Tag: Drake

Anthony Fantano, the self-proclaimed Internet’s Busiest Music Nerd has officially become one of Drake’s biggest critics. The music reviewing Youtuber’s critiques of the “No Friends in the Industry” rapper finally warranted a response from the superstar. After Fantano posted a video claiming that Drake slid in his DMs to share a vegan cookie recipe, Drizzy decided to show receipts. 

Drake took to IG Stories to unveil what he really said to Fantano. “Your existence is a light 1,” wrote the Honestly, Nevermind artist. “And the 1 is cause you are alive. And cause you somehow wifed a Black girl. I’m feeling a light to decent 1 on your existence.” 

Instagram

Prior to being one of Drake’s top opps, Fantano was known mostly for his takes on music. He delivers straight-forward reviews that don’t necessarily dig deep into the content of albums, mixtapes and eps, but that says just enough. He’s become known for his trademark review rating scale where he rates albums on a scale of 1 to 10, which Drake referenced in his clapback. With over 2.63 million subscribers on YouTube and just under 700,000 followers on Instagram, he has amassed a large audience that trusts his views. 

For over a decade, the man behind The Needle Drop has been offering his thoughts and opinions on music releases ranging across genres, including rock, alternative, r&b and of course hip-hop. This year alone, he’s rated everything from Kilo Kush’s American Gurl to Kid Rock’s Bad Reputation, with his reviews of Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (2.2 million views) and Jack Harlow’s Come Home The Kids Miss You (1 million views) being the most watched.   

“I didn’t know it would become this popular when I started,” he admitted to Spin Magazine in 2016. In that same interview he also expressed that “intimacy and interaction between YouTube creators and their audiences” is what inspired Fantano, who studied journalism in college to start vlogging in the first place.  

Back in the mid-2000s Anthony Fantano was a music director at a college radio station in his hometown of Connecticut. Soon after, in 2007, he started blogging with The Needle Drop. A couple of years later he stepped out from behind the pen and in front of the camera and transitioned into doing video reviews with The Needle Drop Youtube channel. Memphis-based artist Jay Reatard is said to be the first artist he covered when he began video blogging. 

In 2011, he started going extra hard with his The Needle Drop channel. That’s when he started focusing on developing the channel on a full-time basis. He also launched the Youtube page thatistheplan around this time. On it he reviewed memes. 

YouTube

Since his humble beginnings, he has grown his brand into an empire. He’s even hosted a The Needle Drop tour that touched down in major cities throughout the country. He’s been praised as one of the most successful and well-known music critics in recent years by the likes of Spin Magazine, the New York Times and other major outlets, and has written for the Washington Post and others. 

Anthony Fantano may not always be liked by the artists he critiques, but that hasn’t stopped his fans from appreciating his willingness to speak openly and honestly about the music that he listens to. The Connecticut native has gained notoriety and built a following as a result of his brutally honest music reviews. If you want to learn about new music or are just interested in hearing someone’s opinion on a trending artist’s project check out The Needle Drop.

Over the summer, Drake had “the most important night” of his life. The night didn’t feature any record-breaking moments or the release of any new game-changing music. It did, however, feature appearances from some of our most known and unknown neighbors to the north. During his October World Weekend festival, Drake paid homage to some of  the most influential Canadian artists, including Nelly Furtado, Kardinall Offishall, Choclair, Maestro Fresh Wes and others.

Canada, which has given us the likes of Drizzy, Weeknd and Justin Beiber, has lowkey been a hotbed for talented artists for a minute. A Canadian artist on the rise, looking to add his name to the long list of international superstars from the North is Boslen.

The 23-year old from Chilliwack, BC has been making waves with his music over the last few years. The experimental rapper has been steadily developing his eclectic style by being influenced by iconic creatives such as Kid Cudi, Jay-Z and Salvador Dalí, the world renowned surrealist artist. 

Tapping into the music he grew up with, as well as the vibes of his surroundings, he blends hip-hop, r&b and the mood of a place like Vancouver —which he calls home — to deliver his sound. “I felt so like confined within an 808 and a sample that loops that I was like, but where’s the progression of this? Where am I bringing audiences?”, says the Canadian artist. 

