IT'S ALL GONE TO THE DOGS! - A Review Of Drake's "For All The Dogs"

This should go without saying, but what the hell: let's all say it together!

MORE LIKE DOG SHIT, AMIRITE!?!?!?

Now.  What I'm about to do is not done out of anger.  That may be hard to get across in writing (especially given what I'm saying and probably how I'm saying it), but I'm not mad at this.  Annoyed?  Yes.  But at the end of the day, Drake is a fact of life.  It's like being mad at the weather just for existing.  I'm having fun with this on some level, despite not enjoying the album at all.  I've never been a Drake fan, but I'm not going to get too worked up about his projects.  Ultimately, what I'm trying to do here is make fun of a muti-millionaire for doing music I find boring and whack.  And in doing so I hope we can have fun together.  So with that in mind, here's a track by track breakdown:

On "Virginia Beach" he sounds off-key on the hook.  It's a slow, migraine swamp of bass and misogyny.  It's your average Drake song.  I get the appeal, for dudes its a fantasy to be as toxic as they want without doing it for real and for women its a "sensitive" bad boy because Drake gives them a liiiitle bit more than the fuck bois they normally deal with.  At least that's what I assume as an outsider.  If I don't take any of that into account, it's a rich asshole "oh woe is me"-ing about women not falling in line exactly as he expects while singing (badly) over a barely there beat that's got overdriven bass that's only there to gain "cred" because the music aesthetics of today were built off of amateurs that didn't know how to mix ten years ago when Soundcloud allowed them to change the game.

There's twenty-two more fucking songs.  Do we really need to do this for all of them?

*sigh* fine.

"Amen" is a Teezo Touchdown track featuring Drake.  Hardly surprising since Yebba did a whole-ass song on Certified Lover Boy and it still counts as a Drake song even though he didn't even touch it.

"Calling For You" is a mess.  First of all, you got 36 year old Drake going after 21 year old girls, which normally I wouldn't even point out, but he's been in trouble for this shit before.  (I rolled hard when Myke C-Town made that "Hot 16" joke on Dead End Hip Hop about this subject.)  Then he goes into this mumbly falsetto, showing he's learned nothing from Honestly, Nevermind's reception.  Then there's...an interlude with some woman complaining about how stagnant the cuisine was when she went on vacation with Drake?  Dude, I know rich people live different, but I don't know how the fuck you could possibly care about this much less any of us.  What is this?  ("It's a thing that makes you go 'What the hell is that?'" -Todd In The Shadows, talking about CLB's album cover.)  Then 21 Savage comes in on a completely different beat and is average at best, but compared to Drake on this album so far he's a GODSEND.

That was just one track.  But it's emblematic of a lot of this project; the number of beat switches is frankly irresponsible; get an ambulance chaser on speed dial, cuz if you listen to this album you will sustain tonal whiplash!  Songs don't end, they morph into something else because it sounds like dude got bored and grafted another fragment onto the end of it.  It really is proof that Aubrey needs a break.  (He's announced he's taking one, but who knows if it'll actually stick.)

Talking about this album is playing into his hands but fuck a donut.  Even for Drake this shit is whack.  Dad joke Drake has been creeping into being over the last few years, but For All The Dogs is its full manifestation.  Here's a quote from "Fear Of Heights":

"I'm in time, auntie

Yeah, and the sex was average with you

Yeah, I'm anti 'cause I had it with you

Okay, I'm auntie like your daddy sister

Auntie like a family picture

And I had way badder bitches than you, TBH"

Are...you...fucking your aunt?  Are you fucking a family member?  And bragging about how much better the women you sleep with to said family member?  I know that's not what's being said here, but there's no reason for anyone to say something this random and corny at the same time so the incest angle ends up making more sense than the dad pun angle except no it doesn't because none of this makes sense and wow I'd rather write about Lil Uzi Vert insted; can I just do a Pink Tape review?  No?  Okay.  (I'll save my comments for that for the year end.)

The dog sound effects on this song made me laugh, but the word "sissy" ain't cool; don't know if Mr. Graham got the memo.  Other than that it's just a bunch of brag shit that only works if you're into Drake.  If you're on his team or if you can fit into his shoes, this might go for you, but I've never really been into that.

Scarface is 40 years old and rappers are still on its dick.  Though I have to admit "Daylight" is the best Drake has sounded as a rapper in years.  It's still not amazing, but I will give credit, this song wasn't terrible.  Then as if this entire project was a giant troll (which I partly suspect it is), his five year old son Adonis gets on and cuts a verse.  That's neat and all, but he's on a song where his dad has lines like "She said she was vegan, she eatin a G.O.A.T." and the chorus is "Shot him in Daylight".  I'm not a parent, I'm not the morality police, it's a weird choice is all I'm sayin'.

Then dude has the nerve not 40 seconds of runtime later to complain about rappers "sendin' their verses back to me, and they be terrible, just like a two year old".  Now that I read the lyric I think maybe he was going for a play on the "terrible twos", but context is important here.  You just had a literal five year old on here.  Do the math.

For the first two and a half minutes, "First Person Shooter" is a J. Cole song with a brief Drake verse and hook.  Then it becomes a whole different song with Drake doing another thing I'll give him credit for, making his voice sound like a different person.  This isn't a different rhythmic flow for Drake, but the delivery is something I haven't heard him do before (he may have, but like I said, not a fan).  The lyrics suck, but they're not nearly as far below competent as some of the things on this album (like J. Cole's crop dusting line earlier in this song; can't let that one slip past).

