In Aubrey “Drake” Graham’s home city of Toronto, there are only two seasons: Winter and Summer. “It’s a very unique place,” said the rapper in an interview with Zane Lowe on his Beats One radio show OVO Sound Radio. “You start to value your days a lot more, when seven months are spent in the icy cold.” Views, the “fourth” studio album from Drake, dropped on Apple Music and iTunes lat last Thursday night (after a blitzkrieg of two mixtapes in the past year alongside some summertime diss tracks and singles—but none of them official, of course).
Views, as described by Drake, is a journey through the seasons of Toronto. The album’s good. It flexes Drake’s ever-growing ego and wish for the women in his life not to embarrass him at the Cheesecake Factory. More notably, the impeccably polished record firmly establishes his longtime producing partner Noah “40” Shebib as a force to be reckoned with. Without 40, Views would be nothing. Maybe Drake would be nothing, too.
It’s weird that, less than a decade go, we were watching little Drake grow up as the dauntless Jimmy Brooks on Canadian teen soap Degrassi: The Next Generation (where in one late season episode, he aptly stole the spotlight from his aspiring-musician girlfriend Ashley by rapping over her track, mirroring his real-life rise to fame as he eclipsed former mentor Lil Wayne). He started from the bottom, and now we’re flinging the grown-up, well-established rap monger from Toronto’s CN Tower in an interactive version of the album cover for Views, created by comedy and animation group Super Deluxe. In a decade, Drake has gone from teen soap star, to rap and hip-hop crooner, to living meme.
As you goofily drag Drake across the interactive Views album cover—entitled Drop Drake—he bemoans quips from his own hits. A miffed “not again” (stricken from part two of his Meek Mill-diss track saga “Back to Back”), to the longer spit “I got enemies / got a lot of enemies” (I don’t want to be an enemy of Drake, but here we are). Drop Drake is a sort of air-borne sibling to QWOP (2008), flailing limbs and all, while poking fun at the painfully obvious photoshopping of Drake sitting atop the tower.
As the seasons pass in Views, as do the unlockable outfits in Drop Drake, showcasing the most important looks of Drake’s career (or at least, since 2014). There’s Courtside Drake in an oversized sweater and grandpa-esque glasses, sitting courtside at a Raptors game. And of course, Hotline Bling Drake, but you already know that look. These are in addition to other “unlockables,” achieved from the amount of far flung drops, such as the Tony Hawk game-reminiscent Big Head Mode and even a floaty Zero Gravity option.
Drake’s Views is essentially Take Care All Grown-Up Edition. A side-step away from the vicious, hotel-recorded If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late (2015), and from the banger-filled Nothing Was the Same (2013). It’s Drake returning to his got-rich-off-a-mixtape roots, which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on where you fall on the Drake-fan-spectrum. He’s still easy to poke fun at, evidenced by the giggle-inducing glee of Drop Drake. And if this rap thing falls through, at least he can find continued success as the meme-generating human being he is. Come on, he literally said “what are thoooose” on a track on Views, so anything is possible for the 6 God now.
You too can fling the 6 God around Toronto’s CN Tower in the browser based Drop Drake, all you have to do is click here!