The results of his musical explorations have been projects such as Motionless and Motionless II, the Black Lotus EP, his Capitol Records debut DUSK to DAWN and more recently a seven-song EP, called Gonzo.

Refusing to be confined into any boxes, Boslen knows the sky’s the limit. When asked what’s next for him he responds, “Honestly, just breaking outside of music. Like, I want to get into architecture. I want to get into fashion. I want to do more designing. But most importantly, I want to just enjoy life, man.”

I feel like somebody’s not doing something and I feel like I can do it, so I’m gonna do it. I feel like that’s what motivates me and pushes me. I feel like I have a lot of things to say, man. Another thing is that I feel like there’s so many kids out there that don’t have a voice that don’t have a platform. I feel like if you don’t use your platform or your abilities to help or inspire then true artistic integrity will be lost.

I’d be lying. If I said it was easy.  I think a lot of artists cap like it just come so naturally. Like, no, not at all. I’m a human bro. Like I’m 23-years-old. I’m still trying to discover who I am. You know? The process is never ending. In life, you’ll continue to face ups and downs and you learn from them. It’s like a career on its own. I feel like that’s the best part about music. It’s not only the shows or like the recording process or any of that, but it is really like a battle against yourself.

Kid Cudi. Wiz Khalifa. Hopsin. A lot of Akon [laughs]. “Smacked That” was probably my favorite Akon song. Going into my teens and my later teens, A$AP Rocky. I listened to so many artists. My mom listened to Marilyn Manson. We listened to Johnny Cash. So it was a lot of, you know, conflicting sounds in my household. My sisters used to listen to like Green Day, Avril Lavigne, just so many sounds. So for me as a kid I had to find my own identity and musical tastes.

He touched a point in my life. He was saying things that I felt like not a lot of people were going through besides me. And I wanted to do this thing for kids that I grew up in areas where maybe they felt alone or maybe wanted to feel empowerment. 

I think Jay-Z right now. How he talks about truth. I really resonate with that and like how when he raps. It’s not rapping, he’s really having a conversation with the listener and I feel like that’s so authentic. I feel like I just started getting into that now with like a song like “Scars,” where it’s just more of a conversational type of standpoint and it’s like therapeutic in a way. A lot of people I’ve been playing inspiration from lately. I’ve been trying to go back to artists like Kanye West, Beyonce, 070 Shake.

It wasn’t even like musicians or anything like that. It was more like philosophers. I remember it was last Christmas. I came back home and I was dealing with some like personal issues, you know, those frustrations. And for some reason that pushed me to look further than music. I started with Aristotle and I went to Socrates and I went to Plato and then I found Salvador Dali. I was fascinated by his creative process. Dali was a big inspiration.

The culture’s very rich, but it’s still very early and I think we’re still trying to grow it. It’s a more moody sound. It’s not hard-hitting trap or like easy, repetitive samples. I think right now it’s definitely at a stage where it matches the weather where it’s very bipolar.

Being Drake is cool, but, sometimes, it isn’t. At the end of 10 of his 12 albums, Drake has delivered a personal State of the Union, summarizing the spoils of victory and the snakes and charlatans that lurk in the shadows. The flows are conversational and uninterrupted; the beats are unadorned with any musical flourishes beyond drums and a swirling, muffled vocal sample; the vibes are aspirationally cinematic with the lacquered climate-controlled energy of a BMW commercial—he is Drake, the Ultimate Rapping Machine. 

Despite the silly grandiosity of these songs, these Drake outros have also offered some of the most incisive and clear-eyed rapping of his career; this charisma and technical mastery is what separates Drake from the scores of other rappers who are attempting to be the next Drake. With Drake’s most recent album closer “Jimmy Cooks” emerging as a song of the summer, here are all of the Drake outros, ranked

I’m not owned, I’m not owned, Drake continues to insist as he slowly shrinks and transforms into a corn cob. As the anchor of Scorpion, “March 14” sounds like a retconned closer that was hastily made in response to Pusha T’s revelation that Drake had a secret child. Until this point, Drake had always projected an imperial mafioso vibe but here he most resembles a third-act Henry Hill here, panickedly looking over his shoulder as he scrambles to fix the unfixable.

