Honestly, Nevermind: 1 Week Later (Article)
What up one & all. Sky Bento here on the check in once again. Hope you & yours are doing well, drinking water, protecting your mental health, knowing the vibes and whatnot. Summer is officially underway! We had our first poetry night of the Summer last night, and Day Trill is literally tomorrow. This presents us with the opportunity to here Drake’s new album in a more proper setting. Like many people on the internet I was quick to get my opinions off - you can read them here. If you’re too lazy to read, what are you doing reading this? But nah, I’ll sum up my thoughts. It is a bad album. Not because of the music being bad, but because Drake himself was the least interesting part of his own album. I can’t help but feel like another artist could’ve made so much more of those beats, especially now that Beyoncé has released her own bop of a house record. But it’s been a week, so maybe my thoughts have changed? Follow me as I dig into some thoughts I’ve had since the record released.
As always, these are just my opinions and do not reflect the views of TDN as a staff, label, or as a m************ crew. Feel free to curcify me over on Twitter @plzsaythebento after you’ve finished reading, but alright let’s get into it.
So as I just mentioned, Beyoncé is giving us house joints now too. I wonder if there was some kind of Illuminati meeting where all the top artists played music for each other and decided to bring house back. Kanye West himself can’t be too far behind, since he’s toyed with house his whole career. Love or hate the album, I can’t help but feel like a widespread house revival upon it’s release was inevitable. I mean regardless of how successful Honestly, Nevermind turned out to be, it’s a Drake album and artists are naturally going to take notes on and incorporate whatever the biggest artist in the world does into their own music. Even more importantly, the commercialization of house does seem like less of a big shift in music and more like a natural progression the more you think about it.
It’s Summertime, and that’s when all the pop charts turn much more danceable. Music in general has steadily become more danceable over the past few years. Artists like Dua Lipa & Doja Cat (the new Drake) have incorporated major disco and retro dance music vibes into their own chart-topping hits. Tik Tok has made it so any song with a catchy enough part to dance to (or meme to) can catapult a record from virtual obscurity, into a hit your grandma will sing on the toilet because you forgot to buy her Depends and now she gotta actually get up and go potty again like us regular folk. Too bad she don’t have the hips to dance to it anymore. But the beauty of these simpler, more danceable tracks is that they can rely less and less on the actual artist and more on the beats and typical formulas. With the rise of artificial intelligence, we’re already starting to see songs completely generated by algorithms. House music with it’s 4-on-the-floor kick drums and simply syncopation are prime for this, as is the nostalgia wave that is always permeating music. With so many great 90’s pop, techno, and of course house records to imitate, it ain’t hard to tell how a shift toward a revival of more electronic music could cut costs both financially and creatively.
In response to criticism he received over the new album, Drake himself said we’d catch up with the sound of this album soon. He knew it would be polarizing. As an avid Ye fan, I’m sure he himself knows the power of being polarizing with your art. This is his first chance to actual do something polarizing as he has just worked out a new deal where he has more control than ever. He’s already Drake, investors already trust he will do serious numbers regardless because he will. So I do applaud Drake for actually taking the leap. And after seeing the way women react to this album on the dance floor sold me on the sound a bit more despite still thinking Drake could’ve came harder himself with this. But we do need polarizing albums like this to drop and shake things up, and we need to give them time to grow on us. Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red turned out to be very influential in 2021 despite being trashed left and right upon release.
Polarizing albums introduce us to sounds we may not be regularly experiencing and since we don’t know what to make of it, we lean toward dislike. I’m sure I’ll hear more joints from the album over the Summer in appropriate settings and gain new appreciation for them. I may even one day say that I like the album. That’s totally fine, we’re supposed to grow. Let’s normalize changing our opinions upon gaining new information and new experiences. If we had, Drake could’ve switched it up like this a long time ago and I think the music would’ve been even better then. But the albums that came out and influenced other artists happened exactly the way it did and brought us to this point. Moving forward, maybe Drake will try this again and do it better. Maybe Beyoncé’s full album is house music too. Maybe Doja tries it and really takes the crown from Drake. Maybe some new artist we’ve never heard of before takes notes on this Drake album and gives us the greatest album since Thriller. Who knows? All I know is this, this is not about learning to enjoy bad music or hearing it “outside” or anything.
It’s about letting art be art.