“Boasts and grievances blend together, track after track, into a thick thematic murk.”
– Mukqs on DS2
“Making music is part hard work and part social media performance — and then life goes on, like a meme.”
– Hydroyoga on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late
Reporting live from the gutter: Watch the Industry Throne claimants reign baaack-to-back only months after Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, more than 56 nights since Future’s DS2, and any time now before the impending gloom of Drake’s forthcoming album, Views From The 6. This is all happening while Future and Drake still share airplay (an anachronism with resurrected clout) via “Where Ya At,” the song that planted the dream of this release. The spectacle exists larger than life in the it’s-too-late-capital world of radio trap, their brands of ego resonating en masse (yeah, I’m talking Twitter) like maybe no other artists right now. Their combined social media accounts stir us consumers into a guaranteed-platinum frenzy of fake countdowns and meme celebrations. We love it. If this isn’t more than a cash grab, then it’s at least the most serviceable (unimaginative) fan service imaginable.
What A Time To Be Alive arrived this month, announced only a day before, as a professionally Drake & Future affair, featuring the artists’ favored production and lyrical focuses (cloudy bangers about being in the club, with money to spend and demons to battle). It’s Metro Boomin, Southside, Boi-1da, 40, et al. bringing more big-budget, hi-fi sublime DS2-type beats, still suited best to the ever-deepening reserve of ear-catching and heart-melted Future flows, with spare room for Drake to sugarcoat his no-contest Best New views into.
The masterfully pre-meditated result is a populist offering, a retail album styled as a mixtape. It’s Future’s void and Drake’s reflection: a diamond-encrusted infinity mirror. To listen to the surprise and familiar world of #FBGOVO is to listen to a brand merger that works, 100%.
Know The Meaning
The great ones can do it all!!! shout out to Drake and future on this collabo.. @kingjames fire!!!
A photo posted by dwyanewade (@dwyanewade) on
What is it about rap that forces picking sides? The “you and yours vs. me and mine” mentality begets an essential question: “Are we [actually] talking teams?” The brand loyalty and ego aggrandizement of rap dynasties is distinctively attached to the economic metaphor, a competitive mindset that capitalizes on the human tendency to want to “have a team.” As a result, we see grown adults indulge their entire late-lives into the paradigm of sports love and furniture, a type of brand loyalty that may have always been creeping around in the background of popular hip-hop. Yet, WATTBA makes it clear that this loyalty is attached to a certain baby-boomer concept of individuality: the ability to define an individual life in terms of devotion, whether that devotion be economic or even regarding entire ideologies or belief systems.
So, “what a time to be alive,” a time when there’s at least the possibility for collaborative consumption, where everyone involved can share access to products, services, and ideas without necessarily claiming individual ownership. Despite the guise of a competitive agenda, Future and Drake demonstrate how everyone can own this mixtape — it’s not attached to the masterpiece concept or even to the directly hegemonic aggrandizing à la Watch The Throne. Rather, WATTBA gives us the opportunity to crowdfund our demand for parallax luxury through the brands of Future and Drake, two identities that work together quite well, whatever their actual chemistry on the tracks. Whereas the initial, generative blog-buzz tried to pit these two artists against each other, attempting to proclaim who “won,” the internet has lauded their collaboration as being flat-out useful. As one listener aptly memed, “I’m tempted to text my ex after every Drake verse, then Future brings me back to my senses.”
While Drake’s verses do contain a certain pressure, a vulnerability that seems to be up for scrutiny to the public-at-large, he has a charm that fuses narcissistic gloom with Future’s nihilistic buzz, a monstrous couple that seems to adequately sum up the current internet culture.
While Drake’s verses do contain a certain pressure, a vulnerability that seems to be up for scrutiny to the public-at-large, he has a charm that fuses narcissistic gloom with Future’s nihilistic buzz, a monstrous couple that seems to adequately sum up the current internet culture. Necessarily, Future is able to incisively cut off Drake’s social-media flow by bringing back the dirty — the kind of stuff you just can’t post on your timeline — an aspect that gives WATTBA a near-constant momentum. Despite his apparent, bulky, and brooding presence in Metro’s syrupy environs, Drake creates tension through his ubiquity, through the fact that he still seems to be making more room for himself. He’s always contained multitudes, or at least variations of sad boys, but now he seems himself uncontainable like Agent Smith spreading through the baller-radio matrix. As the radio becomes increasingly ATL, Drake does the unthinkable and predictable, assimilating the Oracle, Pluto’s own Future Hendrix, to catch trap credibility and a needed passivity. Drake and Future’s chill reifies our understanding of the two as unbeatable stars on a hot streak, and they make it look easy.