While a major part of Drake’s success has been defined by his  consistency, Thank Me Later represents the cautious first steps of a rapper still finding his voice. As such, “Thank Me Now” (and Thank Me Later at large) sounds like an artifact of a long-gone era. Namely, the song is sabotaged by garish synths that blare in the background like lightsabers. Still, Drake sounds confident amidst the cacophony, signaling what was to come. 

Long before they embraced stunt sampling choices on “Way 2 Sexy” or “Nice For What,” Drake and 40 flipped Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” on “Congratulations.” In their hands, “Viva La Vida” morphs from a swaying arena into a triumphant beat with the syncopated violins forming the song’s foundation. To be sure, it’s a gimmick, but it’s a clever one, providing early evidence of Drake’s ability to seamlessly insert himself in a variety of sounds and contexts.

On its own, “The Remorse” is perfectly pleasant enough. Within Drake’s larger oeuvre, it’s indicative of the sad fact that he’s running out of things to say. Released in 2021, “The Remorse” is seemingly the 90th time that Drake morosely talked about how loyal 40 and Chubbs and CJ have been to him. Seriously, does anybody need to be regaled with more tales about how people doubted Drake before he made them eat crow?

This is perfectly replacement-level Drake. It’s fine, good even, but not altogether that remarkable or memorable; the beat is spare and Drake is compelling as usual. As Drake’s only solo song on What A Time To Be Alive (his 2015 collaborative project with Future), 30 for 30 Freestyle is a contemplative end to a raucous project. In it, Drake plays the hits—score-settling, braggadocio, bottle-service wracked with ennui, you know, Drake stuff. 

The last song on Drake’s 2020 compilation Dark Lane Demo Tapes, War is part of the lineage of Drake outros in a literal sense more than a figurative one. Accordingly, War exists without the external pressures and neuroses that encumber Drake’s other outros. It’s not some mission statement or declaration or treatise of the isolation of having more houses than friends or whatever; it’s simply the last song on an album rather one of his capital-o Drake outros.

Originally released in conjunction with the Top Boy series on Netflix, “War” is Drake’s version of a British drill song, even enlisting UK mainstay AXL Beats for production. Even if Drake sounds more London, Ontario than London, England, he raps with such momentum that it absolves the reverse Eliza Doolittle-ness of him trying to put on a very specific kind of accent. 

Perhaps the ur-Drake song, Views is equal parts great and self-indulgent. It’s pure Drake myth-making—incredibly specific and aggrieved bragging layered over a rich, sample-driven beat.

By virtue of being the sole traditional rap song on Drake’s house-ish Honestly, Nevermind, “Jimmy Cooks” is a welcome reminder that Jimmy can still indeed cook. With 21 Savage riding shotgun, Drake atypically ending the project on a high-energy, Memphis-flavored banger.

Take Care is one of Drake’s best albums, so it tracks that “The Ride” is one of Drake’s best outros. Whereas most of Drake’s outros are full of bombast and boasting, “The Ride” is one of Drake’s last truly vulnerable songs before he became hardened by fame. 

The beat has launched 1000 freestyles. Similarly, Jay Z adds instant gravitas. The second collaboration between Drake and Jay Z, “Paris Morton Music / Pound Cake” marked Drake’s arrival as a universally respected rapper in addition to being a pop megastar.  

On the More Life ender, Drake makes a typical Drake outro, but better. Chiefly, a winding Snoh Aalegra sample gives the song shape and a strong vocal counterbalance to Drake’s typically sharp raps.

Here, Drake is at the peak of his powers. He takes fire at Tyga and throws subliminals at Kanye West, Jay Z and Kendrick Lamar. By this point, his unyielding commercial dominance had made him untouchable—and, even better, he backed it up with his music.