Drake – Headlines

Drake
Oct 13th, 2011
| posted by: David |

Like fall follows summer, like New Yorkers are a pain in the ass, like crazy ass squirrels scoot up trees, every Drake song to ever drop in this fair union of states seems to catch on like wildfire. Unconcerned with birth status (originally a Canadian local) as they are fixated by their president’s, Drake songs have taken on the sort of instantly axiomatic quality usually only prescribed for fast food outlets and packaged beef jerkey. Rarely in the history of American music has there been such a rite of passage for a particular artist’s tunes through to clothes stores, ringtones, vegan diners and every audio-spilling device in between. Overseas he and his young money counterparts in Wayne and Minaj have a reputation for quality, popular music but hardly scrape the heady demigod heights ascribed to their releases here in the States. The saturation is unbelievable but it doesn’t come without merit. To the victor their spoils and all that and Drake, Wayne et al have been hard enough at work in the studio to deserve theirs.

There is certainly something to be said for the prolific output of the gang officially led by Birdman but more realistically steered by the recently unshackled Lil Wayne. Drake exhibited early prodigious mixtape form and, although there was a notable lack of material between sensational debut ‘Thank Me Later’ and his current pre-sophomore rennaisance, you get the sense that the kid lives work. That’s the vibe his lyricism, consistently caught up with stardom and its ramifications, gives off at least. Occasionally grating for his introspective obsession, Drake has a way with inflections and tone that makes you forget that you are very probably listening to a multimillionaire whinge about his multimillions. It is that smoothness, a sensuous take on celebrity’s travails, that colours modern America’s aural landscape in a hilarious and telling way. Wafting through the subway, at the post office or blaring out of a delivery boy’s skullcandys is Drake reflecting in an endearingly serious way on life. At a time when the country is at a crossroads, drake’s candidness demonstrates one effective coping mechanism and as such, is wildly popular with the masses.

Given that the Young Money enterprise trades on the star value of its biggest signings, public relations and promotiond has got to be a bitch. There’s Birdman and Wayne sipping on sizzurp and making it rain benjamins, and there, somewhere in the corner of the room, cowering over her two laptops, nineteen twitter accounts and four iPhones is their publicist trying to work out when the label should drop ‘Headlines’, Drake’s most recent pseudo-single before his most recent mixtape. It’s a goddamn strategic nightmare. And having, inexorably, made the right decision, the slap-up quality of the resulting single is just astounding. A couple of horn synths, some deliberately plastic drum sounds and a bit of Drake crooning is all it takes and all it took to turn ‘Headlines’ into the smash hit dealing-with-fame song that a thousand jaded starlets could never translate into success over the years. The effortlessness of the whole enterprise is frightening, the honesty of the lyricism out of all proportion to its mainstream take up but the near-nationalised fan club is undeniable. No need for extra! extra! You’ll hear all about it.

Drake – Headlines[audio:https://1songday.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Drake-Headlines.mp3|titles=Drake - Headlines]

Tags: , , Nicki Minaj
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2 Comments:

[...] situation is getting to be slightly ridiculous. A couple of weeks back I described the Drake effect slowly inculcating all of music-listening America in the ways of [...]

[...] And then I hear this track, ‘You Need Me, I Don’t Need You’ on a commercial radio station today and think to myself, almost out loud, What the fucking fuck? For one, Australian commercial radio stations have been more in the back pocket of record labels lately than at any other time in recent memory. The amount of esoteric, out-of-left-field, hardly popular music that now turns up on the FM band is weird – but good. Secondly, I thought as I careened across three lanes of traffic to get to a petrol station, how does Ed Sheeran become the biggest thing in Britain by putting out esoteric, out-of-left-field, only marginally ‘pop-sounding’ music like this? Maybe I’ve underestimated the general listening public but something about ‘You Need Me, I Don’t Need You’s’ sort of forced wit and wordy delivery don’t scream ‘NUMBER ONE HIT!’ As a reflection on the perils of fame, this slots somewhere above Lindsay Lohan’s ‘Rumours‘ but well below the exquisitely tortured antics of Drake. [...]

Ed Sheeran – You Need Me, I Don’t Need You | One A Day

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