The mixing and mastering on this are already excellent, shout out all my people behind the scenes making music sound amazing who never get the credit. Dost thou sing withest the Auto-Tune Drizzy? Sounds a bit like it. We've heard this heartbroken crooning from Drake before, but this production is really different. 'All my let's just be friends' just became a caption on 40,000 Facebook posts. Horns and almost jazz opening things up, this is definitely different, although the singing sounds like peak Drake. 'Keep The Family Close'ДЄnd we're off.by sheer coincidence I was just talking about compiling a list of all the audio clips of random women talking onВ rap records. Then I'll be back later, weeks or months from now, with a follow-up review that attempts to break down the meaning and importance of the album once I've had time to marinate on it.В For a deeper explanation of 1 Listen reviews, click here.ДЄnd with that, let's do this damn thing. Finally.ДЄs always, this 1-Listen review will be aВ gut reaction, stream of consciousness account of my first listen withВ no pausing or rewinding andВ no editing. I predicted that VIEWS would in retrospect prove to be Peak Drake, the album that later signaled his moment of highest importance, and it's finally time to put the predictions and hypotheticals aside and get to the real thing. And so now we have VIEWS, an album two years in the making that feels less like a highly-anticipated album andВ more like yet another guaranteed blockbuster that only needs to actually drop to continue his streak of platinum albums. His loose Soundcloud releases garner GRAMMY nominations, every song on IYRTITL, his so-called 'mixtape,' charted on Billboard. Like he's transcended every other barrier before him, Drake's transcended the bounds of the mere album. Drake's albums have all beenВ massivelyВ popular, hugely influential on pop culture, but they've never said anything more than what they said aboutВ Drake, and what thatВ saysВ about the millions who like to envision themselves as Drake. The effect is to make his music prolifically relateable-very few know what it's like to grow up as a good kid in a madd city, but we all have enemies trying to drain us of our energy, we've all driven through our respective cities with our respectiveВ woes-but has fittingly limited his album's lasting impact on the world. Cole, he never inhabits other voices and perspectives, never even acknowledges a world outside his own.

Unlike the other multi-platinum rappers of his generation, Kendrick Lamar, and J. I think that's because his music isВ so uniformly personal every Drake song is onlyВ about Drake and nothing else. Ask 100 people if he has a classic in his catalog and if so what it is, and you'll get 100 different answers. The one weak link in Drake's armorВ is that, unlike the other acknowledged greats, he doesn't have a consensus classic album.

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