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Drake and 21 Savage’s ‘Her Loss’ Review: A Frisky Experiment
The rappers’ collaborative album is loose and untethered, a frisky experiment that’s intermittently successful.One of the grim inevitabilities of new pop star albums is how they are parsed, chewed through and cracked into gossipy bites the moment they arrive. Within minutes of the release of “Her Loss,” the new collaborative album by Drake and 21 Savage, Twitter and hip-hop news and gossip sites were aflame: a stray reference to Serena Williams’s husband, nods to old rap industry quarrels, an ambiguous multiple entendre referencing Megan Thee Stallion.Drake knows this will be chum, of course. It’s not fan service like Taylor Swift’s Easter eggs, but it reflects an understanding that for many listeners, and perhaps especially for those who may not bother to listen at all, the metanarrative matters.And yes, this is one way to measure an album’s success: how much chatter it engenders. Even the marketing strategy for “Her Loss” — which featured elaborate imitations of Vogue magazine and mock appearances on NPR’s Tiny Desk series and “The Howard Stern Show” — suggested an awareness of the utility of, and disdain for, the way information flows online these days.But somewhere underneath all of that lies the music itself, which, nowadays, ends up serving as a distraction from the chatter as much as the other way around.“Her Loss” is frisky and centerless, a mood more than a mode. Drake has done a full-length collaborative project before; “What a Time to Be Alive,” with Future, released in 2015, was an assertion of grimy gloss, adding fresh texture to Drake’s already formidable arsenal.But he and 21 Savage have a different sort of chemistry. Drake is endlessly malleable, a Zelig figure forever testing prevailing winds, while 21 Savage is a classic stoic, set in his thoughts. Often on this album — “More M’s,” “Privileged Rappers” — it feels as if they are ceding space to each other, side by side but not interwoven. Sometimes, like on “Spin Bout U,” they successfully melt into something greater than their parts.This is the lesser of Drake’s two projects this year, lacking the cohesion and unexpected ambition of “Honestly, Nevermind,” the dance floor-focused album he released in June. (The one outlier on that album was “Jimmy Cooks,” a collaboration with 21 Savage that went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.)But the fact that these two albums live side by side reflects something about how one of the most potent pop stars of the decade intends to navigate a far less stable era: embracing quick-burn place holders in lieu of big transitional ideas.And so “Her Loss” is, in many ways, a playground for Drake. The exuberant “Circo Loco” riffs on Daft Punk’s “One More Time” in a concession to pop glimmer. There’s flow pattern and melodic experimentation on “Backoutsideboyz.” “Hours in Silence” is a master class in Drake’s self-eviscerations and recriminations: “There’s three sides to the story, girl/The one you subtweet, the one your group chat gets to read, the one you come and tell to me.” On “Rich Flex,” there’s a particularly cheeky run of acronym rhymes: CMB, CMG, B&B, PND, PTSD, TMZ, GMC, B&E, DMC, BRB.Because this album arrives with slightly lower stakes than a stand-alone Drake release, it also permits him to lean in to his deeply bawdy impulses. Part of Drake’s ongoing appeal is that there is still a bit of frisson in hearing him at his rawest, proof that the most dexterous artist of the last decade still wants to play in the mud. That tendency recurs through the album, especially on “On BS,” where he raps about the strip club with winking toxicity: “I’m a gentleman I’m generous/I’m blowing half a million on you hoes, I’m a feminist.”But “Her Loss” also features the other side of Drake, the one whose true subject is his own ascendance. “Middle of the Ocean,” a six-minute rumination late in the album, is a classic of that approach. The rapping is a little slow, as if he’s accessing the memories in real time: “For your birthday, your man got a table at hibachi/Last time I ate there, Wayne was doing numbers off the cup like Yahtzee/And Paris Hilton was steady ducking the paparazzi.”These are the most vivid lyrics on the album, and also the ones that ground it in Drake’s most familiar gestures without conceding to what it’s taken to make Drake as crucial a figure as he is. And perhaps as he moves through the middle section of his career, he’ll feel less tethered than ever.“Thought I was a pop star,” he raps on “More M’s.” “I baited ’em.”Drake and 21 Savage“Her Loss”(OVO/Republic/Slaughter Gang/Epic) More
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Carly Rae Jepsen’s Brand-New Boy Problems, and 7 More New Songs
