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• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

Lock it in and fuhgeddaboudit with an annual subscription to Culturedarm, which supports the site while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

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Albums

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Muslim Shaggan – Asar

Over the populous span of South Asia, a region...

Dave Sewelson, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, George Cartwright, Anthony Cox and Steve Hirsh – Murmuration

The Arkansas free jazz outpost Mahakala Music says that...

Klein – thirteen sense

For her last album marked the South London maverick...

Behind the Song

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Behind the Song: Chuck Berry – ‘You Can’t Catch Me’

'You Can't Catch Me', one of Chuck Berry's early singles, proved an unexpected commercial flop. It failed to chart upon its release at the onset of 1957 - despite being given prominence by the fledgeling rock and roll feature Rock, Rock, Rock!, which had opened in cinemas the previous month...

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

Behind the Song: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8 Animal Collective's eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

Tracks of the Week

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

At the Movies

Tully (2018)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Tully is the third collaboration between director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, following on from Juno (2007) and Young Adult (2011). All three films deal with the role of women as child-bearers, looking in turn at teenage pregnancy and adoption, miscarriage, and postpartum depression, which in this case borders on psychosis...

Toni Erdmann (2016)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Winfried Conradi is so given to practical jokes that he practically depends on them. When he opens the door of his home in the spa town of Aachen, he regales the postman with an elaborate deception featuring look-alike brothers, prison terms, erotic magazines, and mail bombs, tipping the postman for any distress accrued and to make amends for his own strange excesses. He carries a pair of false teeth...

Pickpocket (1959)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - Michel the titular character of Robert Bresson's snappily downcast Pickpocket is a renegade, a nihilist, one of cinema's Nietzschean Übermensch and most of all a real churl. He is the surliest of apostates with the hint of a bad boy persona that might suggest Marlon Brando or James Dean in blocking or on the amateur stage, for as is Bresson's wont the lead Martin LaSalle was a rank novice...

The Sunshine Boys (1975)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In The Sunshine Boys a pair of ageing and increasingly frail former comedians, Al Lewis and Willy Clark (George Burns and Walter Matthau), are brought together eleven years after their acrimonious separation in order to star one more time in a special for ABC. Veterans of the vaudeville circuit, their career together spanned forty-three years and six appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show...

Don Jon (2013)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In Japan grown adult men - thirty, forty, fifty years old or more - lie prostrate in their childhood bedrooms, which they never leave, as their ageing parents push parcels of food beneath the door. On their beds they clutch plush life-sized cartoon figures, somehow prepubescent but boasting ginormous boobs, and between the heaving and moaning they not only cry but orgasm into their pillowcases...

World Cinema

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - In 1902 an inscrutable gambler, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), arrives in the fledgling town of Presbyterian Church in the northwestern United States. A hazy rumour has him as a gunslinger, and McCabe uses innuendo and disorder to quickly assert his position in the town, acquiring three prostitutes and opening a whorehouse, to which he plans to add a saloon...

We’re the Millers (2013)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In what sounds like a riff on an old joke, a drug dealer, a stripper, a runaway, and a nerd climb into a camper van south of the border. David Clark (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level marijuana dealer who finds himself beholden to his supplier, the sleazy businessman Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms), when a couple of street hoods make off with his stash. To cover the debt with a little added compensation, David reluctantly agrees to smuggle a 'smidge' of weed from Mexico...

Halloween (1978)

★★ (2 out of 4 stars) - In the suburban neighbourhood of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, 1963, while other kids are out trick-or-treating, a six-year-old boy without any apparent motivation creeps up the stairs, slips on a mask, and slashes to death his near-nude teenage sister. Fifteen years later he's still confined to Smith's Grove, a sanatorium for psychiatric patients, but he breaks out and returns to Haddonfield...

Tully (2018)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Tully is the third collaboration between director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, following on from Juno (2007) and Young Adult (2011). All three films deal with the role of women as child-bearers, looking in turn at teenage pregnancy and adoption, miscarriage, and postpartum depression, which in this case borders on psychosis...

Chinatown (1974)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Chinatown is a detective story, loosely inspired by the California water wars which took place between the fledgeling city of Los Angeles and the surrounding Owens Valley in the early twentieth century. The pivotal figure in those wars was William Mulholland, the chief architect of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, whose career came to an abrupt end with the failure of the St Francis Dam in 1928...

Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle Bay neighbourhood on the east side of Midtown Manhattan was a 'riverside back yard' for the city of New York. Imposing brownstones and squalid tenement housing butted up against the breweries, gasworks, and slaughterhouses which lined the waterfront. Eventually the waterfront would be reshaped by the United Nations headquarters, with dozens of diplomatic missions...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...

Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Poetry

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

Silentium! Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal the way you dream,...

Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)

Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...

Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’

Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)

Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...

James Joyce

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...

Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita

With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

Obituaries

Juliette Gréco, Doyenne of the French Chanson, Dies at 93

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJSkGd-t6U Juliette Gréco, doyenne of the French chanson, died on...

Stephen Sondheim, Who Reinvented the Musical Theatre, Dies at the Age of 91

The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died on Friday...

Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Influential Producer and Dub Pioneer, Dies at the Age of 85

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTNam6GbJYg Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the charismatic producer and restless pioneer...

Norm Macdonald Used To Think His Life Was Incomplete. Now It’s Finished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7K-kaelQEs Norm Macdonald, the comedian whose mischievous glint and deadpan...

Culturedarm

Subscribe to Culturedarm

A monthly subscription supports Culturedarm while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

Lock it in and fuhgeddaboudit with an annual subscription to Culturedarm, which supports the site while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

placeholder text
3
25
0

Albums

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Muslim Shaggan – Asar

Over the populous span of South Asia, a region...

Dave Sewelson, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, George Cartwright, Anthony Cox and Steve Hirsh – Murmuration

The Arkansas free jazz outpost Mahakala Music says that...

Klein – thirteen sense

For her last album marked the South London maverick...

Behind the Song

Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’

Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Behind the Song: David Bowie – ‘Subterraneans’

'Subterraneans' is the closing song on what has become perhaps David Bowie's most critically acclaimed album: Pitchfork placed Low at number 1 on their 'Top 100 Albums of the 1970s', on Q's list of the '100 Greatest British Albums Ever' Low was Bowie's highest entry at number 14, and while...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

Behind the Song: Animal Collective – ‘Summertime Clothes’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8 Animal Collective's eighth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was...

Tracks of the Week

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

At the Movies

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - When it comes to the blockbuster action movie, three franchises remain. There is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other assorted comic book pictures, y'know, for kids; Tom Cruise, most clearly for the ever stellar Mission: Impossible series, wilfully forgetting Jack Reacher but with shoutouts to American Made, Edge of Tomorrow, and the upcoming Top Gun sequel, sure to be a success; and then there's The Rock...

Uncut Gems (2019)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Juggling a growing amount of debt, Howard has begun pawning off as sports memorabilia the collateral he receives for loaning out his jewels. When the opal finally arrives from Ethiopia, the basketball player Kevin Garnett can hardly avert his gaze. Howard accepts a 2008 NBA Championship ring as Garnett takes lend of the opal, immediately pawning it for the sake of a little liquidity unbeknownst to Demany and the Boston Celtics star.

High Noon (1952)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the marshal of a small frontier town in New Mexico Territory, gets married in a small civil ceremony to his beautiful young wife Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly), a Quaker whose imminent plans include a family and a convenience store someplace else. Fully intending to play the doting husband, to that end it is also Kane's last day on the job, and he hands in his badge...

Tully (2018)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - Tully is the third collaboration between director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, following on from Juno (2007) and Young Adult (2011). All three films deal with the role of women as child-bearers, looking in turn at teenage pregnancy and adoption, miscarriage, and postpartum depression, which in this case borders on psychosis...

Halloween (1978)

★★ (2 out of 4 stars) - In the suburban neighbourhood of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, 1963, while other kids are out trick-or-treating, a six-year-old boy without any apparent motivation creeps up the stairs, slips on a mask, and slashes to death his near-nude teenage sister. Fifteen years later he's still confined to Smith's Grove, a sanatorium for psychiatric patients, but he breaks out and returns to Haddonfield...

