And yet So Far Gone still scans as one of the most compulsively listenable mixtapes of a great year for mixtapes. Blame Kanye. Drake isn't just a post-Kanye artist; he's a post-808s and Heartbreak artist, possibly the first. On that album, Kanye drifted lazily from rapping to singing over a bed of rippling lush-but-sparse electro that still gets better every time I hear it. Drake does much the same thing on So Far Gone. He's a singer/rapper in the Missy Elliott mode, and he even pays Missy tribute by swiping the beat from her "Friendly Skies" for "Bria's Interlude". When he swings from rapping to buttery teen-idol singing, it feels organic and effortless, like he's just doing whatever makes the most sense at any given moment.
Musically, Drake favors a very specific sort of sugary but spacious electro-soul; nearly every track makes heavy use of organ sustain and sparse heartbeat drums. He uses tracks from Swede-pop types like Lykke Li and Peter Bjorn and John, the sort of thing that seems forced and gimmicky when most rappers do it. In Drake's hands, though, those songs make sense in close proximity to, say, Jay-Z's "Ignorant ****" or Kanye's "Say You Will". And it helps that he actually interacts with his source material. With "Little Bit", Drake doesn't simply rap over Lykke Li's original. Instead, he structures it like a duet, he and Lykke slowly circling each other and admitting their crushed-out feelings. It's cute. My favorite track on the tape is the DJ Screw tribute "November 18th", wherein Drake pulls off something that I've never heard any actual Houstonians manage (sorry, Big Moe): He turns Screw's slow, woozy sound into loverman R&B. The lyrical conceit is goofy as hell ("Tonight I'll just **** you like we're in Houston"-- slow, get it?), but Drake's angelic falsetto floats beautifully over the smeared-streetlights track, and it just sounds right.
And then there's all that price-of-fame stuff. Again, blame Kanye, because somehow this comes out sounding slippery and interesting rather than petulant and unbearable. See, Drake's figured out that the way to brag backhandedly-- to brag without bragging-- is to complain about all the awesome **** that you get to endure. So here he is on "The Calm": "Look what I became, tryna make a name/ All my first dates are interrupted by my fame." Other rappers talk big about getting mobbed every time I hit the mall; Drake complains about those masses making his candlelit dinners a little bit more awkward. Or: "My mother embarrassed to pull my Phantom out, so I park about five houses down." You learn he has a Phantom, and you also learn that it's the source of some family strife that doesn't even make sense. Crafty. And now that Drake is really, truly famous, he should really have some **** to complain about.
, but anyway back to the conversation at hand