Hear tracks by DJ Khaled featuring Drake and Lil Baby, Panda Bear & Sonic Boom, the 1975 and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Beach House’Boy problems? Carly Rae Jepsen’s got them in spades on “Beach House,” a cheeky earworm from her forthcoming album “The Loneliest Time.” Jepsen employs her deadpan sense of humor as she lists off the red flags and deal-breakers that marred relationships with “Boy No. 1” to “Boy No. I Can’t Keep Count Anymore.” Amid all the silliness, though (“I got a beach house in Malibu,” one prospect tells her, “and I’m probably gonna hurt your feelings”), the song effectively taps into the romantic frustration of endless, “Groundhog Day”-esque first dates and long-term singledom: “I’ve been on this ride, this roller coaster’s a carousel,” Jepsen sings on the anguished pre-chorus, “And I’m getting nowhere.” LINDSAY ZOLADZDJ Khaled featuring Drake and Lil Baby, ‘Staying Alive’A quizzically melancholic opening salvo from the upcoming DJ Khaled album “God Did,” “Staying Alive” nods casually to the Bee Gees on the way to somewhere far less ecstatic. In this construction, staying alive is an act of defiance, not exuberance. Drake bemoans “This life that allow me to take what I want/it’s not like I know what I want,” while in the video, he plays a doctor smoking hookah in the hospital and absently signing off on charts of patients who might need some help achieving the song’s title. JON CARAMANICABenny Blanco, BTS and Snoop Dogg, ‘Bad Decisions’Equally unimaginative as the BTS English-language breakthrough hit “Dynamite” but somehow less cloying, this collaboration benefits from the grandfatherly presence of Snoop Dogg, who at this stage of his career always raps as if his eyebrow is arched, and he can’t quite believe what he’s called upon to do either. CARAMANICAThe 1975, ‘Happiness’“Happiness,” the latest single from the eclectic British pop group the 1975, manages to sound both sleek and a little spontaneous; the dense, ’80s-inspired production gleams but there’s always enough air circulating to keep the atmosphere well ventilated. The frontman Matty Healy sounds uncharacteristically laid back here, trading in his usual arch, hyper-referential lyrics for simpler sentiments: “Show me your love, why don’t you?” he croons on an ecstatic chorus that’s catchy without feeling overdetermined. The video, directed by Samuel Bradley, is a hoot, finding the group mugging in all variety of louche, gorgeously lit environments — basically the visual equivalent of the lush saxophone solo that drops in the middle of the song. ZOLADZBandmanrill, ‘Real Hips’A surprisingly luscious and nimble offering from the Newark rapper Bandmanrill that makes plain the through lines that connect drill music, Jersey club and bass music. CARAMANICAPanda Bear & Sonic Boom, ‘Edge of the Edge’Fans of Panda Bear’s beloved 2007 album “Person Pitch” will likely enjoy the sunny, collagelike “Edge of the Edge,” which will appear on “Reset,” the Animal Collective member’s collaborative album with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, out next week. “Edge of the Edge” pairs a playful sample of the doo-wop group Randy & the Rainbows’ 1963 hit “Denise” with Panda’s serenely melodic vocals, which cut through the carefree, pop-psychedelic vibe with some light social critique: “Can’t say it’s what you bargained for,” he sings, wagging a finger at the frenzied escalation of technology, “It’s forever at the push of a button.” The song, in opposition, sounds contentedly off the grid. ZOLADZBonny Light Horseman, ‘Exile’The voices of Eric D. Johnson and Anaïs Mitchell entwine beautifully on “Exile,” the opening track from the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman’s upcoming second album “Rolling Golden Holy.” The song is a duet in the truest emotional sense, as Mitchell swoops in to finish some of Johnson’s lines and, on the chorus, provides a warm, glowing harmony that meets his lonely plea, “I don’t wanna live in exile.” ZOLADZYoungBoy Never Broke Again featuring Rod Wave, ‘Home Ain’t Home’The two loneliest howlers in hip-hop unite for a meditation on the joylessness of fame. CARAMANICA More
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Drake’s ‘Honestly, Nevermind’ Is His 11th No. 1 Album
