Review Summary: Certified Filler Boy
I have to give it to Drake really. The man takes Ls on the daily and has managed to find new ways to make people hate him with every release and album cycle and yet still does ridiculous numbers. This album has been no exception, and with Drake shaving a heart into his head, naming his album the comically fuccboi-ish ‘Certified Lover Boy’ and giving the album one of the worst covers in recent music memory, and with the album naturally becoming the most streamed album on Spotify, it seemed history was ready to repeat itself, with the whole shebang seeming frighteningly similar to 2018’s ‘Scorpion’. Indeed, Certified Boy Lover is very similar to that album, and also very similar to 2016’s ‘More Life’ and 2015’s ‘Views’. Are you sensing a pattern here?
I’ll give Drake this, he’s a hell of a businessman. Even with the ridiculously awful cover art and the mysterious teasers he would drop during major league football games, he had me hyped for this album. I prayed deep down, pleaded with myself, that he would have learned from Scorpion’s detractors. That he would stop with 25 song albums and 90 minute runtimes and boring autopilot songs. He had to have learned his lesson right? Was that asking too much? Instead no, Certified Lesbian Boy is all of Scorpion’s bad moments and more with the same bloated, lengthy tracklist, generic bored sounding songs and features that outshine the man himself. And I like Scorpion! Of course I have to give props to the godlike prowess of OVO 40 who continues to prove why he’s such an acclaimed and unique producer, even if he himself is ticking off boxes on some tracks here. Opener ‘Champagne Poetry’ features a chipmunked Beatles interpolation which stutters and starts before morphing into a dazzlingly uplifting and grandiose beat switch. Similarly, tracks like ‘Papi’s Home’ and the bombastic Rick Ross and Lil Wayne featuring ‘You Only Live Twice’ bring some greatly needed energy and light to what has been an increasingly drab and grey palette that has been infecting Drake’s discography since ‘Views’. But these are few and far between sadly. Drake has found his groove, and that seems to be being as lazy as humanly possible. Even on the tracks that are meant to be “fun” like the now infamous ‘Girls Want Girls’ (which features among other things, Drake rapping “say that you a lesbian, girl me too” and Lil’ Baby dropping some equally questionable bars) or the comically hideous ‘Way 2 Sexy’ (which features Future singing a Right Said Fred sample of all things), Drake sounds like he’s fresh off binging on codeine and also like he’s just been woken up. Nearly every bar off these songs, hell, the entire album, seems tailor made to be slapped onto a Tik-Tok. And look I’m fine with Drake making easily exploitable pop trap full of dumb baiting lines, he’s been doing that since ‘The Motto’. I mean Christ I even enjoyed ‘Toosie Slide’, and that was the definition of lazy tiktok bait, but even that song had a catchy hook. Drake is phoning in hardcore here.
Now it’s not all doom and gloom. Believe it or not, Certified Butt ***er actually has its moments. The features, as par with Drake albums, are as nice as ever, with the aforementioned Rick Ross and Lil Wayne blowing the roof off of ‘You Only Live Twice’. Travis Scott and Jay Z deliver phoned in but enjoyable bars on ‘Fair Trade’ and ‘Love All’ respectively. Kid Cudi makes a surprise appearance and brings his trademark humming to ‘IMY2’ and Yebba even gets an entire track to herself, the icy but lush ‘Yebba’s Heartbreak’. Even Drake himself manages to wake himself from the coma he’s put himself in and deliver some sharp and snide performances on ‘No Friends in the Industry’ and ‘7AM on Bridle Path’, which harken back to the sharp sounds of ‘If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late’. But besides these features and the odd handful of songs, Certified Filler Boy is mostly a lengthy slog full of half assed and lazy performances, filler and absolute snoozers. Drake doesn’t come off as a pure cocky loverman in these songs, he comes off as a dude you take on a date and then stealthily escape through the bathroom window in the restaurant from.
2/5
Standout tracks: Champagne Poetry, Papi’s Home, Fair Trade, No Friends in the Industry, You Only Live Twice
Skips: Girls Want Girls, Way 2 Sexy, ***ing Fans, The Remorse
