patrol”). For once, it seemed the ubiquitous, tell-all soul-barer had nothing to say, three years after trouncing Meek Mill over a ghostwriting dispute. He would go on to wrestle with the Pusha controversy in that year’s Scorpion, to the dissatisfaction of fans and critics alike.
On its face, Certified Lover Boy finds Drake trying to embrace his newfound reputation as an accidental father—with all the unsubtlety that accompanies leaning too hard into the joke to save face. 12 pregnant woman emojis grace the cover art, triggering the familiar meme cycle. The rapper has had a heart shaved into his hair since last summer, visibly certifying his lover boy-ness. Oh, and if you didn’t know he has a son, you will, because he’ll remind you every few songs. Drake has gone from “hiding a kid from the world” (or vice versa, whatever) to holding him up for the world to see, privacy be damned apparently.
It’s a mild surprise, then, that the music itself barely dabbles in the lighthearted spirit suggested by the album concept; instead, it relies on the self-seriousness we’ve come to expect from Drake since 2016’s Views. More than anything, CLB is a dizzying experience, twisting and turning between songs of vastly different style (and caliber) without the cohesive texture that grounded his formative projects.
Drake likes to begin and end his albums with midtempo, single verse (“no hook”) tracks that provide a window into his general state of mind2, and CLB is no different. By now, you’ve just about heard it all: the shoutouts to OVO labelmates, jabs at sworn enemies, and pointed reminders of his sustained success in the rap game. But in the closing lines of the intro, “Champagne Poetry,” he headfakes toward a new direction, one that leaves behind the Pusha and Kanye bitterness. “This the part where I don't ever say ‘Pardon me’ anymore / This the part where imma find a new part of me to explore,” Drake booms over a soul sample reminiscent of Selma’s “Prison Song.” The subsequent “Papi’s Home” boasts a vibrant beat and self-assured humor (“Supermodels and they all sexy / Lock the door to the bathroom ‘cause they doin’ something that is not Pepsi”). For a moment, you might even suspect we have a classic album on our hands.
Then you get to “Girls Want Girls,” which plays like a parody of a dreary Drake song. The soulless “Life is Good” knockoff beat, sleepy delivery, and nauseating, headline-fishing hook (unfit of being published) make it tempting to stop listening to the album altogether. If you manage to stick around, you’ll find that the following two tracks are mostly phoned in. The CLB experience picks up with a pair of singles, “Fair Trade” and “Way 2 Sexy,” but doesn’t really hit a compelling stretch until the album’s midpoint, when the pain of “Pipe Down” melts into the solemn “Yebba’s Heartbreak” and resurrects in the “No Friends in the Industry.” At last, the listener feels moved enough to pay close attention.
While the jarring track sequence is an anomaly among Drake’s discography, the lyrical focus is anything but. Women reprise their well-tread role as sources of simultaneous desire and distrust, garnering sung pleas in one verse and accusatory bars in the next. The Certified Lover Boy himself has no problem moving on from one girl to her friend, as he admits on “Get Along Better,” yet chides a lover for her body count on “In The Bible” as he defends his own—a double standard from the artist that is too familiar by now to even register offense. On “Fair Trade,” Drake copes with the disloyalty of unnamed industry associates (cough cough): “I’ve been losing friends and finding peace / But honestly, that sounds like a fair trade to me,” he insists over an aqueous trap beat with a hook vaguely diaristic enough to resonate with just about anyone, giving CLB the closest thing to a “God’s Plan”-style joint. There’s a palpable, curiously sympathetic bitterness when he reminds us of the failed attempts to sabotage his career and places the ball back in his enemies’ court:
And the dirt that they threw on my name
Turned to soil and I grew up out it
Time for y'all to figure out what y'all gon' do about it
Not content with “finding peace,” Drake escalates the swipes against Team Kanye into a full-out battle cry, giving rise to one of the rare dramatic moments on the record. “No Friends in the Industry” unearths the hyped up Drizzy of his 2015 mixtape days to deliver an unmitigated banger, with glorious results3; you’ll do a double take at the whispered flow he brandishes in the first verse. “7am on Bridle Path” dusts off his famed pen game for a surgical approach to the recent flare-up between the two camps; with it, he notches another solid installment in the fan-favorite AM/PM series:
You know the fourth level of jealousy is called media
Isn't that an ironic revelation?
Give that address to your driver, make it your destination
'Stead of just a post out of desperation
A handful of additional highlights accumulate on Certified Lover Boy, particularly as one affords the album multiple listens. “Way 2 Sexy” basks in a hilarious outlandishness and a dazzling synth-heavy rage beat, making it the kind of nicely toxic workout anthem you might bump against your better instincts. The two-part “N 2 Deep” has a futuristic sound enveloping Drake’s R&B odes and Future’s trap flow, as if the two recorded the collaboration in outer space. And the only flashes of inventiveness occur when Drake taps into never-before-seen ways of channeling pain: “How much I gotta pen for you to pipe down? / How deep I gotta dig for you to pipe down?” he interrogates one woman, with a stinging inflection that could just as easily be redirected toward his consistent band of haters within hip-hop—despite proving himself time and time again, is there nothing he can do to quiet them? “Baby blue, but you are not a baby, I know, shawty,” he croons on “TSU,” the seemingly innocuous lyrics cutting against unexplained sorrow.
“We’ve come to expect two things from any Drake project: iconic, smash hit singles that become undeniable events in contemporary music, and a general quality as a cultural barometer, reflecting and re-adapting generational concerns into fresh, relatable soundbites.”
