There, I said it: I like Drake now

Most time, the villain and the hero’s beginnings / Unlike their endings / Take nearly identical shape and form”

That’s Morgan Freeman drawing the curtain on “Niagara Falls (Foot or 2)”, off Metro Boomin’s excellent newly birthed album about heroes and villains. Drake isn’t featured on it. But because he’s everywhere, those lines are also very applicable to Her Loss, his recent full-length, which, though framed as a collaborative project with 21 Savage, is populated mainly by him. On the canvas of its 16 songs, Drake and 21 (but mainly Drake) enact, to mostly absorbing effect, some of mainstream hip-hop’s (read: RapCaviar’s) more defining tropes, taking proverbial shots at enemies real and imagined, flexing about riches real and imagined (but mostly real, because Drake) and beckoning to women real and imagined (because rap).

It’s nothing new – but it’s revelatory. It says a lot about how ready we are to forgive Drake for his past mistakes , for the diminishing returns he has subjected us to album after uninspired album, and how eagerly we rush to his new demands for our attention. It says a lot about Drake too: It shows how formidably he can enliven a theme, which, in this case, is about being so villainously cool, 21 and him are heroic for it and how, ultimately, that heroism is 'her loss'. It proves that when he wants to, he can command the needle in ways that are distinctly infectious and very often captivating. 

Michelangelo has his David. Drake has his Drake; glaringly erratic, superlatively petty but when he makes the right moves – it pains me to admit it – undeniable. 

Her Loss, which benefits from 21’s involvement but doesn’t owe the larger part of its merits to it, is the best start-to-finish body of work Drake has signed off on since 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Of its 16 songs, only one is an irredeemable dud, (the directionless, interminable “Hours In Silence”). The rest belong on a spectrum bookended by two poles: Good and great. (Yes. Really.)

The album opens with “Rich Flex”, a great song. Ice-cold production which bores its way into your neural grooves like stalactites, legitimately aw-snap beat-switches, Drake in hyper-effective meme mode (“21, can you do somethin' for meeee?”), Drake thug-talking his way into thug-talk singularity that also gels perfectly with 21’s knife-to-the-neck thug-talk, Drake and 21 self-mythologising with bar-for-bar lethality over beats that make for immaculate vibe fodder:

Drake: “You need to find you someone else to call / When your bank account get low, you need to find you someone”

21: “I DM in Vanish Mode, I do that ish a lot”

All of it is peak Internet-addled, pop-facing, playlist-destined, streaming-service-mandated hip-hop. And all of it is peak Drake. Because, not only is he all those things, he’s also transcendentally and unsurpassably good at them. At his best, he’s the anti-Kendrick Lamar. Where the latter, especially now, spurns the low-hanging fruit, forcing himself into the shadows for his harrowing self-reckoning, Drake luxuriates in the searing glare of public adoration, raking in numbers and commas with every crowd-pleasing flourish, every move symptomatic not of an existential crisis but a trumpet-blaring, culture-resounding existential celebration. 

At its best, the album platforms Drake’s best, and Drake’s best is a two-pronged attack, each with a distinct thrust. “Rich Flex” (“Major Distribution”, “BackOutsideBoyz”, “Middle of the Ocean”) and the other flex-forward screeds, where lines such as “I wouldn't trade my life for none of y'alls, it's an embargo / Fifty-nine bags on the 767, this is heavy cargo” and “I jump on your song and make you sound like you the feature” drive his/the point home, enter the lexicon as his new calling cards: Potently to-the-point ‘bangers’ whose boom is both timely and timeless, effective between your headphones and as dance floor detonations. 

They’re instantly recognisable for what they are and they’re not a high wall to scale but how they’re presented here, which is as monuments to rap’s competitive imperative, is legitimately impressive. 

 Bravado, machismo, aggression, all in panoramically dizzying measure, are but words, but in Drake’s hands, they’re the last word. Whatever the desired end of a barb may be, the what (“Strike like a match, knock him out his hat / Knife to a gun fight, this ain't none of that”) and the how (In 21’s case, plainspoken lethality where every syllable of the threat is amplified by its ice-cold utterance, while in Drake’s, fiery matter-of-fact-ness rife with moments of Instagram-caption quotability) receive an elevation to the point of exemplariness. 

