Music continued to get weird in 2015 and that was for the best. The mainstream pop landscape was full of sincere hitmakers like Drake and Carly Rae Jepsen, who topped the charts but didn’t sacrifice their identities or odder interests. And in the underground, genre continued to become more and more meaningless, as acts like Grimes […]
First I Made You Who You Are: What Drake’s Mopey Misogyny Says About Us as Consumers
Earlier this week I came across a disorienting essay: Tahira Hairston’s “Sorry, but Drake’s obsession with good girls is sexist.” It was strange to me not because I disagreed with the thesis — Drake’s music is sexist as an Etruscan pope — but because it was a subject that someone evidently felt required an entire […]
Locked Away in the 6: Drake and the Desperate Excellence of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late
In 2006, Kanye West appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a crown of thorns. Apart from its place in the narrative of Kanye as a famous person who does things that offend people, and the blasphemy that certainly made a lot of middle American grocery-store shoppers nervous as they perused the magazine aisle, […]