The dance-oriented surprise release debuts with the equivalent of 204,000 sales — the streaming star’s lowest opening-week tally for a studio album.A little over a week ago, Drake announced a surprise new album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” and released it online a few hours later. Just like clockwork, it has now gone to No. 1, becoming Drake’s 11th album to top the Billboard 200 chart.“Honestly, Nevermind,” Drake’s seventh studio LP — and his 17th full-length release overall, counting compilations and mixtapes — opened with the equivalent of 204,000 sales in the United States, including 250 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Those figures were enough to send the dance-heavy “Honestly” to No. 1 by a comfortable margin. But they were low by the standards of Drake, who for more than a decade has routinely posted gigantic numbers for new work.The album’s 204,000 equivalent sales — a measurement that reconciles streams with downloads and any traditional album purchases — are a fraction of the 613,000 that Drake posted for the opening of his last studio album, “Certified Lover Boy” (2021). And they are Drake’s lowest since “Care Package,” a compilation of previously released tracks, which opened (at No. 1, naturally) with 109,000 in 2019. Apart from “Care Package,” no Drake album has begun with fewer than half a million equivalents since “What a Time to Be Alive,” a mixtape with the rapper Future from 2015, when streaming represented a minority of overall music consumption. (As of last year, streaming makes up 83 percent of recorded music sales revenue in the United States.)Still, a No. 1 is a No. 1. And with 11 of them, Drake has now matched Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen. Ahead of them on the list of artists landing the most chart-toppers on the Billboard 200 are Jay-Z (with 14) and the Beatles (19).Also this week, BTS’s “Proof,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 4. Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is No. 2, Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is No. 3 and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 5. More
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Drake Hits the Nightclub
Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn the past, Drake has been focused on rewiring hip-hop with melody. But his seventh solo studio album, “Honestly, Nevermind” — which arrived as a surprise, with an elaborate nine-and-a-half-minute video for the track “Falling Back” — is an unanticipated pivot toward the dance floor. Drake has long included moments like this on his albums, but they rarely shaped the narrative. But now, for the first time, production that is hard-knocking and up-tempo is reshaping his sound.Is this just a logical turn for a pop star who has typically made pop from different component parts? Is it a reaction to the growth of drill music, the prevailing gritty hip-hop subculture? Or is it an acceptance of the exuberant freedoms of midcareer middle age?On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Drake’s evolution and production choices, the ways in which he toys with the expectations of his listeners and the dance music subcultures he’s experimenting with.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterLawrence Burney, arts and culture editor at The Baltimore Banner and the founder of True LaurelsConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More
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Drake’s ‘Honestly, Nevermind’ Review: Now It’s Time to Dance
On his seventh album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” the pop disrupter who rethought rap’s relationship with melody opts for a new direction: nightclub abandon.For more than a decade, the Drake factory has been operating at full capacity — recalibrating the relationship between hip-hop, R&B and pop; balancing grand-scale ambition with granular experimentation; embracing the meme-ification of his celebrity. But in recent years, for the first time, it’s felt like the machines might be grinding to a pause. Maintaining the throne is hard work, and the wear and tear were beginning to show.What Drake has needed is an opportunity to refresh, a chance to be unburdened of old assumptions. It’s the sort of renewal you only really find after-hours.“Honestly, Nevermind,” Drake’s seventh solo studio album, which was released on Friday just a few hours after it was announced, is a small marvel of bodily exuberance — appealingly weightless, escapist and zealously free. An album of entrancing club music, it’s a pointed evolution toward a new era for one of music’s most influential stars. It is also a Drake album made up almost wholly of the parts of Drake albums that send hip-hop purists into conniptions.The expectations Drake is seeking to upend here, though, are his own. For almost the entire 2010s, hip-hop — and most of the rest of popular music — molded itself around his innovations. Blending singing and rapping together, making music that was unselfconsciously pop without kowtowing to the old way of making pop, Drake has long understood that he could build a new kind of global consensus both because he understood