Drake Is A Loser But We Knew That Already

‘For All The Dogs’ loses the idgaf war.

Please keep in mind that it’s this little smirk and January 6-core outfit saying absolutely anything. Photo: Screenshot.

Drake used to belong to women, or at least he thought he did. A Drake song was broadly, sometimes comically, desirous: he missed and mourned almost every woman who looked at him too long. He missed Toronto but he’d outgrown living with his mom; he found both his old life and his new one discomfiting. After himself, women were his favorite subject: he was concerned about us and consumed by us, whether it was Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree, Rihanna, or his mother. “Every black girl that went to college likes Drake,” Daniel told Issa in an early Insecure episode. Issa grinned, and said, “He just really gets us!” 

“For All The Dogs,” Drake’s newest release, is an album dedicated to deadbeats and incels, and the women that frustrate them. Drake, in 2023, is remarkably insecure. These are mid raps masquerading as mic drops; Drake is losing, battle by battle, the idgaf war. There is a song where he proves how much he’s not in love with Rihanna by rapping about Rihanna (and her 2016 release Anti, which is more compelling and slippery than anything he has ever made). There is a song about how 25-year-old women are emotionally immature, but the 36-year-old who can’t even text her — “typed some shit, then I erased what I felt” — evades introspection. There is a Drake song about not caring what the Grammys, or Michelle Obama, or Esperanza Spalding, think about him. There is a Drake song about needing to leave a woman at home so he can have a good time. There are several Drake songs about Drake treating you better than another man could, though he offers no evidence to back up this claim, and much evidence to dispute it. There are so many more songs of threats and provocations, wherein the man who was washed by Lil Baby twice is suddenly consumed with proving his own power. 

But Drake has always been petty, and childish. His emotional immaturity made for some of his most evocative writing. But he was rapping so much better then. The essential emptiness of “For All The Dogs” is the way the world’s biggest rapper steps into his bully pulpit with so little to say. Fuck women? He’s said that. He’s a gangster? He’s said that too. “Whipped and chained you like American slaves?” Please. Be serious: he is reaching for the God-level cornball quality of “I wasn’t hiding my kid from the world. I was hiding the world from my kid” or “Say that you a lesbian, girl me too” and coming up short. And, if nothing else, at least the beats were better. This downbeat album is resuscitated by the Sexxy Red and SZA-assisted “Rich Baby Daddy,” but only for a moment.

Please keep in mind that this is the man — this man, above, with that goofy smirk — is the one telling a woman that he’s better than her. Photo: Screenshot.

The music video “God’s Plan,” in 2018, followed Drake around as he gave a lot of random people cash, totaling nearly a million dollars. He paid students’ tuition, and he bought families’ groceries. It was schmaltzy at the time, but is quaint in retrospect. Last week he gave $50,000 to a fan just because the guy’s girlfriend left him. What a remarkably pathetic thing to do. 

“It's weighin' heavy on my moral scale / Knowin' they gon' sell another citizen 'caine, they think they Orson Welles,” Drake raps on “8AM in Charlotte.” That, to me, is the most evocative image of “For All The Dogs,” Drake, lonely and embittered, wandering around his Xanadu, making a case that he deserves everything to no one in particular.

From The Desk of Azealia Banks
On whatever podcast he’s hosting now Joe Budden was similarly unimpressed with the new Drake album. “You are 36,” he said. “Stop fucking with these younger niggas and stop fucking these 25-year-olds!”