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In 2015, it pays off to be first. It doesn’t matter whether you’re actually the first or not, as long as people think that you’re the first. Because of this, Drake no longer operates on an album by album basis—he’s simply too smart to lock himself away for a year or two working on his next major album. He’s working on gut reactions, being in-touch with what’s next, and engaging his audience on a weekly basis.
Few artists of his caliber are so of-the-moment, and that’s what makes him such a special and important figure in modern music. Embracing meme culture as well as immediate sharing through SoundCloud and OVO Sound Radio on Beats 1, Drake is currently acting as an antithesis to Kanye West’s glacial approach to releasing music. Creatively, Kanye is the pinnacle, but when it comes to keeping up with accelerated culture, hip-hop’s self-declared God is starting to slip.
That’s where Drake and his new-found hunger for immediacy comes in. If no one is talking about his Meek Mill diss track next year, it won’t matter. For a minute, that’s all people were talking about. As quickly as we all moved on from it, Drake did too. The amount of tracks he has jumped on as they’ve approached popularity continues to grow, and not only does it serve the artist he’s endorsing; it also asserts Drake as one of hip-hop’s most trustworthy tastemakers. He has jumped on predictable future-hits from Fetty Wap and Migos, but he’s also taken risks with Makonnen and Wizkid remixes.
2015 has been huge for Drake, and yet he still hasn’t released the promised solo album follow-up to Nothing Was the Same. He has, however, been absolutely inescapable, showing up everywhere and achieving success in bursts of trending newsflashes. He’s always giving his fans something new to talk about, never leaving them waiting too long. Drake knows that attention spans are dwindling, and he’s using that to his advantage. While others flirt with irrelevancy and suffer album set-backs and false starts, Drake keeps delivering.
When Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly dropped, it felt like a huge event. Everyone was talking about it, and the critical acclaim was as rampant as it was for his breakthrough success, good Kid, m.A.A.d City. Drake doesn’t seem concerned with creating a singular landmark. He’s not worried about making the album of the year; he’s gunning for the artist of the year spot.
Drake is good at the internet—not as good as someone like Kevin Abstract or Yung Lean, but far better than he really needs to be to have a successful career. He didn’t need to release What a Time To Be Alive, but he knew exactly how crazy the internet would go if he collaborated with Future on a full-length release. The two rappers already had this year in the bag, and this is no more than the icing on the cake.
In 2015, Drake has been making music for the generation of kids who grew up not only with the internet, but on the internet. These are kids who get excited about something one day and forget it the next, kids that will get his low-risk surprise album to the top of the iTunes chart until something new comes along. But Drake doesn’t want to let that next big thing come along unless he’s a part of it, and that’s why he’s dominating 2015.
When Drake remixed “Versace” and adopted the Migos flow back in 2013, it was an obvious attempt to jump on what’s hot at the right moment, and it worked. Ever since then he’s been keeping his name on people’s minds by making rising songs his own. It helps that he’s so readily embracing contemporary, internet-driven culture. There isn’t anyone else of Drake’s stature that could perform in front of a rapid Powerpoint presentation full of memes and have it not look out of place.
This year, he’s been making music in reaction to his audience’s appetites, staying up on what’s cool and what’s getting reactions. This begs the question, however, of what happens when he starts to create on his own terms and puts out Views From the Six. Will it be another short-lived trending topic, or a potential album of the year? Back in 2013, Drake said himself that “it ain’t about who did it first, it’s about who did it right.” He couldn’t be further removed from that statement in 2015, and he’s thriving more than ever because of it.
Even if his newfound approach makes his releases feel a little less important in the long run, it’s a smart way to keep his name buzzing. He’s saying no to diminishing returns, and yes to social media meltdown.
What a Time To Be Alive is far from the event-album status of Watch the Throne, but it doesn’t try to imitate it. In a way, though, it’s far more relevant than a Throne sequel could ever hope to be in this day and age, if only by virtue of keeping with the times. Kanye and Jay Z are too rooted in their own ways to create a mixtape that could set social media aflame in just six days. Future and Drake are more than up to the task.
Even if What a Time To Be Alive is forgotten by the end of the year, by then we’ll have more music from these two prolific artists. As someone else pushes to make the album of the year, Drake and Future’s latest single will probably be trending on Twitter. So far, Drake and Future’s emphasis on quantity hasn’t dramatically diminished the quality of their output, but that could very well change. A certain reduction in quality is necessary to release so much music so fast, but these two are choosing hyper-relevancy over musical longevity. In 2015’s high-speed landscape of modern music consumption, this formula is working.
