It's still as easy as ever to mock or laugh or just plain hate Drake, but I think now, in 2013, as he releases his third studio album, it is no longer possible to dismiss him. Certainly, those qualities that incited the rage of his most vocal detractors remain intact across Nothing Was the Same, out this week, and anybody inclined toward irritation from the outset will leave annoyed as planned. Drake is still Drake, of course, and Drake is still Drake's favorite subject. That he continues to regard rap exclusively as a vehicle for blinkered self-reflection at this point goes without saying. What may be less apparent, however, is that Drake has finally fulfilled the promise he has been working toward since the beginning of his career, a promise that, ironically enough, didn't even begin with him. Rather, Drake has done what Kanye West set out to do long ago: He has outdone 808s & Heartbreak.
This requires a bit of unpacking. When Kanye West released 808s & Heartbreak in the winter of 2008, it was received by critics and audiences with a combination of bafflement and disdain. Maybe it seemed obvious, even then, that 2007's Graduation might as well have been titled Stagnation, and that Kanye could not continue to sustain an interesting career by simply regurgitating more of the same, however good the same might have been. But even if a sea change was anticipated, nobody could have anticipated just how drastic it would be. You may recall that all manner of rumor and speculation about its apparently bizarre production circulated widely leading up to the album's release — it was recorded in Honolulu, it featured little more than an old Roland TR-808, it dealt with the aftermath of Kanye's breakup and the recent passing of his mother, and it found Kanye singing with Auto-Tune rather than rapping — all of which, despite sounding patently insane, proved ultimately true. Kanye West had retreated way back into the deepest reaches of his heart and had emerged, finally, with something utterly strange. Hip-hop had never seen anything like it.
Popular culture, of course, loves to make narratives out of its own recent history, and nothing lends itself quite so well to the process as a comeback album. And so it was that the unprecedented success of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2011 confirmed the failure of 808s as wholly resolute: In retrospect it was even easier to see that synth-pop experiment as a sole career misstep, a daring and perhaps even necessary miscalculation from an artist clearly even then on the road toward his masterpiece. The two albums seemed to somehow make more sense in relation to one another, the latter more legibly perfect when contrasted with the former's grievous err. 808s & Heartbreak is thus relegated to the marginalia of hip-hop history. But the thing about 808s is that, despite its glaring imperfections, it offered the budding rap stars of the time a glimpse of a new way forward, not so much a different style as a different aesthetic mode. The qualities that marked the album as a failure for Kanye West — its ill-fitting minimalism, its sentimentality, its emphasis on vocal melodies in place of rapping, its high-gloss pop sheen — were precisely the things that would go on to influence a new generation of rappers, effectively changing the rap game for good.
Enter Aubrey "Drake" Graham, who released his third mixtape, So Far Gone, in early 2009, and with it scored a massive radio hit — the ubiquitous "Best I Ever Had" — which announced his arrival to the world. Though produced only a few short months after 808s first landed, So Far Gone features a riff on 808s' opening track, "Say You Will," and is otherwise indebted to its overall style and tone. You could even call So Far Gone the first post-808s record: It is characterized by the same feeling of synth-aided melancholy, shot through with the same late-night chill and '80s new wave flavor. Though Drake wore the style more effortlessly — he has a better natural singing voice, for one thing, and (at least back then) a less natural gift for straight-up rapping — it was nevertheless impossible even in 2009 to imagine something remotely like So Far Gone without 808s & Heartbreak establishing the template before it. It was clear that Drake had recognized in Kanye's album an aesthetic he knew he'd be well-suited to, and he had the good sense to know that, despite its reputation as a failure, he could take the basic framework and furnish it tastefully enough to make a success of it on his own.
One quality for which Drake never gets enough credit is taste. This is sort of difficult to qualify, which is probably why critics don't spend much time working through it, but to me it seems self-evident in his case. Drake has surrounded himself with the best talents available, hand-selecting guests rappers and matching them up with world-class beats as if he were pairing wines and meals. Thank Me Later and Take Care, his first two studio albums, are five-star records in every conceivable way even without Drake's presence. He puts them together like a master curator, working with the very best in hip-hop producers and drawing out the best in every collaborator. It's mind-boggling how meticulously these albums have been sculpted, and they are essentially perfect in technical terms. Within a genre notorious for bloated productions and overlong running times, Drake went ahead and mastered the art of sequencing; both records flow from low-key introductions to major bangers to show-stopping midsections before winding down at just the right moment.
Top-notch curation resulted in two superb, sprawling modern rap classics, and it's easy to imagine Drake churning out another five-star record of this kind every year or two for the rest of his career. But Nothing Was the Same is a different story. Rather than continue to make bigger and more sprawling albums, Drake has narrowed his focus, and the result is an album that opts for depth and complexity over scope. Five tracks and 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor, Nothing Was the Same feels lean and fleet, its production dense but thoughtfully streamlined. With the exception of the lead single, "Started From the Bottom," little here qualifies as a hook, and even at its most populist-leaning nothing sounds especially radio-friendly (a point Drake concedes in the first verse). The whole thing sounds more insular and self-contained, a more direct act of personal expression from its maker. Where Thank Me Later and Take Care were loaded with celebrity appearances, Nothing Was the Same only features one guest verse, from Jay-Z, which only appears (not insignificantly) on the last track. This is Drake at is his purest: "All Me," the bonus track and third single, isn't just a boast. It's a declaration of intent.
If 808s & Heartbreak was a failure, its intentions were at least good. It sought to work through personal issues by using rap as a therapeutic device. Nothing Was the Same takes a similar approach, but it is successful because Drake finally has the capacity to make it work on his own. Three albums and three mixtapes have done the once-amateur rapper a lot of good, and his flows here are line for line as killer as any you're likely to find on Dark Fantasy (or elsewhere). Drake is at the top of his game, and while he no longer needs to curate his collaborators as all-inclusively, the people around him are at the top of their game, and they are all working together to create the ideal platform for the artist's self-reflection and self-expression. He's exhausted the topic of fame in and of itself — always his least interesting obsession — and shifted the focus to its emotional consequences, from how he has been alienated from his family to how he couldn't make it work with the girl he wanted to marry. This isn't just the album Kanye West wanted to make in 2008 — it's better than he could have imagined.
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