SCORPION

“I wanna thank God for working harder than the devil.” That’s a line from Elevate, one of Drake’s songs from his latest release Scorpion. A double disc album, with one side A containing Hip Hop and RnB on side B. I’d say it’s a masterful piece of work but I’m a die hard Nothing Was The Same Drake fan. I’m here because of the hype and the tens of thousands of Instagram captions a Drake album comes with. It’s a revealing body of work, because he does admit to fathering a child (I didn’t hide my kid from the world, I was hiding the world from my kid) and you can tell from the tone of his voice that he was deeply hurt by the Pusha T diss.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giOZ3EAleeI[/embedyt]

He may have said that he wasn’t going to say anything about it (A wise man once said nothing at all) but his tone tells another story. Turns out he isn’t impervious after all.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9BwWKXjVaI[/embedyt]

As I write this, Scorpion is already #1 on Apple Music worldwide and is averaging 10 million streams an hour per track stream on Spotify. That means in 24 hours, he’ll probably have averaged over 240 million streams on Spotify alone. The power of the Internet! You can chalk it down to a clever marketing strategy or whatever tickles your fancy but it really boils down to one thing – support. I mean, people are doing everything under the sun to grab a hold of this body of work but when it comes to supporting our own… that is a sad story. I wonder why it’s so difficult to show up for our own the way we show up for international acts; is it because of the quality of work or frequency of new content released? That’s a case study to be discussed another day.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVfcZ0ZcFM[/embedyt]

I need to listen to Scorpion a few more times to decide how exactly I feel about it as a whole, and to give an opportunity to whoever hasn’t listened yet an objective mind while they listen. But if you check elsewhere, music critics have already shared their two cents on this album so thankfully I won’t have to act like I’m a music critic. It’s got some bops that are catchy at first listen, but it’s Drake. One needs to really listen. If you know you know.