Paris Review of Books Essay: Drake, in Search of Lost Time

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Drake, in Search of Lost Time by Benjamin Krusling

August 11, 2025 – IMAX interiorities and inside voices, from the hookah cloud of doom.

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Drake, in Search of Lost Time​

Benjamin Krusling

Image generated by Sora, August 4, 2025.

Disappointment has a placid surface—the word is buttoned-up, its gesture to an inner world prioritizing mild description over emotional urgency, an indication simply that what one wished for went left, fell short. Admitting disappointment in others, in circumstances, can be a moment of quiet devastation, but to describe something as “disappointing” is a means of forestalling tears, putting them on the other side of a line. In pop culture, Drake is disappointment’s mouthpiece and its walking embodiment—it’s almost all he talks about and all one seems to hear about his music and persona. At his best, he is disappointment’s major-label poet, if you’re still willing to go there with me now that his utter ubiquity and industrial-strength productivity have, in the last decade, evacuated what remained of those early days of critical respect. Just as disappointment doesn’t often bring more than a few tears to the eye, Drake’s songs don’t, or don’t let themselves, go loudly to that part of the spirit that cries out for something more. Almost every song, always mixed to a streaming-optimized sheen, is a litany of feelings that are ever so slightly bitter, muted, a half Xan’s worth of narcotized. Psychological and calculating but only rarely soulful, just ceaseless solipsism cut sometimes by the urge to seduce or make music for women to dance to, all delivered with the charming evenness of the lounge singer whose chief pleasure is to give you what you came for.

Unfortunately, I love it. This multialbum monologue of someone who has decided in advance to never break down—“I’ll probably self-destruct if I ever lose, but I never do,” et cetera—who gets rejected by women, colleagues, idols, “the culture,” and, in rare moments of real lucidity, himself, has burrowed so deeply into my nervous system that instead of compulsive counting to make it through long train and elevator rides, I rap or sing these songs to myself, over and over and over, without end, with minor regret.

Without end because the songs are deeply, miraculously sticky; with regret because not only does Drake’s hermetic world feel like a retreat from the real one, but he is also difficult to defend from any angle besides pleasure. For example, Drake is a man of the people, or he tries to be: he’s rapped and sang in at least three or four black Anglophone dialects and dabbled in French, Arabic, and Spanish, too, as the mood, or market, strikes. But it’s hard to be a man of the people and also completely neurotic, so when the diss track that, through its own series of familiar national chauvinisms, went stupidly viral by eviscerating his obvious desire to Represent and Belong, he bowed out of the drama with a deflated, byzantine response (“The Heart Part 6”) that presented himself more as a private mastermind, planting fake info and pulling all kinds of secret strings, than a public icon who can count on the love of a congregation. The ubiquity of “Not Like Us,” however, feels like beating a cheesy joke even when the horse is dead, to paraphrase Earl, and at most like a simultaneous release and containment of oppositional political energies that have had almost no expression at a national or international level. (Only one person was arrested for their political views at Kendrick’s halftime show, and it wasn’t Kendrick.)

In other words, popular discourse has made it difficult to process Drake’s continued success—but I suspect there is something important there to process. Take “Texts Go Green,” the polyrhythmic, Afro-house masterpiece from Honestly, Nevermind and the purest and most sublime distillation of his late bitterness, its greatness and immaturity locking talons and plunging through the air of a vague narrative about a woman who left him and wants him back, even though he’s so over it. “If I come around you, can I be myself?” he begins. Then, after a series of small, trollish reversals, another late-Drake trope—“Well, don’t wanna make something from nothing, that’s where I be / Well, keep getting nothing from something, how’s that fair to me? / I’m thinking something for something, that’s what I need”—this song about moving on from the person least able to move on peaks, or maybe valleys, with the mini-refrain “I feel like everything these days leads to nothing,” getting straight to the center of a global structure of feeling that most of us can easily identify, whether we accept it or rage against it. On a leaked song, “Like I’m Supposed To/Do Things,” about a woman visibly flirting with Drake while he tells his more important romantic interest that she has nothing to worry about, he sings “you know I don’t ever change / Right here for you always.” How can she, we, believe him? But he seems, temporarily at least, to believe it, and in his total, momentary conviction, something sad and troubling seeps in—future hurt, disappointment, a hookah cloud of doom.

