Drake’s 100 Gigabyte Data Dump Is Certified Fluff

I had some fun clicking through the archives, but I also noticed that these are the exact sort of clips a politician might leak of themselves after they were caught muttering a racist remark or banging their assistant. The footage is presented as a raw hard drive dump, but in reality it’s as curated and manicured as any other self-made popstar documentary, formulated to reaffirm the loyalty of diehard fans. Surprisingly, there are no videos of Drake kissing babies and volunteering at a homeless shelter on the weekends.

Drake became a star because of his vulnerability and goofiness. It felt like you knew him even if you actually didn’t. Sure, he was a lead on a Canadian teen soap opera, but at his core, he was a rap nerd as plugged into the blogs and music forums as anyone. “Marvin’s Room” isn’t the definitive Drake song because the singing is amazing, but because it’s melodramatic and more insane than he probably even realized. The flaws are Drake; the uncoolness is Drake. For an artist who started out so embarrassingly transparent, looking back at it all with censors just feels wrong.

Especially in the aftermath, or rather intermission, of Drake’s beef with Kendrick Lamar. Even with Lil Yachty out there running a PR campaign for Drake, getting off bullshit like, “He didn’t give a fuck…he was genuinely unfazed,” we know that “The Heart Pt 6” was not made by an unbothered man, living like a bluesman touring with his boys and breaking hearts along the way (sort of the plot for the 1980 Willie Nelson movie Honeysuckle Rose). He’s obsessed with his image and status, and with staving off the inevitable fall-off that comes for every rapper eventually. His fear of losing the top spot is what fuels him—sometimes for the better (his prolificness) and sometimes for the worse (have you heard For All the Dogs?). The footage portrays Drake’s drive with the uplifting tinge of a sports movie, as you would expect.

There is one clip that shifts the tone slightly. It’s an almost 10-minute interview with Drake’s longtime engineer OVO Noel, from sometime before CLB (I’m ready to reassess CLB at any time, by the way), in Barbados. As the trees sway in the background, the interviewer asks Noel about Drake, “How do you think he would handle not being number one?”

“That’s an odd question,” Noel responds, tightening up. Then, he hesitates. For a moment, it seems like he might be genuinely imagining a version of Drake brought back down to Earth. But after the interviewer presses again, Noel goes back to tiptoeing, offering meaningless platitudes about using it as motivation. Right there, I knew this whole hard drive dump was nothing more than 100 fucking gigabytes of fan-service.

Keep me far away from M. Night Shyamalan’s Spotify playlists

There are a lot of choices that don’t work in the new big, dumb M. Night Shyamalan serial killer thriller Trap, especially the music-related ones. Among them are casting his daughter Saleka Shyamalan as the popstar Lady Raven. Not only is about a quarter of the movie forcing us to listen to her knockoff Billie Eilish balladry, but when the flick turns into a face-off between her and the killer (Josh Hartnett as The Butcher), she has absolutely no juice. (I would buy the theory that Lady Raven talking like a Disney-trained cyborg is commentary on the hollowness of pop stars if it was anyone in the role but his daughter.) There’s also Kid Cudi’s The Thinker, Lady Raven’s loudmouthed musical collaborator with the long blonde hair of Legolas, who doesn’t really do much—that said, I’d still put the role a tier above Man on the Moon 3: The Chosen.