Tory Lanez made hip-hop headlines recently after he was pictured on Instagram alongside fellow Torontonian singer-rapper Drake, their longstanding beef finally quashed. But Drake might want to reanimate it on hearing this astonishingly hackneyed, aggressively chameleonic LP, and how shamelessly Lanez apes his flow. Well, just the cocksure scorn of his more thugged-out moments – there is very little of Drake’s melodic invention on show here.
He’s not the only MC to get ripped off on Lanez’s gutless quest to avoid developing his own artistry. Swae Lee’s entreaties (on 4 Me), Post Malone’s mournful melodies (on Hillside), the Weeknd’s jaded songcraft (on Real Thing), Rick Ross’s freewheeling declarations (on Benevolent) – all are rendered less appealingly in Lanez’s strained, vocal-fried tones. Aside from stark, straightforward domestic abuse storytelling on Pieces – where J Cole takes his turn to be imitated – the lyrics, full of bad girls and truly blank verse, are as generic and lumpen as value-range muesli.
As Migos or 2 Chainz ably demonstrate, rapping about racks and whips isn’t necessarily dull, but you need to have wit, nimble hooks and idiosyncratic flow, none of which Lanez possesses. He’s so profoundly unoriginal you start to wonder if he is actually a rudimentary Spotify AI project who has been fed the RapCaviar playlist and given an edgy beard. But Lanez ultimately doesn’t pass the Turing test, and his jack-of-all-trades versatility leaves him the master of none.
