Drake Harmony Holiday

Angst, check. Complaints, check. Perfectly listenable slow jams, check. Guaranteed obsolescence, check.

$ome $exy $ongs 4 U, by Drake and PARTYNEXTDOOR,
OVO Sound, Santa Anna, Republic Records

^{•   •   •}

For perspective, it’s Nina Simone’s birthday and the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X as I write this—one of those travesties of serendipity when birth dates and death dates align to create an eternal loop or union between two souls and a scar across the heart in the hour of their twin star. It’s not that I’m cloying for a radical intervention when I consider Nina and Malcolm cosmically joined at the helm of the moment; it’s that, together, they form an omen predicting recent collective pandering to the squabbles between much shallower idols/foils, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, reminders that neither half-hearted yearning nor half-hearted militancy offers any lasting reprieve from the crude machinations of the prevailing artifice we call a culture. Consider the moving target of Nina’s “Mississippi Goddam” or Malcolm X loving Duke Ellington so much he once bragged about shining his shoes and later had to give up listening to secular jazz music because he loved it too intensely—without these guardians of redemption through integrity, the wasteland feeds us tabloids we conflate with high-stakes controversy and self-obsessed confessionalism we construe as vulnerable music, then feeds on our attention to the counterfeits it fed us. In turn, we’re served products like Drake’s latest album, with PARTYNEXTDOOR, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, released this Valentine’s Day, where even the title compulsively heralds consumer transactionalism as the ultimate muse of its deflated erotics. They’re deploying sex appeal to deflect from recent threats to Drake’s mass appeal in the most obvious way, which, because the beef between Drake and Kendrick is played out and over-wrought by now—was outed as pseudo-political through its embrace of representation™ and bourgeois liberal idealism, and dragged on too long—is the most mature and honest gesture their saga has produced.

I feel a little derelict redirecting this day to Drake, as if I’m sneaking swigs of poison into a sacred place, but dereliction is essential to the cult of him; you have to abandon yourself and your innate tastes to allow Drake in, and your consciousness shrinks ever so slightly for it with each listen. The recompense is easy, loose pleasure that fades as quickly as it arrives, forcing you to replay songs over and over to retrieve it, like a fiend, or you refuse and gain nothing but fleeting annoyance and the reverberating purr of Drake’s Canada-dry vocal fry stuck in your head for days, tempting you toward the benign disgrace his songs amplify. He’s a great enabler of for-the-plot social distortion. His sound is sustained by its texture, smooth and casual yet just rough enough to captivate the sheltered imaginations of middle-class suburbanites and nerd-adjacent main character–syndrome types who want to be edgier, more trifling, more entitled to a lifelong suspended adolescence between the strip club and the situationship. Drake music, if treated like a bible, which is how many treat it, will stunt your growth. He’s become a disclaimer who we could blame if we were looking to crucify one person for what’s being called the “male loneliness epidemic.” His songs champion alienation as if it’s self-mastery and recommend withholding love or affection as if it’s evolved and zen.

This album, unfortunately, doubles down on these tenets and relies on them as an overcommons where no one is brave enough to be feral but everyone is pretending to want something they refuse to exert any real effort to attain. He opens pitifully, but in a soulless way that doesn’t deepen the sound, on a song about angsty late-night texting. It’s a skip in the grand scheme, a wince. Vanity and actually being down bad might be why they couldn’t resist making it the first track of a quiet comeback album; it gives us nothing but does accurately frame the romantic lead as flailing and lost-at-sea in his drama and dharma, both public and private. I got the worst reputation in our town, Drake complains by the second track, revving up toward something relevant but only to remind us how much pussy he gets regardless, followed by another litany with begging for acknowledgment from a girl who’s ignoring him as its bridge. Vent to me baby / After that we should get intimate baby, he serenades next, trading lines with PND. Strike three. These are perfectly listenable slow jams that are so emotionally stagnant they have the effect of making me burst out laughing—they can’t be serious. This is their charm, the commitment to being ridiculous and narrating the same three scenarios with different melodies ad nauseam. Exhaustion with themselves leads to momentary epiphanies; someone sings the word heartbreak, then back to innuendo, put your ass in my palms. I’m entertained like I might be by a horrific minstrel show asking, where did our love go?

“Pimmie’s Dilemma” is refreshing in that we get a woman’s intonation, and tragic in that she entreats please don’t go out with your friends / they don’t ever keep you in check to some John Doe Drake who spends nights faithlessly at parties. The hook of the following song, pussy so good that I should be inside, is the response she gets, some limp reference to evil eyes from Drake, sustained obliviousness to the possibility that he is his own worst enemy, endorsing and living a lifestyle that guarantees his own obsolescence. The first nine tracks on this album could be collapsed into one and cast off of it, so that it begins with the more interesting pathos of “Gimme a Hug,” where a gospel sample becomes backdrop for Drake’s belated pep talk to himself, which can be summed up as: I’m legitimate, I’m the best, I’m lonely, I’m lonely, I’m greedy, I belong to the streets, fuck a rap beef I’m tryna get the party lit. Briefly, he delivers on the second half of the record, with “Meet Your Padre,” “Nokia,” and “Die Trying,” annoying but idyllic fete and radio music in the tradition of his “Hotline Bling” and “In My Feelings” but less gimmicky and more melodic. When Drake wants to make perfect pop music, he is more than capable of it; he’s right that this knack is at least part of why he’s under attack as a rapper, that a character assassination of him means more revenue for his peers and overlords in case he ever decides to grow up, stop waiting for his father’s or Lil Wayne’s or Ye’s or whoever’s approval, actually fall in love with both music and romantic interests, and seize some enduring power by becoming an executive himself or using his executive function for something other than another round for everyone posturing.

Until that day of real reckoning, Drake, whose cultural relevance is built, not unlike Andy Warhol’s, on the slippage between an ability to effortlessly recognize, predict, and produce products that seduce and sell, and selling out himself and everyone around him, is slipping into the very trapdoors he helped rig. He’s just completed a tour in Australia, performing dressed like some kinda sullen fugitive training for street combat or an undercover comic-book supervillain. Fans in the pit hold up desperate signs as if they’re at a protest, asking for money, favors, attention, and save me, save my father. In his heart, promiscuous chameleon to the core even in generosity and virtue, I believe he wants to oblige them. His personal hell of embittered good intentions is why it won’t be long before sex, for those who make it the emotional scapegoat for all of their struggles until they’ve given too much away, no longer sells.

Harmony Holiday is the author of several collections of poetry and numerous essays on music and culture. Her collection Maafa came out in April 2022, and the extended UK edition will be out in April 2025.