Review Summary: lol, drake
A 2021 hip-hop album with an egregious runtime, eye-catching album art (or lack thereof, to put it gently), and a metric assload of guests, features, and credited writers/producers? Kanye's
Donda hasn't even been out for a
week and already there's a would-be contender stepping up to the plate to try and "dethrone" Kanye's ambitious release. Now, given how close the album release dates were, this is either an obvious coincidence (a very funny coincidence, given Kanye and Drake's latest beef) or a deliberate attempt to - and I laughed writing this, too - knock
Donda off the charts, but regardless of what actually happened... dude. Seriously? Whoever was the "mastermind" behind dropping
Certified Lover Boy not even a full
week after
Donda should have been fired on the spot, because holy sh*t not only is this record
bad, it's especially bad when compared to the immeasurably-superior ambition and passion put into
Donda, a record whose worse moments completely curbstomps
Certified Lover Boy's *best* moments. Why? Because
Donda actually
has ambition and passion.
Certified Lover Boy is a ninety-minute corpse of an album.
"Papi's Home" perfectly summarizes how much of an utter disaster
Certified Lover Boy truly is. A potentially-promising sample of Montell Jordan's sentimental RnB-gospel ballad "Daddy's Home" is used for, like, thirty seconds, and then tossed to the side in favor of a basic-b*tch, milquetoast trap beat with Drake spitting hilariously tone-deaf and unaware lines like rap artists "
doing weak features for a pop artist 'cause they popped down", a line that's quickly given context and truth by Nicki Minaj utterly soiling the track with a lame joke and an obnoxious laugh. There's the zinger!!!
Certified Lover Boy is an utterly nightmarish 86 minutes' worth of music, and it does absolutely nothing to justify its length, with basically every single song on this LP feeling obnoxious, sloppy, lazy, and just plain
fake. "Girls Want Girls" is a droning joke of a track with a beat and melody that screams 'stranger dragged off the street and forced at gunpoint to make a trap beat' energy, and that's not even getting into the guaranteed-to-be-iconically-abysmal "you a lesbian, girl, me too." Unless Drake starts identifying as trans, of course, which instead would retroactively interpret this line as 'sh*thead foreshadowing' instead. "In the Bible" is a boring, five-minute blast of pure
nothing only given a little "spice" by a wimpy guitar solo, "Love All" desperately relies upon a bored-sounding Jay-Z to salvage something out of Drake's same-y, depressive mumbling and nondescript beat, "Yebba's Heartbreak" is
horribly out of place stylistically-speaking, "IMY2" sounds almost exactly like what you'd get if you typed in 'trap type beat' in YouTube's search bar, and boy, it sure is foolish and sh*tty of Drake to release a track literally called "F*cking Fans" after all the controversy surrounding him and his transparent desire to do exactly that. Album closer "The Remorse" is blah blah blah blah blah blah who cares?
Who cares??? Who f*cking cares anymore? In spite of this album's ludicrous, undeserved length, there's a distinctive, filibuster air of "who gives a damn" surrounding
Certified Lover Boy like a toxic cloud of apathy. The whole record is just padding on the way to Drake's next paycheck, and yet it has the audacity to be way too long all the same. The beats are nonexistent, little more than boilerplate trap nonsense. The melodies on top of said beats are flat, drawn-out mumbling. Drake himself is clearly just phoning it in - the few times when he brings a decent or respectable flow to the table are
frequently annihilated shortly thereafter by A.) the sonic realization that Drake's been banking on the same flows he's been using since
Views, or B.) Drake's odious, uncaring singing voice, a voice that has finally stopped resembling anything to close to his old "emotive sadboy" style and crossed the Rubicon into excruciating "not even trying anymore" territory. Drake is frequently outdone by his guests, and most of them aren't even bringing their A-Game, because why would you when the cutz on this record give you absolutely nothing to work with beyond the bare necessities?
God, this is awful.
Certified Lover Boy isn't even ironically enjoyable, it's just wretched, intolerable warbling. Did anyone other than the most delusional of fanboys really expect the latest
Drake project to be any good? No. But
Certified Lover Boy is alarmingly trashy even so, the sound of an artist that stopped being a novelty years ago and has instead insisted upon being a cringey, baffling wunderkind that everyone wanted to copy but no one actually cared about in any meaningful way. Gone are the days of Drake's sullen "vulnerability" and melancholy meaning anything at all, gone are the days of him having a pleasantly identifiable sound, and gone are the days when he wasn't an exhausting, tiring wallflower. All in all,
Certified Lover Boy is a f*cking embarrassment - its' very existence is detestable, and outside of the hilariously atrocious, clearly meme-worthy and TikTok-ready "Way 2 Sexy",
CLB can't even be all that
funny.
