Drake’s rap-singing transition point offers release from identity pressure

Evidence

A glacial fatalism runs beneath everything here, and Drake matters because he makes contact — maybe better than anyone else — with the sense of hopelessness that quietly subsists beneath all the twerking and tweeting, all the twitter and the chatter of twenty-first-century culture. Hear this in the gorgeous electro-downer haze that saturates the album and establishes its tone much more than any of the beats. Yet there’s something beyond the fatalism, too. You can hear it in Drake’s signature move — the transition from rap to singing, the slipping down from ego-assertion into a sensual purring, the relaxing into a lasciviousness that has nothing to do with the localised libido and dumb automatisms of phallic sexuality. Down here, there is a glorious release from the pressures of identity. Rave-like, pitched-up vocals are suspended on placid currents of synth. Voices stop being human, become avatars from a space where subjectivity has been left behind like a bad dream. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1326

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the account of the desiring-self as constructed stage set and the rave-era escape from subjectivity in earlier chapters on Joy Division/rave and on Ferry’s Roxy sensibility.