6 May 2016
Entertaining as the Kendrick – Drake beef has been, I have one teensy reservation: it’s only Drake. Surely there a worthier foe for the lacerating rhymes of Pulitzer Prize laureate Kendrick Lamar than Toronto’s most prominent rapper since Snow. Drake is hardly the Napoleon of rap, not least because the Napoleon of rap is former Tupac associate and rapper Napoleon.
Anyway, Drake was top dog in the latter half of the ’10s. And yet do you really remember much of his chart-dominating hits? The actual tracks now, not just the meme from the video. ‘One Dance’ was top of the Irish charts for a hefty 11 weeks in the middle of 2016, essentially our song of that summer, but I can’t say it jumps out at me as the soundtrack of its time. Drake’s massive popular success was probably a function of his tepid blandness: sad-boy hip hop to complement Ed Sheeran’s sad-boy folk pop.
That’s not to say ‘One Dance’ doesn’t have its charms. To the then-fashionable trop-house sound of reggaeton and trance it adds an Afrobeat rhythm, and I’m always partial to a bit of Afrobeat. Those agreeable west African vibes are courtesy of Wizkid, who here becomes the first act from Nigeria to have a number one single in Ireland. The sparkling vocal hook from UK singer Kyla is also astutely bought-in, sampled from a remix of her 2009 track ‘Do You Mind’. That leaves the lukewarm flow of Drake, the Ed Sheeran of rap. But then again, I shouldn’t be so mean: it’s only Drake.