There are many ways to skin a cat – and if the cat is mainstream A-list rap, Drake and 21 offer two of the most effective and zeitgeist-honouring means to the end. 

But in the jungle of a Drake album, you don’t just encounter feral beasts. You run into your share of soft and tender sentiments. This is the Certified Lover Boy that the radio loves. Purring and pledging his love to you in ways that reveal both his feral and fragile sides. What’s different about the CLB here is that no matter how badly he wants/needs you, he never loosens his grip on the album’s leitmotif: Her Loss.

This is the Drake that has won me over. I’ve always known that in contemporary hip-hop, he resides on the spectrum of good-to-greatness. But now, my eyes are open to how he can self-celebrate even by terms he didn’t set. That’s why, the best song in this collection, to me, is “Spin Bout U”, wherein he tries to convince a woman about why he’s better than the competition (Also: The fact that Drake cannot exist without the competition is structurally integral to Drake the artistic endeavour and cultural phenomenon. It’s a big part of what makes his whole schtick resplendent entertainment).

The song is masterfully realised: BanBwoi, 40 & FortyOneSix bend ethereality and earthiness into a gorgeously clatteringly beat, cavernous and enveloping, as Drake (21’s here too but Drake’s the main character) brings out the big guns (“But just like that R&B group from the ‘90s / Girl, one call, I'll get you in Vogue / One call, you in runway shows / One call, I'm sittin' front row”) and pours out his heart over the beat, flushing out the opposition in the process (“The way you make me feel these days / Comin’ out my body for you, baby girl / Wipe him like he snotty for you, baby girl”).

“Wipe him like he snotty for you” – In one sweep, he foregrounds the physical reality of a psychological imperative in the finality of a physiological outcome; three checkmates on one chessboard. There’s a nasally sibilance when he utters “snotty”, as if he’s sucking back saliva in revulsion at the thought of other guys. Only Drake can make such a thing a thing. We’re not in the rarefied realm of tropes anymore. There’s no literary distance to this thermonuclear level of pettiness – it’s real. I love it. It’s everything I used to write Drake off for; one of the main reasons why the younger, infinitely more credulous me questioned his bona fides. But, this song, with its seething layers, its folds of heat-seeking intent, is so wrong, it’s right. It’s fruit from a poisoned tree, but it’s exquisite. 

There’s so much in the entertainment ether to be ambivalent about. Throughout the pandemic, the pump-and-clog strategy adopted by DSPs cultivated an almighty sense of indifference in the receiving public. Now, there’s so much we don’t care about. So much we prodigiously, casually and passionately have no interest and investment in. Rap isn’t spared from this – but Her Loss is.

One of the holdovers of rap since its inception has been its non-meek attitude. Her Loss is a front-to-back, studio-to-AirPods celebration of its endurance. It’s a particular incarnation of a side of contemporary hip-hop, which, since the 2010s, has commanded a vast blast radius in the pop cultural consciousness. Its casual depictions of extreme behaviour have been entrenched in Rap Rhetoric^TM amongst the building blocks of delivery, the steam which powers the braggadocio which heralds charisma, mythology and narrative. All of it is delivered with the ease afforded by the artistic licence claimed by the music since its origins, to the point where ‘truth’ isn’t as prized a mantle as ‘vibe’, and ‘experience’ isn’t as prioritised as ‘narrative’ as a means by which an artist retains and grows a captive audience.

In the centre of and somehow above it all, Drake stands, watching, plotting, luxuriating, hero, villain and whatever’s in the middle. Not only has he outlasted the competition, he’s outpaced it at every turn in the sprawling domain he claims. He fell once, by Pusha T’s (proverbial) sword. Now, though, he can’t be memed, can’t be a clowned – can’t lose.

It’s obvious: Her Loss is our gain. And, as I’m increasingly coming to understand, mine, too.