the limitations of older approaches, and because the globe is changing.Nevertheless, the bloated “Certified Lover Boy,” released last year, was his least focused album, and also his least imaginative — he sounded enervated, fatigued with his own ideas. What’s more, the people who have come up behind him may have exhausted them, too.Those conditions force innovation, though, and “Honestly, Nevermind” is a clear pivot, an increasingly rare thing for a pop icon. Drake fully embraces the dance floor here, making house music that also touches on Jersey club, Baltimore club, ballroom and Amapiano. Each of these styles has trickled up from regional phenomenon to tastemaker attention in recent years, and like the skilled scavenger he is, Drake has harvested bits and pieces for his own constructions.Part of why this is so striking is that Drake has made a career out of caress. His productions — always led by his longtime collaborator, Noah Shebib, known as 40 — were emphatically soothing. But the beats here have sharp corners, they kick and punch. “Currents” features both the squeaky-bed sample that’s a staple of Jersey club, and a familiar vocal ad-lib that’s a staple of Baltimore club. “Texts Go Green” is driven by jittery percussion, and the piano-drizzled soulful house buildup toward the end of “A Keeper” is an invitation to liberation.This approach turns out to be well-suited to Drake’s singing style, which is lean and doesn’t apply overt pressure. It’s conspiratorial, romantic, sometimes erotic — he’s never singing at you so much as he’s singing about you, in your ear.Most of the songs are about romantic intrigue, and often Drake is the victim. In places, this is a return to Instagram-caption-era Drake. “I know my funeral gonna be lit ’cause of how I treated people” he intones on the hard-stomping “Massive.” On the slurry “Liability,” he moans, “You’re too busy dancing in the club to our songs.”But part of the trade-off of this album is in lyrical vividness — on most songs Drake is alluding to things more than describing them. The words are prompts, suggestions, light abstractions that aim to emulate the mood of the production. (Also, social media moves too fast now, and doesn’t reward the same kinds of patient emotional poignancy that he excels at.)There is recent precedent for Drake’s choices here: Kanye West’s “808s & Heartbreak” and the more fleet parts of “Yeezus”; Frank Ocean’s flirtations with dance music.But music like this has always been a part of Drake’s grammar: think “Take Care” with Rihanna from 2011, with its Gil Scott-Heron/Jamie xx breakdown. Or the serene sunrise anthem “Passionfruit” from 2017 (which also had a Moodymann sample); “Fountains,” from “Certified Lover Boy,” a blissed-out duet with the Nigerian star Tems, was in this vein, too, but seemed to portend that the next hard Drake pivot would be toward Afrobeats, which he’s long engaged with, including collaborations with Wizkid.But Drake opted for club music — the average b.p.m. here is over 100 — building an explicit musical bridge to Black and queer musical subcultures. That said, the sweaty, countercultural house music that he’s taking influence from has also in recent years become a template for music of privilege — it is the soundtrack of the global moneyed elite, the same in Dubai and Ibiza as Miami and Mykonos. It’s music that’s inviting but also innocuous; it’s filled with meaning and reference, but also smooth to the touch.Drake is in an unenviable position only a handful of pop superstars have been in before — he is one of the most famous musicians on the planet, and his fame is premised upon being something of a chameleon. But it’s hard for a juggernaut to be nimble. Nevertheless, “Honestly, Nevermind” is the work of someone unbothered by the potential for alienating old allies. The last two years have been unmooring, and the pandemic has freed artists to do the unexpected simply by removing the old reward structures. (Structurally, “Honestly, Nevermind” is a similar turn to the Weeknd’s electro-pop experiment “Dawn FM,” released in January.)The coronavirus era has also nurtured the rise of hip-hop scenes that thrive in the virtual chaos of social media. That’s been most evident in the rise of drill, which has been recentering hip-hop in grit and nerve. Even though Drake has toyed with drill before, collaborating with Fivio Foreign and Lil Durk, among others, “Honestly, Nevermind” is an anti-drill record. Drake is 35 now, and undoubtedly reckoning with how to live alongside his children’s children.He only truly raps on two songs here: “Sticky,” which verges on hip-house (“Two sprinters to Quebec/Chérie, où est mon bec?”), and “Jimmy Cooks,” the final song, which features 21 Savage, samples Playa Fly and feels like a pointed coda of bluster after 45 minutes of sheer ecstatic release.That’s the sort of hip-hop insider wink that Drake albums have long flaunted, but as he and his fans age, they may not be the stuff of his future. Whether “Honestly, Nevermind” proves to be a head fake or a permanent new direction, it’s maybe an indication that he’s leaving the old Drake — and everyone who followed him — in the rear view. Like a great quarterback, he’s throwing the ball where his receivers are already heading, not where they’ve been.Drake“Honestly, Nevermind”(OVO/Republic) More
