Nobody better seizes on trends than Drake. When the Toronto rapper hears a new sound, he’s quick to incorporate it into his style, and when he sees a new artist bubbling (say, Migos or Fetty Wap), he’s quick to do a track with them. It’s probably no coincidence that Jay Z has also long been a master of this approach, or that Drake is poised to have a similarly lengthy and successful career. The two have, through this process, become kingmakers. When Jay collaborated with Kanye West for 2011’s Watch the Throne, it represented a formal acknowledgment that Jay’s former protege was now on his level – a top echelon superstar in his own right.
A similar thing happened to the rapper Future over the weekend, when he and Drake released their mixtape, What a Time to Be Alive. Future, an Atlanta MC affiliated with the Dungeon Family collective (also known for spawning Outkast and Goodie Mob), has been bubbling since the beginning of the decade, breaking out in 2011 with his appearance on the YC song Racks, and his critically beloved 2012 debut Pluto. His mixtape from March, 56 Nights, will get many album of the year votes, and his July album DS2 (short for Dirty Sprite 2) hit No 1. He’s been on a tear.
Drake and Future have collaborated often, but things haven’t always been smooth between them. There were reports that Drake would kick him off his 2013 tour (though it didn’t happen), and that same year Future said he played an uncredited songwriting role in Drake’s single Started From the Bottom. But the pair are clearly simpatico now. Drake said he recently travelled to Atlanta intending to work with Future on only a few songs, but it quickly mushroomed into an entire collaborative album, crafted in six days.
The result, What a Time to Be Alive, is marketed as a mixtape, though if you don’t have Apple Music you’ll have to buy it on iTunes. It’s partly an early Christmas present for Apple – with whom Drake signed this year, for the approximate GDP of Ontario – and also represents Drake’s knighting of Future as hip-hop royalty. Drake has never really done a collaboration like this before, and it puts the two of them on the same plane, with Drake’s crisply articulated melancholy musings alternating with Future’s druggy, Auto-tuned epiphanies.
Is it any good? At times, yeah, it’s a pleasure to hear their different takes on similar themes, such as on Live From the Gutter. “I watched my broad give up on me like I’m average,” laments Future, perhaps referencing the mother of one of his children, singer Ciara, who’s now with Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson. (To console himself, Future goes up to his attic to count his money.) Drake, meanwhile, raps mysteriously about his entourage and his close associates trapped in situations they can’t get out of. He obliquely references his stress over the Meek Mill ghostwriting allegations, but addresses their beef more directly on 30 For 30 Freestyle, his one solo track on the work. (Never mind that it doesn’t sound like an actual freestyle.)
Never thought I’d be talking from this perspective
But I’m not really sure what else you expected
When the higher-ups have all come together as a collective
With conspiracies to end my run and send me a message
This stanza has the ring of the absurd. Beyond Meek Mill’s efforts and that of a few, shit-talking others, there has hardly been an organized conspiracy to knock Drake off his perch. Further, Drake by almost all accounts emerged victorious from their verbal dust-up. He’s on top now, for real, and nobody’s really arguing any more.
This lack of stakes is ultimately what sinks What a Time to Be Alive. Earlier in the year, Drake was caught up in real drama, which helped imbue his Meek Mill response songs and If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late with interesting tension. Now, however, feels like the time for his victory lap. Instead, we get paranoia, entitled boasts, and veiled threats, like on the grating Big Rings. (“I got a really big team/ And they need some really big rings/ They need some really nice things/ Better be coming with no strings.”)
Future’s parts are more interesting and fun. His solo track, Jersey, is a manic, scrambled series of surreal images describing what it’s like to be on wild ascent like his. “Crime rate’s goin’ crazy, crazy/ Cause my young niggas so thirsty/ Couple commas, made a purchase/ Caught the wave, I ain’t surfin’.” And the album’s beats, from a variety of producers closely associated with the two rappers, do well creating an unsettled mood.
But the works lacks an urgency to make it memorable, especially when both artists have already released such strong work this year. To make what is perhaps an obvious point: perhaps they should have spent more than six days working on it.