Reading through Proust in the past year, whom I think I’ve been drawn to out of a desire for momentary immersion in scale and duration, I’ve noticed a similar, resonant cloud of doom hovering inside the narrative’s baroquely described salons and aesthetic reflections. The resonances between Drake and Proust are many, not least of which the notion that money and competition are the drivers of life and that jealousy is the content of love. Drake’s love songs—or rather his relationship songs, since the love they speak of is almost never offered or secured—suggest that for his moneyed set of international, trips-to-Dubai, clubbed-out, bottle-serviced celebrities and hangers-on, love is all power and bitterness, back and forth, like that, forever. Just like In Search of Lost Time, the narrative trajectory of Drake’s albums shows us an arriviste filled with hope and enthusiasm for a world of art and success who finds himself increasingly shaped and embittered by that world’s ruthless quest to produce the outsider. And, like Drake, Proust’s narrator is best enjoyed against his own grain, since his diagnoses of society’s ills don’t stop him from embodying the worst of them.

Meanwhile, his productivity is as incessant and anxious as Spotify or Netflix, perfect for a moment when life presents itself as a nonchoice between total grind or total despair. He’s a disruptor from the least semi of U.S. peripheries who suggested a slightly new model of popular rap masculinity only to install a mostly familiar misogyny, a numbers-obsessed winner whose latest turn to shilling for a sports-betting company, as diagnosed by Kieran Press-Reynolds, shows a man who can’t help but keep his finger on the depressing pulse. Proust, too, liked to gamble: according to Hannah Freed-Thall (“Speculative Modernism: Proust and the Stock Market”), “y the start of the First World War he had managed to squander about a third of his fortune on stocks.” I thought of Jean Moreau in La baie des anges (1963): “What I love about gambling is this idiotic life of luxury and poverty,” neatly summarizing the thematic poles of mainstream hip-hop as well as the rough seesawing of pleasure and pain that quick millions seem to produce. “Don’t know how to express my love … that’s why I American Express my love for you,” a dead-serious joke (“Search & Rescue”).

So, the volatility of value is Drake’s great subject, to use Hannah Freed-Thall’s phrase, and, in our new age of widespread gambling—which has led to increases in bankruptcy, debt, and domestic violence—his voice is the codeine soul of a pitiless economic machine that produces desperate losers and paranoid, precarious winners. “Is there more to life than all of these corporate ties and all of these fortunate times and all of these asses that never come in proportionate size?” Herein lies the emotional core of this music, which is always just offstage, always outside the world and the people in it. Nothing really feels good. Nothing is dependable, fair or just.

 

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Dionne Osborne, Drake’s vocal coach, who worked with him “to bring out that natural, dark, strong color in his tone,” says that part of his success is because the “average person” can sing his songs. And it’s true—you can sing them in an inside voice. What’s also obvious is the racial character of this averageness, this inside-ness, with its mild melisma and smooth legato, the great middle of a black North American pop-cultural mixture, all flavor and “accessibility.” If rap has historically been the music of the “streets,” a variously constituted inside-outside of the neighborhood, the car, the club, Drake has elaborated, in a thousand impossibly catchy ways, a kind of noiseless, black-but-not-bound-to-it, IMAX inwardness that colors even his club songs with Canadian bro-next-door energy, its references to threats and violence almost always delegated to associates and hired hands. When he “talks tough,” his references to threats and violence are always a degree removed, even as he assures us he’d rather do bad all by himself. But he can’t—the brand must be protected. His domain is the boardroom, the restaurant, and the adult megamansion, “walls, doors, and floors that only I can afford,” where not a single freedom dream makes its presence known or its history felt.

This is the real reason why, for all his obvious ties to the traditions of black music, Drake has, to his constant chagrin, never fit easily into its inherited critical categories: He’s too measured, individual, dot-like, singing to an absent woman in Marvin Gaye’s former studio about male-pattern jealousy and drinking too much (“Marvin’s Room”), whereas Gaye sang about lovemaking and saving children from environmental destruction in a voice a mother can love (my mom doesn’t like Drake). While Nas or Jay-Z gets endless narrative mileage from reflecting on the dense lifeworld of New York City Housing Authority housing, Drake’s music is organized more by the drama of arrival than the complex nostalgia of origin—“To keep it real, I wasn’t really gangsta ‘til now / I was livin’ on a cloud, I was quiet as a mouse / I was in a club gettin’ lost in the crowd / Wasn’t doin’ what I wanted to, I’d do what was allowed,” he raps in the agitated, twilit account of his career called, fittingly, “Away from Home.”

