#benjammin

Before 2016, music was still physical. That matter. Drake’s first run from So Far Gone to IYRTITL had weight on it because people actually lived with those projects. Burned CDs in the Altima. DatPiff downloads sitting in a dusty laptop folder. iTunes purchases synced to an iPod with a cracked screen and somebody auntie baby shower pictures on it. You owned the music. Or your patna did. So the albums stayed outside longer. So Far Gone carried all through 2009 like cigarette smoke in a leather jacket. Thank Me Later had a full summer attached to it. Take Care practically soundtracked the winter of 2011. NWTS owned nighttime in 2013. IYRTITL lasted damn near all of 2015 because streaming hadn’t fully turned music into disposable content yet. Then Meek tweeted. Funny how one tweet shifted rap history more than half these fake “eras” niggas be marketing now. Drake won the battle clear, but that Quentin Miller stain never really came out the fabric. You could hear the confidence change after that. Views felt less like an artist presenting a statement and more like somebody trying to survive expectation. Hotline Bling got stapled onto the album like bonus points on a final exam. More Life came with a disclaimer before the music even dropped. “It’s a playlist.” That was the pivot right there. Drake stopped trusting his ability to present a cohesive body of work and started making projects designed for extraction. Pick your favorite three songs, throw them in your Apple Music rotation, keep it moving. Even Scorpion felt like a reaction to pressure instead of a vision. And that’s after the Scary Hours pack, after Diplomatic Immunity, after God’s Plan accidentally becoming bigger than he probably expected, after Push stepped on the rollout with Infrared and then backed a Brinks truck over the boy soul with Story of Adidon. Ever since then, every Drake project feel like it was assembled in the middle of turbulence. CLB sounded defeated before it even dropped. Honestly, Nevermind literally titled itself like a shrug. Her Loss the first time in years he sounded awake again, like the competitive spirit came back for a minute. FATD went right back to playlist energy. Bloated. Unfocused. Some records cool in the moment while you driving down 45 at 1:38 AM with the windows cracked, but no real staying power. That’s the difference people don’t wanna talk about because streaming numbers became the new championship rings. Drake still dominates attention, but dominance ain’t the same thing as impact. The old Drake albums felt like seasons of your life. The new ones feel like content updates. And somewhere after 2015, the boy stopped sounding like somebody making classics and started sounding like somebody trying to outpace the algorithm. That’s a different kind of hunger. You can hear it too. Humans really turned music into fast food and then act confused when nothing sticks to the ribs anymore.:::