But wasn’t it too easy? Recorded in six days, this is maybe the culmination of a year of “retail mixtapes.” If You’re Reading This and Barter 6, among others, launched a string of mixtapes that were “polished” enough to be considered proper albums, which is only to say, to be sellable. The natural result is WATTBA, another proper studio album that is styled as a mixtape. For a brand micro-manager like Drake, it means something that the first sound on WATTBA is Metro Boomin’s DJ tag. The move is distinctly Drake: This is his first real release in trapaholic mixtape culture, and it’s also $9.99 on Apple Music.
The release’s mixtape-ness allows it to exist casually in the aftermath of a still-for-sale release from Future and with the promise of another purchasable forthcoming album from Drake. But for now, they can ride the wave of their brand strength to give us just what we needed at the time, not a moment too late. The two know themselves enough to depend on their “worst behavior” as a binding agent, appealing to the alternately/simultaneously comic and fatiguing, but always quotable, details of their drug and sex lives. This means a coordinated meeting in the middle of their depressive-championship personalities: It’s a business compromise, imaginable as the suited meeting of superpowers from the ending of the “Where Ya At” video. We should’ve seen this coming, that this is not that big of a deal, even though we’ll be playing it during the pregame until their next thing goes for sale.
Savvily sequenced to look forward, the tape ends with the two doing solo tracks. They part ways on what sound like discarded tracks from DS2 and Nothing Was The Same. “Jersey” is another pinging ode to lean, where Future can sum up his unbroken streak: “You do what you want when you got it.” The “30 for 30 Freestyle” is like the most classically (soft-Drake) Drake track released in years, and maybe his best. This is when we notice that Future’s Twitter avatar is the reflective diamond cover of WATTBA, his highest peak in visibility and truthfully his album, while Drake’s is the art for Views From The 6, the album that will establish his hold on the rap game for another year.
This is how WATTBA ends, not with a line-trading duet, but with each restored intact, no strings, previewing the fire to come.
Brand Loyalty
There’s no doubt Future and Drake are an odd couple — in the way Hendrix makes Drizzy seem anxious and uptight, or how “The Boy” makes “The Astronaut Kid” seem frivolous and immaterial. Future is the cracked screen to Drake’s free and easy-to-use app, the Actavis (downpour, no drought) to Drizzy’s clean Sprite. This is how they get us: Drake and Future both feel just as necessary at their lowest and highest, moments that are in turn indistinguishable.
The tension created speaks to a constructed “magic” that only exists in differentiation. We get off on reading the differences between these rappers’ brands. The comparison game is a human need, an associative project that culture seems to perpetually delight in, resulting in plenty of think-pieces that speculate how certain things are similar and how other things are different. Still, somehow, it’s the element of surprise, rooted in the incongruity between Drake and Future’s two hegemonies, that allows WATTBA to stream along with weird millennial impact. They make it clear that surprise is something us millennials can believe in, maybe because it signals change in a world often too static for our accelerated tastes.
It’s the element of surprise, rooted in the incongruity between Drake and Future’s two hegemonies, that allows WATTBA to stream along with weird millennial impact.
What a time to be alive: when temporary, insubstantial magic tricks shock us into branded feelings of sudden belief, sudden importance, sudden meaning. The inception of these two gargantuan personalities into our contemporary hearts anticipated the “magic” of their apparent, ghost-like collaboration, forcing us to melt like butter over relatively #basic trap tracks. It’s this diffusion of quality into the omnipresent virtuality of brand loyalty and surprise-and-delight marketing that demonstrates how buzz can become poetry, how the easiest association can become illegible, how the mixtape can become an album, how the most basic moment can become heartbreaking.
“You do what you want when you cop it/ You do what you want when you got it/ You do what you want when you poppin’.”
– Future, on “Jersey”
“My plan was always to make the product jump off the shelf, and treat the money like secrets… keep that shit to ourselves…”
– Drake, on “30 for 30 Freestyle”