2 February 2018
Maybe the provocative video for ‘God’s Plan’ was acknowledgement that the track was especially bland and needed an add-on to grab attention. The synth riff and trap beat are nice but slight. Drake’s rap, though, is a contrail of nothingness, a swatch of beige and off-white shades you could paint your kitchen wall so that it goes with your fridge. As with Dua Lipa’s ‘IDGAF’ immediately before this at number one, ‘God’s Plan’ is ambient noise for boutiques and coffee shops.
What feelings does the video for ‘God’s Plan’ intend to provoke? I’m happy for the girl who gets a university scholarship, and the other acts of largesse surely helped those who received paid-for groceries and stacks of cash. But these intercessions in these people’s lives are all done and filmed for your entertainment. Drake may indeed be well-intentioned here, but this is a vanity project: poverty tourism among the toothless poors, with a star swooping down to indulge his fantasy, finesse his image, fluff up his ego, and farm some love, all with a sum of money he and his record company could afford from petty cash. In the vignette where Drake hands out those wads of dollars to a family, you can see a security guard in the background, seemingly maintaining a cordon. The climactic message of the video isn’t agitation for social justice or passion for equitable opportunity, but a sentimental call to be nice to your mother. The last words spoken to Drake in the video are “God bless you”, so he gets a return on investment. Perhaps such scenes play well in America, the land of thoughts and prayers. Here in socialist Europe, and especially here on the peripheral island and corporate tax haven that’s recently chosen full-bore woke peacenik eco-communism in our head of state, I think it’s obscene.
