Reviewed that new Drizzy for Spin. He’s still a smarmy creepo but he totally makes it work here. There are some sequencing issues on this one (here is my redux version) but it’s nearly 80 minutes and doesn’t really feel like it, which is impressive. Because I didn’t get to fit it in the review: The title track! “Take Care” is like a B-Side to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” like the e-pill comedown after that song kicked you all around. Jamie xx’s late-song breakdown of Heron’s vocals from We’re New Here’s “I’ll Take Care Of You,” in this context, sound like some depressed version of “The Ha Dance” or something. Then again, everything on this record sounds like a depressed version of something else, doesn’t it?
Perhaps “Headlines” had you thinking Take Care would be Drake’s humble moment. On that relatively upbeat single, he raps, “I might be too strung out on compliments, overdosed on confidence,” and, later, expresses appreciation for the fans who told him he “fell off” between his hit 2009 mixtape So Far Gone and his star-packed 2010 debut Thank Me Later. And even though “Headlines” is pretty much a rewrite of a previous hit — the “6 Foot 7 Foot” to “Over” ’s “A Milli” — that hardly matters because Drake is consciously lapping himself, returning to the same topic and style with another year of experience, making his conflicted approach to being richer than you just a little more lived-in.
An appropriately absurd cover depicting a despondent Drizzy, five o’clock shadow-sad, looking like a decadent Baba Booey, also foreshadowed a hard, if melodramatic, look in the mirror. Plus, he titled this new one Take Care — so much sweeter than Thank Me Later, right? But on “Over My Dead Body,” Take Care’s first track, our favorite confused Canadian calculates last year’s earnings plus how much he paid in taxes, and chalks the latter up to “you lose some, you win some.” All right, look, man, the cash lopped off the end of my paycheck blows too, but the whole idea behind taxes is that by paying them, we all, in the long run, “win some”!
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?