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Drake Looks for Love, Repeatedly, and 9 More New Songs
Hear tracks by beabadoobee, Perfume Genius, the Beths and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Drake, ‘Falling Back’Less than 10 months after “Certified Lover Boy,” Drake has returned to monopolize summer. His surprise-released seventh album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” is a balmy mood piece —somewhere between a D.J. mix and one very long song — and after a series of weighty, overstuffed albums, it’s refreshing to hear him return to a lighter register, à la the 2017 mixtape “More Life.” (As I type this, “Passionfruit” is trending on Twitter.) Drake showcases his softer side on highlights like the club-ready, house-influenced “Massive,” and the pensive, tuneful “Overdrive,” one of several tracks partly produced by the South African D.J. Black Coffee. And though “Honestly, Nevermind” finds Drake singing more often than not, those who prefer his rapping will appreciate the relentless flow of “Sticky” and the cheeky closing track “Jimmy Cooks,” which features a sharp verse from 21 Savage.But it’s the kinetic “Falling Back,” the album’s first proper track and single, that best sets the scene: A throbbing electronic beat (produced by the D.J.s Rampa, &Me, Alex Lustig and Beau Nox) allows Drake the space for some Auto-Tuned crooning about — what else — a once-promising relationship turned sour. “How do you say to my face, ‘Time heals?’” he sings in a reedy, vulnerable falsetto, “Then go and leave me again, unreal.” The track’s video, though, is more of a lark, playfully sending up Drake’s heartbreaker reputation and imagining a time when he finally settles down and gets married — to 23 different women. Quips his mother, Sandi Graham, “I think he’s really taking these ones seriously!” LINDSAY ZOLADZRhys Langston featuring Fatboi Sharif, ‘Progressive House, Conservative Ligature’The polysyllables fly fast, then go on to accelerate wildly in “Progressive House, Conservative Ligature” by the Los Angeles rapper Rhys Langston, from a coming album called “Grapefruit Radio.” The producer Opal-Kenobi supplies loops of blurry, undulating piano chords and synthesizer swoops, shifting pitch every so often. Langston syncopates his verbal abstractions in double time and then triple time, delivering conundrums like: “Creative manners to skip and erase from moment to moment/abstract, realist, most problematic version of futurism.” It’s both virtuosic and defiantly nonchalant. JON PARELESbeabadoobee, ‘10:36’“I didn’t think you’d fall in love — you’re just a warm body to hold,” Bea Kristi sings on “10:36,” a tale of an emotionally lopsided relationship that will appear on her upcoming second album, “Beatopia.” Her feelings may be indifferent, but the song itself is exuberant — a bright, hooky blast of lo-fi pop propelled by punchy percussion and a bouncy chorus. ZOLADZThe Beths, ‘Silence Is Golden’Elizabeth Stokes is desperate for some peace and quiet on “Silence Is Golden,” the latest track from the New Zealand rockers the Beths and the first single from their forthcoming third album, “Expert in a Dying Field.” Antic percussion and squalling guitars mimic the anxiety induced by an avalanche of urban distractions, like sirens, jet planes and “6 a.m. construction”: Sighs Stokes, “It’s building and building and building until I can’t function at all.” She finally gets what she’s after in the final moments of the song, when the instruments suddenly cut out and she’s left to repeat the chorus contentedly a cappella. ZOLADZJulia Jacklin, ‘I Was Neon’The Australian songwriter Julia Jacklin doesn’t get very specific about the relationship she’s apparently left behind in “I Was Neon.” All she offers are hints like, “I was steady, I was soft to the touch/Cut wide open, did I let in too much?” Midway through the song, she arrives at the more important question: “Am I gonna lose myself again?” She repeats it more than a dozen times over an unswerving drumbeat and a language of rock obsession that dates back to the Velvet Underground — two drone-strummed electric guitar chords — with more guitars and voices arriving to wrangle over