Was this an attempt to push back goalposts and score easy points after a less-than-stellar outing? Was Drake courting collaborators he feels too restricted in his “proper” albums to work with? Was he finally delivering a full-fledged OVO Sound compilation? The finished product isn’t arranged very differently from a standard Drake album. When he’s ready for harsher scrutiny, he’ll call the thing an album.ĭrake’s declining to call More Life an “album” after the mixed reaction to Views gave some pause. When he wants to try out young, untested production talent ( If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late) or pal around with Future in Atlanta for a week ( What a Time to Be Alive), we get a mixtape. To this end, everyone within a mile of the thing has taken to calling it a “playlist” rather than an album or a mixtape, because Drake suggests how he wants a new release to be processed by dictating the medium he wants it digested as. So now we have More Life, 22 new Drake songs with the stated mission of carrying the free-spirited jitteriness of his OVO Sound Radio show - where rap, grime, R&B, house, and dancehall intersect in mixes crafted by Drake, his manager Oliver El-Khatib, and a host of special guests - off Apple Music’s Beats 1 station and out into the world. It was a missed opportunity to snatch back some of the acclaim as a lyricist that was lost in the 2015 dustup with Meek Mill, when the Philly rapper blew up on Twitter and confirmed Drake’s use of an outside writer on their collaborative track “R.I.C.O.” A figure as ambitious as Drake doesn’t settle for news that his album is the best-selling release of its calendar year if there’s palpable displeasure with the quality of the product. Views was more than just a too-long crossover record from a rapper suddenly too sure of his range, though. Drake is rarely one to admit a misstep, but when he began promising new work just six months after Views’ spring 2016 launch, it seemed like he was anxious to put the project behind him. It tried to reach too many different audiences and ended up being too much for everyone.
Views was Drake’s Carter IV, a long-simmering passion project that came out as overcooked as you’d expect after a two-year wait it was a critical toe-stub too commercially successful to be called a flop.
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