If, as Olly Wilson writes in “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American Music,” black music tends toward maximal timbral differentiation, “contrast of color,” which suggests a rich and complex social world through which the music works, Drake’s music pops up smooth, buffed, knock-kneed, and upright from the Drake brain trust that gives you Drake first and a narrow slice of the social world second. And, yet, this has always been the vector through which his music sings its way toward downbeat truths that express a global feeling of immiseration. People just don’t love you back; you can’t figure out a way to do the right thing. It’s not that he believes his personal drama is of world-historical importance and that his belief makes us believe, as some early criticism suggested, though he may indeed believe that. The drama of his music resonates because we know, no matter how often we find ways to believe otherwise, that our individual quests to find enduring romantic love and social acceptance are doomed to fail precisely on the grounds of their individual character. That he elaborates this point through the language and forms of black diasporic music suggests that something of that tradition is still active in his music’s structure of feeling, even though it has become historically possible for him to make these songs without ever alluding to history itself.

***

What am I getting at? I’ve been thinking about romantic love, the kind that puts you in touch with youthful dreams and can, therefore, come to feel increasingly juvenile as disappointments pile up. Reading it, the cartoon I held of In Search of Lost Time—a madeleine-eating kaleidoscope of nostalgia and baroque aesthetic modernism—gives way to the real story of a brutal, racist, misogynistic, and bitterly precarious world of socially anxious desirers being squeezed to psychosis by history and form. In the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, men are fools, dogs, and dandies, while women are kept, used, disdained, or discarded when they aren’t cutting everyone to pieces sotto voce in various salons. The people who serve them are depicted in so many ways as vegetable- or animal-like, fossils of a class of subhuman simplicity. Drake’s music increasingly summarizes a similar world of total antagonism and hierarchy, even if the sets have a slightly different character. So, if Drake “speaks” to our moment, to history, so late in his career and at so urgent a time, it might be because in a singularly (un)appealing way, he gives catchy, dramatic, revealing form to what Zoë Hu, in her treatise on misogynist Andrew Tate, calls a “narcissistic, childlike understanding of love … consecrated or menaced by a powerful, imaginary audience.” This is the hall of mirrors of fame, Instagram, and digital streaming that pressure-cooks the world of this music and sometimes permits stupid, amazing poignancy to lift off into low orbit.

For those of us who still find something to think about and sing along to in his music, the real melancholy of Drake—which comes more precisely into view outside its depressing, hermetically sealed loop of transactions, streams, and grievances—is that no amount of individual success or striving can heal social wounds. The drama of Drake becomes a kind of realism, and the stretch of retaliations against erstwhile collaborators on last year’s “Family Matters” is a sad confirmation of the borderline’s suspicion that our friends’ smiles conceal deep, abiding hatred and conspiracy. Even worse that, at thirty-eight years old, which Drake is at the time of this writing, one can’t count on time to make good what’s been lost or damaged, that winning when you ain’t right within is the most pyrrhic of victories, to paraphrase Ms. Lauryn Hill, whom Drake has sampled twice without learning from her lessons.

***

When I couldn’t sleep last week, I watched Godard’s Changer d’image (1982), a short work made on commission by French television to commemorate Mitterrand’s election—a disappointing “victory for the left”—where he investigates the impossibility of depicting change in images. Years after the militant experiments of his Dziga Vertov group, the Godard in this video, down on possibility and sitting with his back to us for ten minutes looking at a screen, strikes us with his desperate frustration. Here he is, in the closing moments:

There is so much to show, show the resistance. Show the resistance of the image to change. Myself, I believe that I am only the image, and I am not ready to change just like that. On the other hand, I think that in between the images we can change, that’s what we need to show, this in-between. It reminds me of when I was little, of my grandfather driving around using only the first gear. We were little in the backseat, and every one of these Sunday drives was awful. From the back, we’d cry out, “Change, Grandpa, change!” [screeching imitations of a car struggling to proceed] “Change, Grandpa, change!”

As Godard shrieked, I felt another obvious braid grow, Drake and Proust pulling the same scalp while Zionism was further degrading the world and AI companies were trying to drill semiotic fluid out of the general intellect. In pain, I cried out, in my inside voice, “Change, Drake, change! Change, world, change!” Change time, change history, change the order of things. Surprise me! Be different, I’m begging, so we can have some real love, some real peace, before it’s too late. Then I think, Who am I talking to? About the records of a completely doomed brand-cum-person and the world he’s making up to survive himself. I’m interested in coping mechanisms, since I’ve needed a few. I suspect I also have to justify my pleasures to myself, to God, now and forever, because they so often feel insane, indecent. I know, you know, what all this is about. Doesn’t really change things. The culture industry changes pain into money, which is no crime, though it seems worth thinking about the nature of the pain, the cost of the procedure.