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Drake-Scorpion Album Review
Make no mistake, we’ve all heard the gist of Scorpion before. Previously, the album may have been masked under a tropical house flavor or wintery production, but the core components were there, making the news that the project would be a rap/R&B double album (much like every other recent Drake effort) even more eye-rolling. But with Drake’s radio silence over the last few weeks after the conclusion of the already infamous Pusha-T beef and a duo of strong lead singles, onlookers may have held out some hope for a truly great album.
The braggadocios hip-hop oriented Side A of the album kicks off with the sleepy “Survival”, which not only rips off the production on a Lil B song from 2014, but also sets the first half’s precedent of Drake rapping really uneventfully over luxurious beats. “Nonstop” is one of the album’s early highlights, utilizing upbeat production and a Memphis-based sample alongside typical Drake one-liners (“I move through London with the Euro step”/”Al Haymon checks off of all my events”), despite the track lasting about a minute too long before petering off. The Mariah Carey sample on “Emotionless” proves angelic and adds to the impact of Drake’s first public acknowledgement of his newborn son (“I wasn’t hidin’ my kid from the world,
I was hidin’ the world from my kid”), while “God’s Plan” is as catchy as on first release. However the following tracks foreshadow the oncoming…