whether she’ll stay trapped in past habits. PARELESPerfume Genius, ‘Photograph’Mike Hadreas’s sixth and most abstract album as Perfume Genius, “Ugly Season,” is a work that entwines sound and movement, as he began composing it as an accompaniment to the choreographer Kate Wallich’s 2019 piece “The Sun Still Burns Here.” The beautifully spooky “Photograph” has the feel of a ghostly waltz: Drifting synthesizer riffs and groaning ambience provide the backdrop for Hadreas’s darkly romantic croon — “no fantasy, you were meant for me,” he sings — that adds yet another layer to the song’s lush, beguiling atmosphere. ZOLADZFKA twigs, ‘Killer’Even if FKA twigs weren’t suing Shia LaBeouf for sexual battery, “Killer” would be chilling. “I don’t want to die for love,” she sings in her highest, most fragile register. The track is starkly transparent — keyboard chords, electronic blips and drums, sustained bass lines, multitracked vocals, dub echoes — with a terse pop structure of short phrases and repeated intervals; she sings about attraction, intuition, self-doubt, denial and gaslighting. It’s an elegant crystallization of pain. PARELESRöyksopp featuring Jamie Irrepressible, ‘Sorry’The Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp periodically sets aside dance beats for ballads. That’s what it does on “Sorry,” an abject apology that arrives as a preview of its next album, “Profound Mysteries II.” It begins with melancholy piano chords reminiscent of Erik Satie, then opens up a bassy abyss as Jamie Irrepressible — the British singer Jamie McDermott — thoroughly indicts himself for abandoning a lover: “I hate myself for running scared,” he croons. “No heroics, I know, will bring you back.” For the last half of the song, all he can do is repeat, “I’m sorry.” PARELESAlanis Morissette, ‘Heart — Power of a Soft Heart’Alanis Morissette arrived in the 1990s as a voice of righteous wrath and determined self-rescue. Her pandemic project has been “The Storm Before the Calm,” an album of wordless meditation tracks striving for serenity. It’s a collaboration with Dave Harrington, who has worked with Nicolas Jaar in the psychedelic rock project Darkside. “Heart — Power of a Soft Heart” has uplift built into its foundation — three slow, ascending piano notes that are repeated throughout the track and enfolded in other tones: chimes, cymbals, hovering guitar notes and Morissette singing “ah,” sustaining a magnificent hush. PARELESVadim Neselovskyi, ‘Waltz of Odesa Conservatory’Vadim Neselovskyi’s third-stream pianism shares the qualities of a sculpture carved in ice: finely wrought detail, sharply traced; glinting elegance; coolness to the touch; refractions of light. His right and left hands converse with each other in eager, enchanted dialogue. Since moving to the United States two decades ago, Neselovskyi has collaborated with leading elders in jazz, like Gary Burton and John Zorn, but on his new album, “Odesa: A Musical Walk Through a Legendary City,” he sits alone at the piano. The record is a tribute to the Ukrainian seaport where he was raised, and although he composed the suite in 2020 based on personal inspirations — remembering his childhood there, as his father, a Ukrainian Jew, fought cancer — the album inevitably takes on a different cast now that this Russian-speaking, cosmopolitan city is in the throes of war. Before he joined the New York jazz world, Neselovskyi was a classical prodigy; “Waltz of Odesa Conservatory” calls back to the 1990s, by way of some Baroque piano turns, when he was the youngest student ever admitted to the school. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More
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Drake Removes Himself From Competition for 2022 Grammy Awards
The superstar rapper and singer, long a critic of the awards, was nominated in two categories, best rap album and best rap performance.Drake, the chart-topping rapper and singer, has withdrawn his name from competition in the upcoming Grammy Awards, the latest problem involving headlining talent for the embattled awards, which have struggled with the alienation of other top acts like the Weeknd and Frank Ocean.Drake, one of the most popular and influential artists in pop music today, had two nominations for the 64th annual awards, which were announced two weeks ago. His song “Way 2 Sexy,” featuring Future and Young Thug, was up for best rap performance, and “Certified Lover Boy” — one of the biggest hits of the year — was up for best rap album. He was not nominated in any of the top categories, like album, record or song of the year.But Drake and his managers recently asked that his name be removed from the two rap categories, and the Recording Academy, the organization behind the awards, honored