Marc Spector
the 4'11 Cuban
in my opinion rap as a genre is about telling “your story”. We can debate the authenticity of the stories of 1 million rappers, but what that means to me is, for better or worse, stand by your principles in regards to subject matter, production, and song structure.
This doesn’t mean an artist cannot experiment but what this means is that when an artist does experiment, they still produce music that sounds like it came from their pov.
an artist who exemplifies this for me is Currensy. No matter what producer currency works with , a currensy project still FEELS like a currensy project. His fingerprints are all over it and you don’t feel like his attempts to experiment were forced or in authentic or wave riding.
Thats the issue with Drake. he is attempting to fuse pop sensibilities into being a rapper and it just doesn’t work. he wants to be the rapper version of Cher or Madonna, constantly reinventing himself .
But a rapper who can do everything is a rapper who stands for nothing.
It doesn’t help that we know for a fact he does not write a lot of his music. Many of the songs that we know were written by other people were his attempts at trying a new sound.
At minimum, The more trap influenced songs from “if you’re reading this” till now are probably not written by him, so why should I give him kudos or not criticize him for hijacking someone else’s perspective and experience in a very blatant way?
