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Through that B-side pile, we’ve received a trove of really memorable cuts - songs that shoot straight into playlists for partying, late-night moodiness, and cutting underdog bangers.
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The highly successful strategy here is to keep his hold on the culture, while we wait for the real-deal album material. But it officially stamps Drake’s self-proclaimed golden era as what might also be considered his “playlist era.” In the last five years leading up to this record, Drake has released one official album (2018’s “Scorpion”), but also a long playlist of original tracks (“More Life”), a repackaged bundle of past loosies (“Care Package”) and another collection of “demo tapes” (“Dark Lane Demo Tapes”). “Certified Lover Boy” is a perfectly fine record - it’s expensively well-produced, like all of Drake’s albums, and easily likable with a decent batting average for a nearly hour-and-a-half record. It’s also what makes his new album a confirmation of a rapper partially trapped in pop superstar stasis. It is this energy - one hyper-focused on maintaining his reign - that keeps him smiling. By most measures, he’s right: few artists have maintained a stranglehold on music or culture at large for as long as he has.
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“Far as the Drake era, man, we in the golden ages,” he raps later on that same “Bridle Path” track. Indeed, despite only a couple direct promotional efforts, the album will bully the charts - as you read this, a dozen tracks are likely climbing over one another like crabs in a bucket, reaching for slots atop every relevant ranking.