Day 7: Drake – Certified Lover Boy

Album cover art courtesy of OVO and Republic

I’m a little bit ill right now, and quite frankly, I’m just not really in the mood to enjoy things. Any record I listen to will be tarred by the memory of me feeling like a one-woman snot factory. It’s just not one of those colds or flus where I want to snuggle up and watch a nice film, listen to a nice album, burn a candle and enjoy a good book, I can’t find any entertainment that I want to focus on. Because of this, I thought it might be the right time to tackle Drake.

I’ve had an issue with the fact that I very much dislike Drake as a person, but I don’t have much of an opinion on him as an artist. I’ve heard the usual Drake singles that everyone has, but I’ve never actually sat down to listen to him. Maybe it’s because I dislike him so much. Any time a male musician openly campaigns to “free Tory [Lanez],” the Z-list rapper who’s in prison for shooting a woman, my eyes roll so far back in my head that I’m afraid they’ll stay there. Drake, sadly, is one of them.

It’s a strong start for Certified Lover Boy. I like the pitched-up version of “Michelle” by The Beatles that the first song, “Champagne Poetry,” is built around. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much all downhill from there. Most of the time, the album sounds alright, but it suffers from a dire lack of substance. You have to physically stop yourself from listening to the lyrics if you want to enjoy it, lest you hear Drake announce that he’s a lesbian, or that he saved a stripper by giving her a business loan in exchange for sexual favours. Is there a name for what that phenomenon may be? Hmm, I’m pretty sure there’s a name for that.

And it is just so goddamn long. It’s the album version of a meeting that could have been an email. It’s a bit of a snoozefest in the beginning, then there’s a pretty stark Gangster Drake section after the beautiful “Yebba’s Heartbreak,” then it picks up when it pivots into Lover Boy yearner rap with good features. What the thinking was in putting the best songs at the end, I don’t know. Frankly, the only impressive part of the whole album is that there’s a song about being sexy that samples Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” and it manages to not even be a little bit fun – that’s almost an accomplishment.

Certified Lover Boy? Certified 4/10. Would I like this more if I didn’t find Drake so obnoxious as a person? Probably. I also might have gone higher if I hadn’t stopped to listen to the lyrics, but unfortunately I did. I slogged through it and it’s over. Anyway, free my boy Rick.