World Cinema

North by Northwest (1959)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A Madison Avenue advertising man, run-of-the-mill if unusually tanned with his grey flannel suit an impeccable fit, stands up at the wrong moment in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Roger Thornhill has theatre tickets. He wishes to send a wire to his mother, but by summoning the wrong waiter and ostensibly responding to the wrong call, he gets mistaken for George Kaplan, a government agent.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In February 1969 in Hollywood, fading television star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) frequents bars and gets ferried around by his old stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Booth lives in a trailer with his pit bull Brandy, in an empty lot behind the drive-in in Van Nuys, but Dalton keeps up appearances with a luxury home in Beverly Crest overlooking Beverly Hills...

How to Steal a Million (1966)

★★½ (2.5 out of 4 stars) - Nicole Bonnet (Audrey Hepburn) is the daughter of an art forger, who has gathered so many supposed masterpieces in his private collection that he has won considerable renown in the world of art. Approached by the Kléber-Lafayette Museum, he proudly loans to the illustrious Paris institution (which for the sake of the film occupies the building of the real-life Musée Carnavalet) his most prized possession, his Cellini 'Venus'...

High Noon (1952)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the marshal of a small frontier town in New Mexico Territory, gets married in a small civil ceremony to his beautiful young wife Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly), a Quaker whose imminent plans include a family and a convenience store someplace else. Fully intending to play the doting husband, to that end it is also Kane's last day on the job, and he hands in his badge...

The Switch (2010)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - Kassie Larson (Jennifer Aniston) is in her thirties, and she's single, and with no romantic prospects on the horizon she decides she can no longer wait to have a child. She talks the matter over with her best friend Wally Mars (Jason Bateman) - they dated six years ago, and though it didn't work out they've got along swimmingly ever since...

Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle Bay neighbourhood on the east side of Midtown Manhattan was a 'riverside back yard' for the city of New York. Imposing brownstones and squalid tenement housing butted up against the breweries, gasworks, and slaughterhouses which lined the waterfront. Eventually the waterfront would be reshaped by the United Nations headquarters, with dozens of diplomatic missions...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...

Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Poetry

Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)

Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

When the first issue of Others: A Magazine of...

Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)

Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

Silentium! Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal the way you dream,...

James Joyce

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita

With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...

Obituaries

Dean Stockwell, Star of Blue Velvet and Quantum Leap, Dies at 85 Years Old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhPosL3UAN8 The actor Dean Stockwell died of natural causes on...

Kenzo Takada, the Japanese Designer Who Revolutionised French Fashion, Dies at 81

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7E4bITT4t8 With the wet weather and surging coronavirus already putting...

Michael K. Williams, Actor Who Illuminated the Lives of Marginal Black Men, Dies Aged 54

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50RJhOFDmiA Michael K. Williams, the actor who became known for...

Stephen Sondheim, Who Reinvented the Musical Theatre, Dies at the Age of 91

The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died on Friday...

Culturedarm

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Sign up to Culturedarm's weekly newsletter, which features a carefully curated blend of current articles, posts from the archive and sizzling hot tracks of the week.

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Drake – If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late

Drake If You're Reading This

The surprise release of Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late came, a couple of weeks ago, precisely on the eve of the sixth anniversary of 2009’s So Far Gone, the mixtape that established his credentials as one of this generation’s preeminent rappers. So Far Gone led to Drake signing with Young Money Entertainment, an imprint of Cash Money headed by Lil Wayne, with whom Drake was already a frequent collaborator.

Two contextual issues have marked the response to If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. The first involves the ongoing lawsuit between Lil Wayne and Cash Money – and Cash Money’s founder, Birdman – relating to issues of copyright and the delayed release of Wayne’s Tha Carter V. In January Lil Wayne filed a suit seeking the termination of his contract with Cash Money; $51 million in damages, citing money owed; and joint copyright over everything Young Money Entertainment has hitherto released. Wayne’s lawsuit thereby implicates Drake and Nicki Minaj, Young Money’s two biggest stars; and there are suggestions that both have fallen out with Birdman and Cash Money over personal differences and unpaid royalties. The sudden appearance of Drake’s record has been interpreted as a cursory attempt to fulfil contractual obligations; with its title read as a scarcely coded message directed at Birdman.

The second context revolves around the surprise nature of the release and its uncertain form: ostensibly put out as a mixtape, it has been embraced in essence as Drake’s fourth album proper, and the follow-up to 2013’s Nothing Was the Same. Discussing this debate on Twitter, the music writer Craig Jenkins suggested:

‘The distinction between albums, mixtapes and EPs is 100% a matter of marketing intent, ie. how badly the artist wants you to buy the product.

