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And while he’s a thrilling rapper, on the verge of keeping pace with the genre’s best technicians, he’ll choose feelings over skill almost every time. (In this he’s sharing head space with the Weeknd, the Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye, who’s spent the last year honing a beautiful new strain of R&B that’s callous, aggrieved and staggeringly vicious, and who is a strong shadow presence on this album.) A fan of mood-sensualists like Sade and Aaliyah, Drake has never sung as intensely as he does on this album. He raps about soft things, sings about hard things.
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In the future an album like this will be commonplace today, it’s radical. “Take Care” isn’t a hip-hop album or an R&B album so much as an album of eccentric black pop that takes those genres as starting points, asks what they can do but haven’t been doing, then attempts those things. It’s stranger than any Jay-Z album, stranger than every album by Mr. Given that he’s a fixture of hip-hop radio, making an album this outré demonstrates a perverse sense of confidence, and also ignores the received wisdom about consistency and incremental change. Still, “Take Care” is an astonishingly audacious way of spending his newfound currency.
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But Drake is turning stranger, and earlier in his career, far more quickly than they did, making it safe for others to follow. There are a few weirdo hip-hop superstars: the sometime Drake antagonist Kanye West, for sure, and also Lil Wayne, Drake’s label boss. Surrounded by peers who own diamonds but not mirrors, Drake is eager to dismantle himself, to show off his corroded insides. In a sea of tough new-money triumphalism Drake is a splash of the gothic. It’s undoubtedly bizarre, this turn of events. In order to fully assess his just-released second album, “Take Care” (Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Republic), it’s important to understand that Drake - the 25-year-old Canadian former child actor who both raps and sings, the self-flagellator nonpareil - is now mainstream hip-hop’s connective tissue. So it’s gone with Drake, hip-hop’s current center of gravity, his success a reminder of so many of the victories hip-hop has won in the last couple of decades: the right to be decadent, sure, but also the right to reimagine any style of music, the right to be emotionally complicated, the right to be unusual.
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Before long he’s the new normal everyone has to fit in around him. He inches closer and closer to the center, until the center starts moving toward him. He holds his ground until suddenly, despite everyone’s efforts, he’s standing tall. He is jostled from every side, knocked off balance. He struggles to be heard and then to find his footing.