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Our Loss

Craig Jenkins is a critic who writes about music and television and comedy and video games, and he wishes there were more than 24 hours in a day.

Photo: Drake/YouTube

“Give her everything ’cause you swear she’s worth it
All your friends tell you, ‘The bitch don’t deserve it
’Love is blind, so there goes your wealth
Until one day you see things for yourself” — Slick Rick, “Treat Her Like a Prostitute”

“I’m not the one you sleep wit’ to eat quick
Want a cheap trick, better go down to FreakNik
You got to hit me off, buy this girl gifts of course
So I look sick in my six with my Christian LaCroix” — Lil’ Kim, “Crush on You (Remix)”

“How much I gotta spend for you to pipe down?” — Drake, “Pipe Down”

Love rap is a double-edged sword. For every “I’ll Be There for You / You’re All I Need to Get By,” there’s a “Domestic Violence.” For every song honoring a woman’s strengths and struggles, there is an equal and opposite moment when they’re minimized, disrespected, or treated like a trophy. It’s a problem not even an influx of powerful women in rap could solve; we saddle them with double standards, and should they overcome them, we give credit to whichever man was closest. We preoccupy ourselves with the way they look and dress. God forbid a woman owns her sexual prowess on record the way the guys do. (Yes, Lil’ Kim showed skin in the videos. A lot of people did that.) If you had a problem with Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion rhyming about bodily fluids, how closely are you listening to rap, really?

You could argue that attitudes have shifted thanks to a wave of music-industry players such as Ye and Drake, whose singles from the aughts opened doors by waving off hypermasculine tropes and exploring romance in greater subtlety and earnestness. Both artists have that dog in them, too, though. Drake offers insight into the mind-set of the North American men in his audience. He’s fluent in the language of social justice but wise to the florid history of strip-club jams and players’ anthems, the kind of guy who pops up on a flip of Juvenile’s classic “Back That Azz Up” dunking on his exes in order to ingratiate himself to a new fling and pulls it off, who is equally believable at the pettiness of a “How Bout Now” and the reverence of “Shut It Down.” In the turbulent first quarter of the young century, cishet men have an awareness of the need for a more equitable balance of power in every corner of culture and also have fantastic incentives not to do the work. Patriarchy rewards petulance. The spiteful spirit of some of the love songs in last year’s Certified Lover Boy felt like a symptom of a dark and pisive time, a whiff of the same bad air that made Ye go out of his way to try to help reform DaBaby’s and Marilyn Manson’s public images on Donda. Drake pivoting into zesty dance music this summer on Honestly, Nevermind felt like a nice reprieve, but outside “Jimmy Cooks” hitting No. 1, it went nowhere — the ultrarare collective rebuke of a new Drake release.

Her Loss, his new album, billed as a collaboration with Atlanta rapper 21 Savage, is a hangover from the club nights of the previous project, a speedy retreat into calculated cool-hunting and passive-aggressive aristocrat rap. Guesting on most of Her Loss’s 16 tracks, Savage renews Drake’s interest in bars but also in excitable cruelty. Sometimes the flurry of threats and chauvinist snark feels like a purposeful tribute to the coarser hip-hop that Drake’s earliest hits seemed to reject, but this can make the album feel musically and emotionally retrograde.

“Mr. Right Now,” off 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’s Savage Mode II, and the Lover Boy deep cut “Knife Talk” proved Drake and 21 work well as equals, complementing each other’s strengths. Drake’s the untouchable mogul making your life hell from far away; you trust Savage when he says he’ll show up at your house. Tanks and snipers make a great team. Her Loss plays this dynamic up to hilarious effect in the trio of ice-cold rap workouts up top, on which both rappers touch on a life of precarious career plays and lavish expenditures from different angles. On “Rich Flex,” Drake is making it clear he loves the other guy’s coarse image, while 21 speaks on the mortal danger that money and visibility can put a rapper in: “Never send a bitch your dot, that’s how you get shot.” “Major Distribution” reverses those roles, as Drake implies that he’s had someone disappeared — “Paid a hundred, ran up something light / Simple price to keep ‘em out my life” — and Savage raps like the pop star: “Major distribution, labels callin’, Harry Styles numbers, it’s a robbery / My niggas go in-Zayn to catch a body.” Trading bars during “On BS,” both lock into a seamless conceitedness: “Popped an Adderall, I feel like I can lift a tree up / Seen too many cameras, so I never lift my ski up / I jump on your song and make you sound like you the feature / I jump on your song and make a label think they need ya.” The banter entertains because both rappers are genuine fans of each other, but it’s too bad Her Loss chases that high with “BackOutsideBoyz,” a clinic in the album’s flaws: the flows Drake borrows and the commitment to reminding anyone in earshot that he can be powerfully petty by rehashing a years-old tiff with DRAM over “Cha Cha.”

