The Emperor Has No Abs
Drake’s rollout for the new album Iceman began with an instagram post featuring his new surgery-enhanced abs. This, paired with his decision to litigate his loss in a rap battle, displayed his willingness to defy the unwritten rules of hiphop manhood. He followed this full embrace of bitchassness with a cosplay. The video for his new single “What’d I Miss?” features him playing warehouse worker in an ice factory, a return to the strategy of his 2020 tongue-in-cheek triumph “Life Is Good”. In that video, he and his frequent collaborator Future, play regular working stiffs still trying to get on as he lyrically dismisses his first major L in the sport of rap. (Niggas swear they past us/They doin too much/Haven’t done my taxes/I’m too turnt up/Virgil got a Patek on my wrist goin’ nuts/ Niggas caught me slippin’/Okay so what?”) That was then, when a relentless Pusha T turned some reckless pillow talk into a lyrical drive-by. But the combination of humor, alliance with the street certified toxic king and a generational beat switch gave the casual fan permission to look past the damage done by the surgical “The Story of Adidon”.
Now Drake’s attempting to shake off K. Dot’s multi-level, multi-dimensional, continuous assault on his work, reputation, and character with a similar approach but this time without Future and less room to maneuver. The visuals for “What’d I Miss?” — a witty double-entendre to reflect a two-sided, almost contradictory agenda — features Drake in an ice factory break room and pool side in front of an arsenal of guns. He wants to be both vicious and dismissive, laughing off the dismantling he weathered all of last year while aiming subliminal bullets at the legion of opps. That includes all the rappers he helped who turned on him and a certain superstar basketball player who showed up at the The Pop Out, the live Drake funeral that brought the warring tribes of LA together. He then drives a work truck through Toronto on Live — a move meant to reclaim his city after Dot was welcomed there with open arms last month — listening to another cut from the album.
“What’d I Miss?” is a lament punctuated with what feels like whispery self talk. “Let’s go” he seem to tell himself again and again. Like “Nokia” and the his more recent work like “No Face”, the song still retains echoes of the musicality and wit (babygurl) that made Drake the king of pop rap and does just enough to ignite his long-suffering fan base to get energized about the certified hitmaker again. I’m still him he seems to say, and fuck these ingrates and betrayers and haters. But there is still something rather Kabuki about the whole thing. We don’t believe Drake believes. Something is profoundly different about him now but only time will tell if this is him still in strategic warm up mode, playing possum until he is ready to strike or if this lack of confidence is something truly structural. “You switched on the guys and supported a hater/Let’s go/What’s the get-back for niggas? TBD/I look at this shit like a BTC/Could be down this week/Then I’m up next week”. He’s a buy but we are cautiously awaiting what Drake emerges in the K. Dot era. Them store bought abdominals signal more volatility in the short term.
You Nasty Boy
These were not the orgies we were promised. We assumed after the announcement of government raids and Diddy’s massive stashes of baby oil that we were in for a months-long exposé of Epstein-level fuckathons populated by celebrities, drug-addled underaged, bisexual vixens and endless sex, lies and video. None of that really found its way into the courtroom. Outside of a brief testimony of Kid Cudi and a court visit from Ye, the trial was a dud relative to the hype that proceeded it. The Diddy verdict was the answer to a question that hovered over the entire scandal from the moment Cassie Ventura’s lawyer made good on the threat to expose Sean Combs for the depraved abuser he was. Yes, the Government proved that part beyond a shadow of a doubt. Combs comes off as a morally bankrupt cuckold who manipulated, harassed and physically and emotionally abused his girlfriends in all kinds of unnatural ways. The infamous video in which he beat Cassie and dragged her while in a towel revealed what we suspected but the question however was did he commit the crimes he is accused of.