I had fun clicking through the files, but I also noticed that these are exactly the clips a politician might leak of himself after being caught muttering a racist comment or punching his aide. The material presents itself as a raw hard drive, but in reality it's as curated and polished as any self-made popstar documentary, designed to confirm the loyalty of die-hard fans. Surprisingly, there are no videos of Drake kissing babies and volunteering at a homeless shelter on the weekends.
Drake became a star because of his vulnerability and silliness. He felt like you knew him even if you actually didn't. Sure, he starred in a Canadian teen soap opera, but at his core, he was a rap nerd as connected to blogs and music forums as anyone. “Marvin's Room” isn't the definitive Drake song because the song is amazing, but because it's melodramatic and crazier than he probably even realized. Flaws are Drake; uncoolness is drake. For an artist who started out so embarrassingly transparent, to have it all censored just feels wrong.
Especially in the wake, or rather break, of Drake's beef with Kendrick Lamar. Even with Lil Yachty running a PR campaign for Drake, dismissing the “He didn't give a f*ck…he was real cool” kind of bullshit, we know that “The Heart Pt 6” wasn't created by an unbothered man. lives like a bluesman who tours with his boys and breaks hearts along the way (sort of the plot for the 1980 Willie Nelson movie Honeysuckle rose). He is obsessed with his image and status and with preventing the inevitable downfall that eventually comes for every rapper. His fear of losing the top spot is what fuels him — sometimes for better (his productivity) and sometimes for worse (have you heard For all dogs?). The footage depicts Drake's movement with the refreshing feel of a sports film, as you'd expect.
There is a clip that changes the tone slightly. It's a nearly 10-minute interview with Drake's longtime engineer OVO Noel from back in the day CLB (I'm ready to reevaluate CLB anytime, by the way), in Barbados. As the trees sway in the background, the interviewer asks Noel about Drake: “How do you think he'd do if he wasn't number one?”
“That's a weird question,” Noel replies with a shrug. Then, he hesitates. For a moment, it seems like he might actually be imagining a version of Drake coming back to Earth. But after the interviewer presses again, Noel tiptoes back, offering meaningless platitudes about being used as motivation. Right there, I knew that whole hard drive dump was nothing more than 100 fucking gigabytes of fan service.
Keep me away from M. Night Shyamalan's Spotify playlists
There are a lot of choices that don't work in M. Night Shyamalan's new big, dumb serial killer thriller Trapespecially those related to music. Among them is Saleka Shyamalan's daughter as pop star Lady Raven. Not only does about a quarter of the movie force us to listen to Billie Eilish's ballad, but when the movie devolves into a showdown between her and the killer (Josh Hartnett as The Butcher), it lacks any juice. (I'd buy the theory that Lady Raven talking like a Disney-trained cyborg is a commentary on pop star hollowness if it were anyone but his daughter in the role.) There's also Kid Cudi's The Thinker, Lady's musical partner Raven with the long blond hair of Legolas, who doesn't do much – that being said, I'd put the role up a notch Man on the Moon 3: The Chosen.