“BackOutsideBoyz” also sees Drake working with the album’s other major influence, the Atlanta rapper and wock keeper Lil Yachty, whose presence is felt not just in the production and ad-libs but in the flow and tone of Drake’s voice, which calls back to the lilting, childlike melodies in Lil Boat gems such as “Minnesota.” Elsewhere, Drake tries Chicago-drill flows on “Broke Boys” and dips into the drippy, drumless Donda sound in the closer, “I Guess It’s Fuck Me.” He wants you to know he’s been everywhere; you hear it in the way his voice changes up around the company. Savage is all the more fascinating of a foil for this kind of geographic slipperiness as an Atlanta rapper born in London who is able to claim more than one country but doesn’t need to put on airs to let us know he’s a world citizen. He juggles football fandom, his council-estate upbringing, and southern pride in “Circo Loco” — “Went from Angell Town Estate to a big estate / Prolly woulda had a zombie on me if I would’ve stayed,” “Still posted in the A where niggas feel me / Still gotta see the Gunners win Premier League” — but the discourse around the song has fixated on Drake’s disrespectful double entendre about Megan Thee Stallion’s shooting. Lacking the grit that makes 21 Savage’s raps about opps pop, the feelings of regret and remorse haunting songs such as Savage Mode’s “Ocean Drive,” Savage Mode II’s “Many Men,” and “all my friends,” the Post Malone collab from 2018’s I Am > I Was, Drake comes off like someone fishing for the trouble that finds him, a vibe pervasive in “BackOutsideBoyz” and in the songs about women that live up to the whiff of spite in Her Loss’s title.

By teaming up with the rapper who made “Slaughter Ya Daughter” and “X” after gorgeous, mirthful Honestly, Nevermind jams like “Flight’s Booked” drew guffaws from guys who preferred crabbier Lover Boy cuts, it seems as if Drake’s coldly acknowledging that his audience craves a certain amount of mess. (“Middle of the Ocean” reframes Nevermind’s sharp detour as necessary territorial expansion — “Niggas so ignorant in our hood, they bе like, ‘Why the fuck you makin’ techno?’ / I’m worldwidе, and this is just another cargo jet flow I had to let go” — which is … interesting when you know that “Way 2 Sexy” charted higher than “Sticky” pretty much everywhere on the planet.) Her Loss’s aim to please that crowd and the subjects of songs such as “Best I Ever Had” and “Fancy” throws things off balance. For every highlight like “Treacherous Twins,” one of the best Drake love songs in years because it actually asks him to dance around his range as a vocalist, there’s another song or line that eats away at that goodwill. “Spin Bout U” dismisses Republican lawmakers as “men who never got pussy in school” and pledges to lift up a love interest who suffered domestic abuse; then “Hours in Silence” complains about not receiving a finder’s fee for helping a significant other discover herself. Drake often writes women as fixer-uppers, complimenting their drive, offering them freedom from financial burden. Sometimes he sounds more like an angel investor than a boyfriend. “Hours” falls prey: “I drain accounts to make you love me.” So does “BS”: “I’m a gentleman, I’m generous / I blow a half a million on you hoes, I’m a feminist.” Bringing Savage around to talk that talk is a peculiar choice: Yes, 21 has made grimy sex songs like “Fuckin Niggaz Bitches,” but, incrementally, he’s shown greater range on I Am’s “RIP Luv” and “Special” and “FaceTime” off 2017’s Issa Album.

Drake uses the stretches of Her Loss that he gets to himself to zero in on much smaller worries. “Middle of the Ocean” flies off the rails as Aubrey goes after Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder and husband of Drake’s ex, Serena Williams, calling the man a groupie, as if there were a fault in being the biggest fan of your wife, the tennis champion. Again, the drama obscures great lyrics. The “Middle of the Ocean” bars that didn’t get blasted out online are the best — “First got to America, niggas wouldn’t check for me / No chance the kid’ll make it here, like vasectomy / They underestimated my trajectory” — which is par for the course for an album containing some of the artist’s finest rapping and most baffling judgment calls. Why are we revisiting all this 2015–16 beef? Why was Meg’s shooting a punch line the week after we mourned Takeoff? Why are there so few women involved with crafting these songs about love and romance year after year? Her Loss shows us how 21 Savage is growing while revealing Drake’s tropes: the song about the hard-working woman who needs a break, the song about how he can show her the world she’s missing out on, and the song in which he later feels used after spending all that money on her.

Drake is capable of so much more, but he seems unsure his audience wants it. Change can get expensive when your music garners billions of streams, and fans who fell in love with a now outdated version of you come to each consecutive project with the expectation that you’ll still be the artist you were ten years ago. Caving and capitulating and selling them the same unchanging playboy image is a choice, and Her Loss calls the bravery of that decision into question during winning moments like “Treacherous Twins,” in which 21 Savage goes for broke by pushing past the rough image his music is known for without losing any charm. “Spin Bout U” acknowledges the perilousness of this moment, when reproductive rights are being gutted, but then Her Loss continues to talk the same kind of shit the ’80s Too $hort and ’90s Kilo Ali records did. As pressing as it is right now to rally around women, there’s just as much adulation to be earned from treating them another way. The audience that grew up on both “I Need Love” and “Freaky Tales,” or “Slob on My Knob” and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” or “Not Tonight” and “Xxplosive,” or “Poetic Justice” and “She” has been hearing mixed messages about sex, sexuality, agency, and commitment its whole life. It’s not entirely on Drake and 21 to fix this; it’s bleak seeing even the “Fancy” man losing interest in niceties.

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