“Really I think I like who I’m becoming,” Drake told us cautiously on his second album, Take Care. On its follow-up, Nothing Was the Same, he’s thought about it some more. “Prince Akeem, they throw flowers at my feet, nigga!” he screams. “I could go an hour on this beat, nigga!” The song, “Tuscan Leather,” which opens the record, is six full minutes long with no chorus, a point Drake is eager for us to absorb: “This is nothing for the radio/But they’ll still play it though/’Cause it’s the new Drizzy Drake, that’s just the way it go.”
The Drake Era has ended; welcome to the Drake Regime. Aubrey Graham’s gone from an unlikely rapper to an accepted rapper to maybe the biggest rapper out, all in four years, and he’s the genre’s biggest current pop crossover star. Kanye has, for the moment, stepped out of the pop-radio wars, which means that Drake currently has no meaningful competition. On Nothing Was the Same, he acts accordingly—the mansion doors swing shut behind you and he mostly stops pretending to be nice. “I’m on my worst behavior,” he leers, over a glowering low-end synth and an insectile battery of defaced-sounding percussion, courtesy of DJ Dahi. It’s the meanest-sounding thing Drake has rapped over, and he matches it with some of his angriest lyrics, a series of sputtered “muhfuckas never loved us” surrounding an extended riff on Mase’s verse on “Mo Money Mo Problems.”
As Drake albums go, this is the Drakiest: Except for Jay-Z, who shows up at the end of the album, Nothing Was the Same is an entirely solo affair, and all of Drake’s tendencies are dialed up. Even for a rapper known for sniping at non-famous girlfriends on record, he’s breathtakingly petty here: The album is four days old on the internet, and already his line, “The one that I needed was Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree/I’ve always been feeling like she was the piece to complete me,” from “From Time” is infamous, a reference so specific that the actual Courtney has had to put a padlock on her social-media life. Drake has been talking to old flames who have no equivalent soap box to climb on to talk back since before “CeCe’s Interlude,” of course, but as he’s gotten more famous, they’ve grown more malicious, and here they feel like a series of emotional drone strikes.
On “Paris Morton Music,” he relishes the thought of showing up at his high school reunion, watching everyone “go through security clearance,” and on “Too Much,” he airs out his family: “Money got my family going backwards/No dinners, no holidays, no nothing,"”he laments, before going in on his uncle, his cousins, and even his mother: “I hate the fact that my mom cooped up in the apartment, telling herself that she’s too sick to get dressed up and go do shit like that’s true shit.” Drake recently performed this song on Jimmy Fallon, apologizing briefly to his family before tearing into it. The album title, in context, reads like a self-fulfilling prophecy viewed from the rear view, an acknowledgment that he’s cutting final ties, torching the last bridges. He might like who he’s become, but you can hear he doesn’t expect anyone else to.