Member Since: 2/27/2012
Posts: 12,567
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The Singles Jukebox drags Drake!
The respected music review site spent their Thursday afternoon going in on Aubrey.
Quote:
Drake – Back to Back
TSJ’s response track forthcoming…
[4.20]
Maxwell Cavaseno: Supposedly this is a diss track. This proposed “diss record” does not provide more content based on the defamation or ridicule of the subject, a one “Robert Williams,” beyond talking about the success of his girlfriend compared to himself. WOOOOOO. DAMN. THOSE SOME HARD BARS AUBREY. Ultimately just an extension of Drakk’s continued boozy nothings, it’s a wonderful world where we love a middle-class Torontonian child actor teasing his peers who’ve lived the existence he likes to embody and receives fawning praise from the kind of people that Aubrey Graham probably feels are beneath him. It’s a testimony to how sick “Drake” is as a brand. Oh, and that beat ****ing sucks.
[0]
Alfred Soto: “Trigger fingers turn to Twitter fingers” is a line for our times, parts of which were carved by Aubrey Drake himself. The sinister and minimalist wobbly sequencer would help a rapper less indifferent to stresses and less arhythmic than Drake. On the evidence Meek Mill has little to worry about.
[4]
Megan Harrington: I’m sympathetic to how insulting it feels when someone you don’t even consider up to your standards lashes out at you, but this is still punching down.
[2]
Crystal Leww: A throwaway diss track response that deserves to be treated as such. Drake pokes fun at Meek Mill for supporting his girlfriend on tour while simultaneously giving Nicki ups for being a boss bitch, and it’s sufficiently confusing, just like Drake himself. Not quite a single, but not a bad mixtape track either.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: Good beat, good flow — Drizzy sounds nimbler here than he has in a minute — but the tired “battle” with Meek Mill is just that, tired.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: Drake is insufferable when he’s introspective, but when he’s roused to take notice of anything outside his own navel he can be quite charming. I hesitate to use a word like “authority” to describe what he achieves here — “following the script of traditional masculinity more closely than he usually does” would be a truer description — but damned if it isn’t attractive.
[5]
Brad Shoup: It was a fun couple days on Twitter dot com, but other than that I don’t give a ****. I can’t imagine how many pills I’d have to charm out of Drake’s entourage to elevate this from decent diss track to biographical bullet point. The synths mimic ominous movie strings, but from four floors down. The drums chirp like crickets; I guess that’s an ode to Meek’s response. I’m so ****ing bored.
[4]
http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=17998
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Quote:
Drake – Hotline Bling
It’s Drake Day! Wait, where are you going?
[5.08]
Alfred Soto: Drake’s the guy whom I expect to worry about cell phone calls. Just when the track’s churning minimalism passes into the okay zone it stops so he can deliver a jealous rant without imagination. And there’s a minute left.
[4]
Josh Love: It’s hard to argue this former good girl’s life hasn’t improved markedly since Drizzy left the 6. “Running out of pages on your passport” is a thing no one has complained about in the history of ever; same goes for “glasses of champagne out on the dance floor.” Oh, and “hotline bling” is a catchphrase so strained I’m starting to think the reason Drake got diesel is just so he could carry it.
[4]
Maxwell Cavaseno: Something about the way Drakk phrases the hook here reminds me of his old former sparring partner Trey Songz, as well as the ambiguously accented warblings of PartyNextDoor over a Wii Music remake of Young Thug & Migos’ brilliant bossa-nova banger “YRN.” He conveys lothario longing, sounding like he’s drunk in an open shirt while lounging in a island manor, clutching an 80s cellphone and doing his drunken ex-boyfriend bit which is, much like that cell-phone, played out. You’d think maybe after going out of his way to redeem his image with the “TUFF” talk of If You’re Reading This… he would stay a bit solidified, but this whole record leaks out through the cracks of your fingers. Even when he does his “OMG GUYS, DRAKE’S PUTTING ON A FILTER AND GOING INTO FAKE DEEP MODE” bit, its something he’s been doing now for seven years and seems oddly inadequate at bringing to his next possible level.
[3]
Andy Hutchins: **** this song. This is Drake taking the brio and sunlight of “Cha Cha” — one of the best and most off-kilter songs of the year, and one created by independent artists with no capacity to make that song a hit — and gentrifying it into his umpteenth lamentation of women in Toronto maturing beyond their interest in his negging ass. “You used to call me on my cell phone / Late nights when you neeed myyy looove” might as well a message to the same woman whose voicemail he appropriated for “Marvin’s Room” — hey, another Drake song trading on an established musical context for some of its pathos — because lord knows no woman ever had Aubrey Graham starstruck, right? And this is essentially a ****-shaming ex’s anthem: So you “feel left out” about a former flame who “used to always be at home, be a good girl” “doing things I taught you, getting nasty for someone else”? Get the **** over it, bruh, and unfollow her on Instagram. (Oh, and “hotlline bling” is Drake doing his typical neologism-as-appropriation act — he’s saying something no one had said before because no one has used the term “hotline” to refer to a cell phone since 2002 and no one else would be shameless enough to turn a patois “bling” into a verb. I hate that ****.)
[0]
Brad Shoup: Maybe if this weren’t the tenth go-round I could take this as necessary angst. I don’t really need to unpack his good-girl complex; I’ll just note that “you need my love” is the phrase with the most conviction. The Timmy Thomas sample chimes softly, a little light glimpsed from a turned-over phone.
[5]
Megan Harrington: Not as interesting or absurd or fun as its source material, but otherwise a strong testament to how anything, with the addition of Drake’s sonorous croon, can sound sad. Almost every time I reach my hand into the unknown I want to pull out something happy, but I know a time will come when I need to depress and there will be “Hotline Bling.”
[5]
http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=17997
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