You drop a “mixtape” when you’re spitballing ideas out of sight of the charts or trying to regain some lost industry cachet.

You drop an “EP” when you think you’ve got your sound down and wanna float a more prestigious project to retail w/o the critics harshing you.

You drop the “album” when you are ready to rest your reputation on a single body of work.’

To some extent, this sudden manner of release is an inevitable result of albums leaking over the internet. In December, Madonna was compelled to make available the first six songs from her upcoming Rebel Heart owing to the leak in spates of assorted demos. Then in January, just one week after announcing a March release date, leaks encouraged Björk to immediately release the magnificent Vulnicura.

A case like Björk’s may well have occurred regardless; but Beyoncé undoubtedly signalled a decisive shift in the way major label stars conceive the release of their works. The old mode of setting a release date and advertising towards it has dissolved: a sudden release now serves as a means of promotion in its own right, as news spreads organically and from the ground up via the word of mouth of social media. Already this year new singles by Kanye West and Rihanna have emerged in a similar fashion, suddenly, with fragments first heard at fashion shows or performed live on television, videos teased on talk shows, and behind-the-scenes film footage put out via YouTube. The release of music today is increasingly a surreptitious and continuous affair, a multimedia and multispace endeavour revelling in the ceaseless (if short-spanning) attention of listeners.

Nevertheless, charging for what is professedly a mixtape is an interesting move. With DatPiff.com and competitors making so much rap and R&B available for free, serving to level the playing field while allowing aspiring talent – including Chance The Rapper, Rich Homie Quan, Young Thug, and Tink – to thrive, going the iTunes route was something of a risk. The tendency has been for mixtapes to appear for free – with artists using them as a means to establish themselves, to offer personal or unorthodox material, or for a credibility boost following a fallow period or critical or popular disdain – with some works receiving major label releases at a later date, provided they have received sufficient acclaim. This is a path taken previously by Terius Nash: 1977, for instance; and it was at one point the plan for ASAP Rocky’s Live.Love.ASAP, upon his signing with RCA and Polo Grounds Music. The So Far Gone mixtape was itself reformulated and reissued by Young Money as a shortened seven-track EP in September 2009.

In fact, DatPiff.com’s founder Kyle ‘KP’ Reilly has suggested that there were early negotiations towards making If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late a free release. Cash Money apparently intervened, and came to a compromise with the artist. The success of the approach taken has been immediately clear. In the first week of its release, Drake’s mixtape sold 495,000 copies and topped the Billboard 200. And this week all seventeen of the mixtape’s tracks have charted on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs. With Drake featuring on four more hits, he has twenty-one songs on the chart in total: obliterating the chart’s previous record of fourteen.

Musically, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late stands up to all this scrutiny. This is a late night album, with darkly looped synths, scattered samples, and beats which alternately stutter and hesitate then burst forward in brief spurts of momentum before again coming to a pause. In the space which the restrained production allows, Drake eschews the woozy atmospherics characteristic of his compatriot The Weeknd for a more focused outlook: with a present and thematically consistent set of lyrics; concentrated upon modulating and refining his verbal flow.

‘Legend’ opens on a slowly reverberating rhythm and Drake’s spectral voice, which cohabits the song with samples from Ginuwine’s ‘So Anxious’. The mixtape’s opener does serve as a sort of manifesto for what follows, in so far as it begins on a note of confrontation, with Drake rhyming ‘When I pull up on a nigga tell that nigga back, back / I’m too good with these words watch a nigga backtrack’; sees Drake with bold confidence declaring ‘I got this shit mapped out strong’; but also has him admitting ‘It’s so hard for me to let new people in’.

Beyond the occasional reference to missing cheques, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late is marked, not by anger, but by distance. Drake adopts a covetous persona, fiercely proud of his accomplishments and just as eager to ensure that nobody muscles in on his position at the pinnacle of popular music. There have already been numerous attempts to decipher all of the disses on the record: towards Tyga and Diddy, and perhaps also towards Kendrick Lamar, who has directed several lyrics at Drake amid a half-playful attempt to reignite the hip-hop feud as a micro-genre. Further than this there seems among some commentators the inclination to scan every reference to a fellow rapper as a slight. Broadly, over piano keys, the hook to ‘Energy’ sees Drake affirming ‘I got enemies, got a lot of enemies / Got a lot of people tryna drain me of my energy’.