the request, according to representatives for the rapper.The Recording Academy had no comment, but a page on the Grammys’ official website, listing changes to the nominations, was updated on Monday noting the removal of Drake’s two citations.The news was first reported by Variety.Drake’s withdrawal, which emerged just as the final voting period for the awards was opening, is the latest complication for the Grammys. The academy has struggled for years to prevent an exodus among major artists of color, who have made a litany of complaints against the awards, including a poor record of wins for Black artists in the most prestigious categories, as well as a wider failure by the academy and its voters to recognize and appreciate the cultural heft and intricacies of contemporary Black music..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The Recording Academy has also taken steps in recent years to attract a younger and more diverse voting pool and to prove to the music industry that its processes are fair and transparent.But already this year, the awards have been dogged by questions about what has happened behind the scenes. The day before the nominations were announced last month, the academy’s board approved a last-minute plan to expand the ballot in the top four categories to 10 slots, from eight. Comparing the final ballot to an early version of its nominations list, which circulated throughout the industry, showed that the beneficiaries included Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Abba and Lil Nas X.Drake has been nominated for 49 Grammys in his career — counting the two nods he got this year — and has taken home four. But he has long expressed ambivalence about the awards, even after winning, and has often decided not to attend the ceremony even when he has been widely nominated.After his streaming smash “Hotline Bling” won best rap song and best rap/sung performance in 2017, Drake questioned his genre categorization in a radio interview. “‘Hotline Bling’ is not a rap song,” he said at the time. “Maybe because I’ve rapped in the past or because I’m Black, I can’t figure out why.” He added of the awards, “I don’t even want them, because it just feels weird.”In 2019, when Drake and Kendrick Lamar were the two most-nominated artists, each declined invitations to perform on the show. Drake did appear onstage to accept the best rap song award for “God’s Plan,” but seemed to allude in his speech to the Grammys’ fraught history in recognizing hip-hop — a rocky relationship that dated back to the first-ever rap award in 1989, when some artists boycotted the show because the category was not going to be televised.“This is a business where sometimes it’s up to a bunch of people that might not understand what a mixed-race kid from Canada has to say or a fly Spanish girl from New York, or a brother from Houston,” Drake said. “But the point is, you’ve already won if you have people who are singing your songs word for word — you don’t need this right here,” he added, holding up the Grammy.But as Drake started to continue speaking, the Grammys cut to commercial. Drake later called his words “too raw for TV.” A representative for the show said that producers had mistaken a pause in Drake’s speech for the end.Earlier this year, before the 63rd annual show, the Weeknd, who had been shut out of the nominations despite his album, “After Hours,” being one of the biggest hits of 2020, declared that he would boycott the awards in the future to protest its use of anonymous nominations review committees. Those were blue-ribbon industry panels that sorted through voters’ first-round nomination picks and settled on a final ballot.The review committees had long been a subject of intrigue in the business. A legal complaint by Deborah Dugan, who became the academy’s chief executive in 2019 — only to be ejected just five months later — said that those committees were rife with corruption and conflicts of interest. This year the Recording Academy, led by its new chief, the producer Harvey Mason Jr., eliminated those committees in most categories, though the last-minute rule change has once again put a spotlight on the nominations process.In response to the perceived snubs of the Weeknd last year, Drake wrote on Instagram that “we should stop allowing ourselves to be shocked every year by the disconnect between impactful music and these awards and just accept that what once was the highest form of recognition may no longer matter to the artists that exist now and the ones that come after.”He added, “This is a great time for somebody to start something new that we can build up over time and pass on to the generations to come.”The 64th annual Grammys are scheduled to be held in Los Angeles on Jan. 31. More
