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Originally Posted by louder
Drake has turned into the hip hop version of Rihanna. He's just a pop artist who's mainly about commercial success and breaking records, he performs demos that his artists send to him instead of writing his own songs.
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I like Rihanna. I think ANTI is a pretty good record. Not brilliant, but solid. Kanye helped. And she absolutely RULES on "Famous." But that's neither here nor there.
I have to disagree about critical acclaim. Metacritic aside -- as far as I know they have a pretty limited range of sources from which they aggregate their scores -- I believe Pitchfork is the true maker / breaker of modern music media. As long as your album gets a good score on Pitchfork, it's considered a good album by the industry. That's sad, but it's true. Also, Drake's second and third albums and IYRTITL all got glowing pitchfork scores, and were all up for Grammys. So I think he's got critical acclaim. What he doesn't have is a true "classic" album. He has no Blueprint, no College Dropout, not even a Slim Shady or Marshall Mathers LP. His take on MBDTF is pretty basic comparatively, and IYRTITL was "not an album" (eyeroll.) He simply isn't poising himself to go down in history. He'll be a fixture of future "I love the 2010's" specials on vh1 because he has yet to make any kind of definitive statement, and that's something even the critics who love him seem to be able to acknowledge.
Also, he's screwed over a lot of his "co-signs." Poor ILoveMakkonen (don't really care for him, but he deserves better than the shitty treatment he got from OVO) had to bounce labels just to keep releasing EPs. And who the hell else is on OVO? Nobody.
The Weeknd will bypass Drake just like Drake bypassed Wayne, and that's the circle of life for forgettable artists.