But more than keeping his distance from other artists, there is Drake’s distance from the wider world. On ‘Energy’ he states ‘Fuck going online, that ain’t part of my day’ – a cutting throwaway, considering how pivotal the online community has been to his career, a key facet of his art always subsisting in its interplay with online trends, and the release of his first three mixtapes gaining him a significant audience via the internet. More, Drake can rap about running through Toronto with his ‘WOEs’, but at the same time depicts himself locked up in his studio, isolated and accepting no calls. Toronto is at the forefront of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, its various locales repeatedly referenced and portrayed in relation to Drake’s life and upbringing; but as on ‘Uptown’ from So Far Gone, he offers his representing on Toronto’s behalf in place of his regular physical presence in the city.

Throughout Drake’s flow is casual and loosely experimental while his tone remains resolute. ’10 Bands’ is one of the tape’s most driving and hypnotic cuts, with breaking percussion and a climax of sorts as Drake revels in his city having him ‘feelin’ like the one again’. His vocal stylings on ‘Know Yourself’ clearly echo those of Young Thug – Birdman’s latest protégé, along with Rich Homie Quan. ‘No Tellin” really comes alive in its final third, with Drake’s robotically rhythmic lines, delivered over mechanised soul, including the demand ‘Please do not speak to me like I’m that Drake from four years ago I’m at a higher place’.

After such a strong first five tracks, ‘Madonna’ and ‘6 God’ merely keep the tape ticking over. ‘Star67’ begins in the same vein, but then opens out with a change in tempo and Drake’s lingering voice transferring into song. Then on ‘Preach’, with its wobbly bass, industrial clanging, and rapidfire beats, PARTYNEXTDOOR arrives with a vocoder to give If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late new impetus. While this and the follow up, ‘Wednesday Night Interlude’, comprise two of the chillest pieces on the record, still Drake offers paranoid sentiments like ‘I am convinced that my calls are being recorded’; and he continues to navigate a relationship with women that veers from distrust and disinterest to their being on his mind ’24/7′.

‘Used To’ features Lil Wayne; ‘Now & Forever’ has Drake labouring over an interesting instrumental – which includes industrial sounds, ethereal spliced vocals, and a looped sample from Nas and Ginuwine’s ‘You Owe Me’ – conceivably in relation to his split with Cash Money; and ‘Company’ has Travis Scott on the microphone and contributing to the production.

As the mixtape comes to a close – before the melancholy soul of ‘Jungle’ and the triumphant finale of ‘6PM In New York’ – ‘You & The 6’ has Drake open up through a sustained address to his mother. Mother songs in the realm of rap are destined always to be compared to Tupac’s ‘Dear Mama’ – and Tupac, always occupying a central position, has recently returned to the forefront of the form courtesy of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Keep Ya Head Up’-referencing ‘The Blacker the Berry’ – but the intimacy of Drake’s address makes the comparison apt in this case. In a manner that quickly becomes conversational, in the first verse of the song Drake attempts to reassure his mother, doing his best to deflect her concerns and come to a mutual understanding regarding his romantic life. The beat shuffles, and Drake’s voice is replete with sighs and hesitations before he thanks his mother for raising him well.

In the second verse, Drake brings his father into the discussion. He notes that his father ‘made mistakes throughout his life’, but realises ‘he just want our forgiveness, and fuck it look how we living / I’m content with this story, who are we not to forgive him?’. Recalling his father spending time in prison, and his younger self rapping over the phone to his father’s fellow inmates, Drake considers ‘now I got me a Grammy, that could be part of the reason / Let’s just call this shit even, we got some things to believe in’. Utterly eschewing simpler concepts of being wrought through struggle, and overcoming the perpetual strife and bragging of rap, Drake momentarily offers a calm, submissive graciousness which rarely finds expression in any art.

Christopher Laws
Christopher Lawshttps://www.culturedarm.com
Christopher Laws is the writer and editor of Culturedarm, currently based in Umeå, Sweden.

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