"IDGAF" is a Yeat song with a Drake feature.  Yeat has two verses and three hooks.  The song itself is a drab pile of flex which is the last few tracks on here done worse cuz it's Yeat.

The hook to "7969 Santa" is off beat in spots.  The beat itself is actually kinda nice; the pads are spacey, they're vibey, they're atmospheric.  But the song is about a guy being mad his girl isn't doing everything he tells her to do and dares to have any kind of personality for herself.  Then of course around the 3:00 mark it becomes a completely different R&B song, with Teezo Touchdown singing, and Snoop Dogg doing a radio drop from B.A.R.K. Radio, introducing a radio station interlude trope into this album eight tracks in.  (A conceit that only pops up two other times in 85 minutes.)

"Slime You Out" sucks pretty hard.  "Whipped and chained you like American Slaves"?  Yeah, that's pretty shit.  "You need somebody who could micromanage you"?  Not even as a joke.  Maybe if you dated women in your age group you wouldn't have to teach 'em table manors, but then again since you're in this perpetual state of arrested development brought on by your wealth and fame, what woman your age who's heard even one of your songs would even bother with you?

Just a thought.

SZA is good at singing, but her lyrics try to match Drake's petty energy, and winds up not being petty...enough?  Am I really complaining about that?  Sure, why not?  Then the second half of the song is a completely different song because of course it is, with a reasonably clever framing device of detailing the relationship over the course of every month, but Drake just shits himself and moans himself into FUCK this is giving me a headache.

How many more songs do we have?  Shit.

You're telling me this man did a whole ass song about how he's mad some girl fucked up his vacation, a girl he names by first name?  Of COURSE he does!

"Tried Our Best"?  No the fuck you didn't.  NO THE FUCK YOU DIDN'T.  You didn't even try at all.  You haven't tried since 2015, dude.  Come the fuck ON.

"Screw The World" is literally just a DJ Screw song they threw on here like it was a mixtape.  Not a rap mixtape, a tape you would make for your car, like they forgot they were making an album.  Drake had nothing to do with this song.  Not production, not performance, not anything.  It's just a DJ Screw track, now credited to Drake.

It's the best song on the album.

"Drew A Picasso": You may not judge, but I'll judge you for even bringing up R. Kelly.  This is so embarrassing we all want to die.

"Members Only": The "Gangy"?  (It also says something that PARTYNEXTDOOR (capitalization theirs, not mine) comes in and bodies Drake on this track, when I've never remotely liked anything he's touched, this included.  But in comparison...)

Also: "Feelin' like I'm bi, cuz you're one of the guys?"

Bruh.

BRUH.

If you ignore the lyrics "What Would Pluto Do" would be a competent song, but pffff.  "R.I.P. the fuckboys" he says?  While being the biggest fuckboy on Earth (in the song and in general)?

Okay, I take it back.  "8 AM In Charlotte" is the best song on the album.  It's actually the best song he's done since "Nice For What".  The shoutout to Oliver North was weird, but you know what, any port in a storm.  Gives me a chance to clean all this dogshit off my galoshes and be a little more objective going forward.

"BBL Love" is forgettable but smooth enough.  It has motherfuckin' SADE on a B.A.R.K. Radio drop, so there's that.  "Gently" is a two minute Drake/Bad Bunny collab completely in Spanish.  It's pretty bargain basement for a Bad Bunny song.

"Rich Baby Daddy" is actually kinda good too.  The hook's annoying, but Drake is competent and SZA sounds really nice.  The Miami bass beat by way of a PinkPantheress soundalike is a welcome change of pace after more than an hour of dirges.  And then Drake tacks on 90 seconds of complaining about relationshit over a slow, dull, over-serious synth pad.  Way to kill the fucking mood.

Then he tries to pick it back up like nothing happened on "Another Late Night" with one of his ghost writers Lil Yachty (the guy who allegedly ghost wrote the line on Her Loss siding with Torey Lanez in the Megan Thee Stallion shooting).  The beat's kinda okay, but Drake is whatever and Boat just sucks.  It's a song that wouldn't be bad as background music; best I can give it.

Is "Away From Home" actually okay or is it Stockholm Syndrome from hearing so much garbage befo...Oh HELL NO you ain't talking shit about Esperanza Spalding and getting away with it!  The last song was forgettable toss.

Now, if you've made it this far, you're probably wondering why I wrote such a painstaking review about an album that could be summed up by "Rich dude loses the plot and needs to grow up but is too enabled to do so".  Because I needed to illustrate the CRUSHING length of this thing.  Eighty.  Five.  Minutes.  What for?  Well, money.  Duh.  Forget I brought up the why; the what is at hand.

And what do we have?  An album that suggests Drake needs to take a break.  Sure, this practically went gold in its first week, "Slime You Out" debuted at #1 and will probably return to it this week, but all Drake projects do that (except his one House album last year).  He's on inertia.  He's been on inertia since the Pandemic.  And even Drake has to respect the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: The entropy of a closed system never decreases.  Nothing lasts forever.  Sometimes you've got to start over.

Still better than Certified Lover Boy, though.