It’s a shame then, that the feature-film-length album is bogged down by filler and forced imitations of the Drake experience. Tried-and-true melodies creep up on you at multiple points4, alongside entire tracks whose sole purpose is to try and revive an “old Drake” era. Take “Fountains,” the inferior Afrobeat offspring of “One Dance” and “Signs” from the Views days. Or “You Only Live Twice,” a clearly telegraphed mashup between “Lord Knows” and “The Motto” off of Take Care5. Intentional fanservice, perhaps—the kind hinted at in CLB’s teaser trailer—but more likely the product of the 34-year-old’s stifled creativity. Certified Lover Boy is the first Drake album that lives not just dwarfed by, but wholly in deference to its forerunners.
For all its flaws as a bleak melodrama, at least Scorpion was replete with arresting moments, from the gripping guitar loop of “Mob Ties” to the defiant chorus of “8 Out of 10.” Compare “March 14,” a fitting conclusion to the saga of Scorpion, with “The Remorse,” a meandering outro to CLB that makes you realize you’re no longer invested in the story of Drake (let alone his friends; who the hell are Chubbs and Mark?) Without drama at its core, there’s too little to propel CLB as an ambitious endeavor, let alone indicate that Drake should be regarded highly at all as an inspired artist—the most damning evidence to date of the “arrested development” charge that has dogged him since Views. And while his efforts have yielded uneven results in the past, we’ve come to expect two things that always put any Drake project over the top: iconic, smash hit singles that become undeniable events in contemporary music, and a general quality as a cultural barometer, reflecting and re-adapting generational concerns into fresh, relatable soundbites. None of those things happen here. An unfair bar, to be sure, but one that Drake has set and surpassed time and time again over his career.
Between its meme-hungry cover art, at times shamelessly provocative content, and overt derivation from earlier works, Certified Lover Boy pursues safe commercialism ahead of creative risk: “Career going great but the rest of me is fading slowly” may very well be the most honest bar on the whole record. But to Drake—who has achieved a level of musical success for the history books, far beyond anyone’s wildest expectations—that just might sound like a fair trade to him.
Recommended Listens
A more compact, focused, and better sequenced version of the album is below, also available as a Spotify playlist.
Papi’s Home
Way 2 Sexy ft. Future and Young Thug
N 2 Deep ft. Future
Get Along Better ft. Ty Dolla $ign
Fair Trade ft. Travis Scott
F*****g Fans
Pipe Down
Race My Mind
Yebba’s Heartbreak ft. Yebba
No Friends in the Industry
Knife Talk ft. 21 Savage and Project Pat
7am on Bridle Path
Fountains ft. Tems
You Only Live Twice ft. Lil Wayne and Rick Ross
Notable Lyrics
Champagne Poetry
Under a picture lives some of the greatest quotes from me
Under me I see all the people that claim they over meMy soulmate is somewhere out in the world just waiting on me
Fair Trade
Uno, dos, tres, in a race, they can't hold me
I got feelings for you, that's the thing about it, yeah
You know that it's somethin' when I sing about it, yeahMama used to be on disability but gave me this ability
And now she walkin with her head high and her back straight
Pipe Down
You could never tell nobody that you held me down
If it was ride or die then you should've been dead right now
No Friends in the Industry
And I'm like Sha'Carri, smoke 'em on and off the track
And you love that hoe, but me, I put her on her back
You get Drizzy on a track, he'll put you on the map
Oh, it's like that? Hell yeah it's like thatWhen I signed my first deal, that shit came through a fax
That should let you know how long I been out here runnin' lapsAlready disrespecting, something I ain't tolerating
You n****s fuck with me, I give 'em motivation
And your circle shrinkin', see some boys escapin'
Rest of them is guilty by association
7am on Bridle Path
People that could've stayed on the team
They played in-between
Clouds is hanging over you now, 'cause I'm reigning supreme
Some of these n****s say what they mean, it ain't what it seems
Had to pull my n****s out the mud like I'm trainin' Marines
You Only Live Twice
Bullet wounds don't be covered by ObamaCare
Your funeral was way too soon, that's if your mama there
- Rick RossCatalog is immaculate
Still runnin' the game, don't ask me about the practice
Ho, you go on vacation, don't ask me about relaxin'
Not sure if you know but I'm actually Michael Jackson
The man I see in the mirror is actually goin' platinum
F*****g Fans
You was at the crib reading stories that they sent you
Most of that was bullshit but some of it I did do
Hard for me to justify the women I was into
Especially when the whole entire world wished they had you
Then I locked the door that night in Vegas 'cause I had to
Then I had a kid even though I never planned to
I cannot imagine when your girls gave you that news
Among other things. Pusha taunts Drake’s “lightskin” status, his parents failed marriage, and his producer’s multiple sclerosis. Ouch!
Take Care: “Over My Dead Body” and “The Ride”
Nothing Was the Same: “Tuscan Leather”
Views: “Views”
Scorpion: “Survival” and “March 14”
You’ll almost forget that this feud really has no more substantive turns to take.
A singsongy component of “Elevate” (Scorpion) is interpolated on “N 2 Deep” (CLB), later resurfacing on “F*****g Fans” in a manner that bears resemblance to “Child’s Play” (Views). A catchy flow, to be sure, but twice on one album is pushing it a bit!
Also, “Race My Mind” is definitely a second attempt at Take Care’s famous “Marvin’s Room,” identified by its desperate theme and sung-rap structure. And “No Friends,” as mentioned previously, directly borrows the style of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. The list could go on.
Drake is Jewish??! Also, pregnant emoji's and amongsus is extremely cursed.