The first is not addressing the mainstream issues people have with hip hop culture. It may be lucrative to market to your most supportive audiences, but you can't ignore the masses.
The second is simply not being cool enough to be compatible with hip hop audiences. Being edgy is not the same as cool. It can help, but "Lose Yourself" didn't need to depend on kindness to do well.
Written by
Atlas Wind
Drake is a rapper from Toronto; One of the biggest ever. Although he came up from Myspace and Degrassi, he won over the Cash Money circle and became a hipster rapper. When culture shifted he diluted his music to represent the culture. A controversial beef with Kendrick Lamar landed him here with Ice Man. Now, the cover is a reference to the Michael Jackson glove Kendrick Lamar wore during his tour prior to the beef. It's clever but polarizing because people are complicated. Drake has learned from 21 Savage to keep his music playful and a little intentionally ignorant, but it works very well on this album. Rappers get a lot of crash out commissions; (Where a label with no cultural investment in you asks you to sell something desperately unrealistic with very little concern for your career i.e. "Sugar On My Tongue"). That aside, Drake hasn't flexed his lyricism this hard since his early career. He's sincerely one of the best musicians in his genre and Ice Man is a reminder of that.
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