★
- Keep the Family Close: 👎🏻
- 9: 🤷♂️
- U with Me?: 👎🏻
- Feel No Ways: 🤷♂️
- Hype: 👍🏻
- Weston Road Flows: 🤷♂️
- Redemption: 🤷♂️
- With You: 👎🏻
- Faithful: 👎🏻
- Still Here: 👎🏻
- Controlla: 👎🏻
- One Dance: 👎🏻
- Grammys: 👎🏻
- Childs Play: 👎🏻
- Pop Style: 👎🏻
- Too Good: 👎🏻
- Summers Over Interlude: 🤷♂️
- Fire & Desire: 👎🏻
- Views: 🤷♂️
- Hotline Bling: 👎🏻
After a long conversation about Drake Saturday night, mostly prompted by this episode of Reply All, I decided to give him a shot. The only song of his I knew I’d heard was Hotline Bling, which I already knew I didn’t like.
I didn’t like the rest of the album either (with the exception of Hype), but I definitely found listening to it worthwhile. The experience of listening to Views was unlike anything I’ve experienced before while listening to a record. It’s really hard to explain, and probably impossible to understand if you haven’t heard the album, but Views is filled with this sort of soundscape that precedes and and follows and sometimes even persists through all of the songs. It isn’t really “the song,” but it’s obviously part of the album.
About half way through I finally found something I could think to compare it to: It’s like watching one of Casey Neistat’s vlogs. His videos always have a music component, but they’re just background tracks over top of whatever else is going on; riding his Boosted Board or running or riding in a cab to the airport or climbing around in his office to reach some piece of equipment. The music might be prominent or it might be in the background, but it’s not the only source of sound. Whatever is actually happening in the video is also generating sounds. That’s kind of like that soundscape thing that’s happening at the start and end of these tracks on Views.
The weird thing about that, though, is that Views is exclusively an audio medium. It sort of pulls the disparate songs together to make a cohesive whole. But it also makes it impossible to think of one song as being separate from the whole. As the album goes on, it’s less prominent, and that’s where all the singles reside, which is also interesting.
Have you ever tried to do that thing where you watch Wizard of Oz synced up with Dark Side of the Moon? Views is like that if you were blind.
