The vocals are often just vampy flow experiments, but at their best these verses exhibit the weightless exhilaration of a technician at work. Music is the real joy for Drake, and If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late is best enjoyed as an exercise in the casual excellence of the artist as rhymer and purveyor of hooks. ("I ain’t rock my jewelry, and that’s on purpose/ Niggas want my spot and don’t deserve it.") Success creates as many problems as it solves. "Know Yourself" celebrates the thrill of mobbing through a city that’s his for the taking, but even in joy there’s a note of tension and the ever-present possibility of actual danger.
On "10 Bands" he’s holed up in a home studio for weeks pushing himself to create ("Drapes closed, I don’t know what time it is/ I’m still awake, I gotta shine this year"). The pre-fame queasiness of early Drake is now the loneliness of a distrustful despot. Instead we get a spectral late-night longing not unlike that of So Far Gone touchstones "Lust for Life" and "Successful". There’s little in the way of obvious singles here, (though the Ibiza bop "Preach" might find a chart by accident). If You’re Reading This arouses many unanswered questions on a business front, but where it truly delivers is giving Drake room to breathe outside of the lumbering commercialism of his retail albums. Is this release a ruse to close out Drake’s Cash Money deal? Is the absence of Birdman from the mixtape’s lengthy thank you's an oversight or an intentional slight? Is the title a dig? If You’re Reading This is littered with pith for Drake’s label situation ("No Tellin’": "Envelopes coming in the mail, let her open ‘em/ Hoping for a check again, ain’t no telling," "Star67": "Brand new Beretta, can’t wait to let it go/ Walk up in my label like ‘Where the check, though?’"), and all of this surfacing weeks after Wayne’s lawsuit bombshell raises a few questions. He’s since initiated an audacious $51 million lawsuit requesting not only his own exit but that of Drake and Nicki Minaj as well.ĭrake and Nicki have been smartly mum on the split (well, word around town is Birdman was barred from Minaj’s Grammy party earlier this month), but years of whispers about Drake being owed substantial back royalties were publicly validated with the surprise release of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a retail mixtape arriving on the six year anniversary of Drake’s star-making So Far Gone.
#DRAKE KNOW YOURSELF EKALI FLIP UPDATE#
(With Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan he seems to be training still another army.) The wheels appeared to come off of the Cash Money machine for good, however, on a random December afternoon when Wayne gave a curt Twitter update on his long-gestating Tha Carter V album, blaming Birdman and Cash Money for the holdup and demanding an exit from the label he’s called home most of his life. Birdman’s business acumen and A&R smarts carried Cash Money through three distinct eras, from the late '90s Hot Boys heyday through Lil Wayne’s mid- to late-2000s bid for "Best Rapper Alive" to the current YMCMB incarnation featuring Drake and Nicki Minaj.
Cash Money Records has escaped the fate of the Roc-A-Fellas and Bad Boys thanks to the enduring genius of Bryan "Baby" Williams, AKA Birdman. One year it’s "All About the Benjamins" and the next it’s Lincolns and Washingtons. Death is the only certainty for rap dynasties.
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