On one level, this is simply more of the same from Drake. In summer as well as in winter, beneath a beach umbrella just as much as under the cold carapace of a Toronto sky in December, rap’s pretty boy little brother is sort of always talking about the many grievances he’s picked up along the way. “I got enemies, got a lot of enemies,” he proclaims almost triumphantly in the hook of the 2015 song “Energy,” as if the accumulation of adversaries were a badge inevitably accompanying great success. Elsewhere in the song, he issues a complaint that always makes me laugh: “I got girls in real life tryna fuck up my day.” There’s also this, which sounds somewhat avoidable: “I got two mortgages, thirty million in total.” Nobody’s ever put so much rhythmic and rhyming effort into revealing, wittingly or not, that he needs to think about downsizing and searching out some more levelheaded new friends.
Still, Drake is known as a master of the summer banger, whose lyrics, across the years, have surely launched millions of vaguely hostile or sexy—but always, in either case, vague—Instagram captions, because he’s got some versatility and an ear for popular desires. Take “One Dance,” an almost undistractedly romantic ditty from 2016, or the yearning, dirty-macking R. & B. of “Marvins Room” (2011). He can—it’s easy to forget, given the recent travail of the protracted, often mutually ruinous battle he lost to Kendrick Lamar two years ago—get sweet and sour, cool and warm, grateful for his blessings, or obsessed with the hordes of underminers pretending to wish him well.
Alas, poor Drake! Losing to Lamar knocked him down a few rungs in the hip-hop firmament over which he’d so gaudily and spitefully lorded for more than a decade. The great occasion for and theme of “Iceman” is his hoped-for resurrection, his return from being “buried alive.” He’s not in a summery mood. “Janice STFU” takes the melody of its chorus—put through some syrupy, saddening machine—from the upbeat and charmingly repetitive song “I Follow Rivers,” by Lykke Li. In the chorus—“Reach me, baby / Call my phone and say you need me, baby / I’m so green, you gotta teach me, baby / From Vancouver, you a BC baby”—Drake’s voice carries a slightly Auto-Tuned edge, and the verses seem to refer to any number of opponents, imaginary or real, inside the “industry” and without, people who are less authentic or, to be more specific, more successfully inauthentic than Drake.
All summer I’ve heard this song everywhere, spreading with nocturnal menace from the windows of cars as they speed through my block, or from the middle of a circle of friends around the corner or in the park. It offers a vision of the season that gets less press than the primary-color nostalgia—sand and waves, endless trips on winding roads—that often dominates our talking and thinking about the summer. Don’t forget: it’s also a time of relentless comparison and dashed expectations, of regrets that linger hotly until the great puddle of August threatens to drown you pore by pore. Think of the protagonist of Éric Rohmer’s 1986 film “The Green Ray,” a young woman named Delphine, who’s recently broken up with her boyfriend and can’t seem to find a summer activity fit to get him—or, really, her loneliness, which quickly crowds out the silhouette of the man—off her mind. One friend, freshly coupled, leaves her in the lurch. Another circle of acquaintances makes her feel like the odd woman out. She goes to the Alps, then Biarritz, on and on, looking for signs in the faces of strangers and in the sky. The whole picture is a stylish sulk, and so is the summer itself if you’re not getting what you want.
