On ‘Views’ Drake Becomes the ‘Rap Game Frank Sinatra’
Drizzy’s now unequivocally pop’s chairman of the board
Drake has been rap music’s most dependably bankable pop star for seven years. For his fourth studio album Views, Drake’s one-upped himself as a superstar. In a depressed music buying economy, he sold 630,000 first-day copies of the release, and has arguably morphed into an artist-as-icon, superseding all other dominant male artists in both rap and mainstream music altogether. If looking for an artist to whom we can favorably compare Drake, it’s actually best that we focus on Frank Sinatra. In doing so, we discover the heights to which rap music has ascended and also contemplate just how Drake’s success re-contextualizes rap, pop and the future of music overall.
Drake’s road to becoming commercial rap’s best male performer in just over half a decade of time required nothing short of inverting rap music’s expectations by discovering the dark side of the bravado and mania that’s driven American pop’s fascination with urban music for a century. The Toronto-born MC’s ability to deftly blend equal parts of the artistic legacies of Jay Z, Pimp C, LL Cool J and Marvin Gaye allowed him to successfully discover and occupy the hidden bleeding emo heart that has always driven the macho-pop desires of rap and soul music. In short, that’s what makes Drake a game changer, and also ultimately what makes Views sound like such an annoyingly milquetoast release to many rap critics.
Frank Sinatra blurred the lines between iconic vocalists, discovered the progression of genres, styles and sounds, and similar to Drake, angered his critics and fans, too. Frank’s success was in walking the line between white pop and crossover black soul. He found the tightrope line between Bing Crosby singing “Danny Boy” and James Brown raspily crooning “It’s A Man’s World” and excelled. Integration is what made Sinatra a game changer, and as The Economist says, he “captured the public’s new mood for licentiousness rather than mere romance, and received the reward of fame and money.”
To begin the Drake/Sinatra conversation, let’s look at a song like “My Way,” arguably Sinatra’s signature song. Sinatra famously opens by singing, “Regrets, I had a few / but then again, too few to mention.” As stated earlier, he’s squarely between two well established psycho-emotional spaces for people. Couple that with Sinatra being one of those guys who could either wear the hell out of a tuxedo or simultaneously hold a cigarette, wear a tailored suit and have a fedora sitting “just so” on his head, and this ability to meet the precise ideal of being all things to all people is either commendably epic or entirely infuriating. Given that roughly one-third of Sinatra’s 59 studio albums were gold or platinum-selling successes, the former may be true.
On album number four, Drake’s more Sinatra than ever before. “Hotline Bling” closes out the release, and could be “My Way’s” modern doppelganger.
Ever since I left the city,
You got a reputation for yourself now
Everybody knows and I feel left out
Girl you got me down, you got me stressed out
’Cause ever since I left the city,
you started wearing less and goin’ out more
Glasses of champagne out on the dance floor
Hangin’ with some girls I’ve never seen before
Drake’s the most popular male pop artist in the world. Yet, he tempers this iconic acclaim with an extraordinary level of melancholy about an unknown mate who is finding her sensual freedom and personal identity as a woman without him around. If any other artist recited these lyrics, we’d all probably not care. But in Drake having that perfectly groomed beard, and ability to have everyone in the world find him dancing poorly to be just the most meme-able thing ever, he, like Sinatra in his ever-present fedora, toes the line between epic and infuriating. Drake is four platinum-selling albums and two platinum-selling mixtapes into his just-under a decade-long mainstream career. Clearly Drake’s quite epic.
Drake’s Views continues the artist’s desire to dive into genres outside of expectations, as diverse sounds including Dominican dembow, bachata and U.K.-friendly house make appearances. Sinatra was a genre-jumping fanatic too, as evidenced via his 1967 bossa nova duet album with Brazilian superstar Antonio Carlos Jobim. When artists not named Drake or Frank Sinatra make these leaps, we end up with fun, yet ultimately terrible things like Rod Stewart and The Rolling Stones making disco, or LL Cool J and Tim McGraw doing country. Somehow, in knowing how to find the thin line that connects all things, Drake’s “One Dance,” “Controlla” and Rihanna duet “Too Good” are easy-to-compare as Sinatra and Jobim “Corcovado”-style performances.
Artists who can steadfastly remain their best pop selves in the midst of a listener’s sonic cognitive dissonance are historically easy to hate, but should be just as open to our universal adoration.
Like Sinatra not mirroring Bing Crosby’s standards, Drake isn’t making “rap” music. And much like Sinatra not digging too deep into rock & roll or R&B, Drake is not making “soul” music either. Instead, these two stars created sounds that are couched in-between styles and expectations that traditionally have a profoundly singular emotionally connective tie to mainstream ears. That’s what ultimately frustrates 2016’s rap fans about Drake, and what probably frustrated 1956’s pop fans about Sinatra, too. In both artists standing as a sole arbiter in the struggle between joy and pain as expressed through music, their best songs end up being the soundtrack to a centered feeling at the core of our humanity that everyone knows is *just* outside of their emotional reach.
Writer John Lahr states that Frank Sinatra was great because he could “swing, break hearts, behave badly, and he made his voice an instrument that kept reinventing American music.” In Drake doing the same thing a generation after Frank Sinatra’s death, he, like Sinatra, is a divisive artist with undeniable popularity. Like Francis Albert Sinatra, Aubrey Drake Graham is reinventing the boundaries of pop music worldwide — not just American music. He is the new “Chairman of the Board.”
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