One Artistic Appreciation Course: Fill & Download for Free

Middling batting average. It is an ongoing discussion in rap forums and barbershops if Drake has a great album. This alone would indicate that he probably does not. Perhaps his utmost best album is excellent while the remaining are average to mediocre. In my opinion, his albums tend to include a few fine hit songs in the middle of a bunch of ok and bad songs with maybe a legitimate non-hit standout (“Too Much,” “From Time,” “The Ride,” “Do Not Disturb,” “You & The 6,” “Weston Road Flows”). Most artists of his caliber and skill have at-least one package of songs that define the time, push the genre forward, or challenge us in a way that is not immediate to our ears. Drake is yet to do this. It is the ongoing asterisk of his career.Megastardom. Get this: Drake is so popular that people listening to him are not just fans. Unlike the cases of Mick Jenkins, Vince Staples, or ASAP Rocky, the general public listens to Drake. As a result, his positive reception ratio plummets. He is at a greater risk of being criticized simply because more individuals are lending an ear.Jealousy. Drake, for all his criticisms, is a living and active legend. He has rewritten history books and will ultimately be regarded as one of the most essential, talented, and influential artists of all time. He is a force with the widest hand. The premier performer. His albums are affirmations of the highest order. He has the world of rap at his fingertips. He is utterly inescapable. Of course he will be criticized by many because they envy his position. They desire his abilities, privileges, and illustrious career.The culture. He has few visible tattoos. He does not dress in ridiculously extravagant ways. He does not speak very bombastically. He speaks with zero slang. He has no urban accent. He has had little serious legal troubles. He was raised in Toronto by his Jewish mother. He was originally an actor on a teenage drama show. He can be described as soft-spoken. And don’t forget his first name is Aubrey. I mean this to say Drake, in his presentation, is not suppose to be a rapper, let alone the biggest rapper of his generation. He mostly subverts the very masculine looks, demeanor, attitude, and background of a leading man of this genre. Given what we have seen in previous eras, how brisk he rose to relevance, and the ongoing demonstrations of machismo in Hip Hop culture, this is grounds to criticize him. His personality is deemed antithetical.Leveraging his talents. Drake is not as strong a rapper as some, but he can be quite good and always manages an unruffled level of charisma and swagger. His instrumental-choosing talent is highly underrated. Contrary to hip hop lore, he can song-write and his style is respectable. And in these songs, he does manage some clever one-liners. Despite hitting all of the marks to be an outstanding rapper, Drake upsets some by pandering to a wider audience and thus not utilizing his utmost rapping skills. He spends an awful lot of time crafting R&B slow-jams, agreeable pop songs, and hypnotic rap tunes. When he does really rap, like on “Diplomatic Immunity” he is pretty good, but these tracks are blue moons. A purist does not like this and will continue to criticize Drake’s willingness to ‘sell out’ for a larger audience.Thematic presentation. As Drake mostly subverts from the expectations of a rapper in background and behavior, so does his music. He markets himself as a cloying lovesick romancer. As regular as clockwork, he searches for love in the wrong places only to fall hard and fast for women with middling interest. He dreams up imaginary realms for he and his lovers when there is no grounds to do so. That saccharine boyishness can occasionally woo audiences of all demographics—with good reason. But other times, he is painfully sappy. Irrespective of your adherence to common masculine norms in Hip Hop, it would be hard to deny that Drake has a tendency to come off as gutless.The whole ghost-writing thing. The whole beef with Meek Mill blew this out of proportion but Drake did enlist The Weeknd and Quentin Miller to write virtually the entirety of some of his songs. Adding to the controversy is that the two projects these artists played a role in crafting: 2011’s Take Care and 2015’s If You’re Reading This Its Too Late, are regarded as Drake best projects. And even the one following the latter—2016’s Views, in which Miller collects zero credits, you could say is his worst album. As Hip Hop is traditionally a genre in which lyricism is a cornerstone, some media elites, pundits, rappers, and others have called into question Drake’s talent and greatness. I guess if you have not penned even a few of your songs, you’re disqualified as a rapper by some.Shady. Drake has done some rather cunning, dodgy, if not outright inexcusably strange acts that he has not explained or justified well enough. More than any artist I know, he has taken lyrics and interpolations from others songs and just thrown them onto his own without giving credit. I am pretty sure he jacked XXXTentacion’s whole breakout song “Look At Me” without his knowledge—an odd thing to do even if he did know. He cleverly avoided offering credit to DRAM for his Grammy-winning track “Hotline Bling” which was certainly inspired by his breakout hit “Cha Cha”. The most egregious example is when he used Rappin’ 4 Tay’s entire verse for a YG feature that he later was forced to pay $100,000 for. Even his remixes, which I’m sure most artists appreciate because he’s Drake, seem more self-serving than acts of benevolence. He steals less like an artist and more like a lumbering rookie thief.There a few others I’m perhaps missing. Feel free to add them blow.

Maybe you would find art more interesting if you took a class wherein you made some art. An art appreciation course might help, but I think a hands-on course would help more. You’d see for yourself how difficult it is.Part of the problem might be that you haven’t seen much bad art. Most people see art in museums, which is good art. (I know, there’s not much agreement on what should be in museums, but it’s there because somebody thought it deserved to be there.) Non-art people don’t see the failures, the terrible stuff artists produce while trying to make something they can consider a success. I’ve read about one artist who worked for months trying something new. She said she ended up with 3-inch deep oil-paint “mud” on her canvases, over and over. But eventually she painted what she wanted.It’s fascinating to me to study how art reflects the society it’s born in. ( In explanation of that idea, read Stephen King’s book Danse Macabre on how horror movies reflect problems that are current in the culture that produced them.) Fine art is the same way; it reflects the artist’s opinion on a current issue.Also, artists go in and out of style the way everything else does. When I was in college, Matisse was dismissed as “decorative.” Now he’s studied as a great artist. For a while “outsider art” was in vogue, now it’s not.

Okay….Up through the late ‘70's most bands were assembled organically…that is to say:Musicians held auditions for their own groups, wrote most of the material they recorded themselves and recorded those songs themselves.These bands/artists created their own sounds and image and left it to the record companies to promote/exploit said music and image. (This is one reason album covers are so revered…a cool cover could really make you want to hear the songs inside...even if you’d never heard of the group.)The record companies were run by either musicians or very staunch lovers of music. Artists were respected.Enter the ‘80’s…massive corporations start buying the record companies, style (how you look) is more important than how you play and it became very questionable if the bands were playing “as advertised”. A lot of bands started using (or had them forced down their throat) drum machines, sequencers and studio pros to get slicker and more radio-friendly productions. Most bands also used outside songwriters (people not in the band).Record companies were now run by (essentially) advertising executives and a bunch of eager “yes” men and MTV ruled the day…so the music became sort of an afterthought……so did the artists…band logos became more important than band members…and most record company execs had never even taken a music appreciation course let alone knew anything technical about music or production.Add focus groups and test markets and suddenly music is no longer an art form but a popularity/beauty contest.The ‘80's were all about how you looked……not how you sounded.Cheers.