Tracks

“Best I Ever Had”
Drake
Few are naive enough to believe a rapper’s street-life spiel. 50 Cent probably wears reading glasses and a Snuggie. The only dice Common throws these days come with Boggle. But buying into the braggadocio of Canadian rapper (stop snickering) Drake requires a Herculean suspension of disbelief. Here’s a kid actor from Degrassi: The Next Generation offering the surreal boast, “I can make a pussy whistle / Like the Andy Griffith theme song.” Um, cool?

Two key ingredients have put the child star on pop radio, and neither has anything to do with the generic Auto-Tune crooning and laid-back Will Smith–plus-raunch rhymes (which, come to think of it, just equals “Kanye West”): Drake is Lil Wayne’s protégé and currently sees Rihanna. The chunky, plastic beats sound straight off an iPhone app. Hell, they might be. At the very least, “Best I Ever Had” is such transparent posing it reaches camp.

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