The Singles Jukebox

One more song? We tried 80 times, but never quite finished him off…

[Video][Website]
[2.85]

Katherine St Asaph: This is bad, and it didn’t have to happen. The site closing, I mean, but also the song.
[3]

John Seroff: Seriously, we’re going out on ANOTHA ONE with Fucking Drake? You know, I don’t believe this guy is even really sad.
[2]

David Moore: Am I gonna get misty from this fucking thing? What a defiant, appropriate, utterly mediocre Fucking Drake song to go out on. I’ll hand it to him — since the moniker came early and stuck around — that he’s somehow adapted and expanded, grown even, without changing the core of who he is or what he does one iota. It’s awe-inspiring in its own weird and special and infuriating way. This is the most unequivocal [6] I’ve ever awarded. Farewell, Jukebox.
[6]

Alfred Soto: What I’ll miss about The Singles Jukebox: drooling on my laptop as I break my brain in search of quips at the expense of the act who has done the most to reduce man-woman relationships into “Have some Xanax, baby, you lied to me.” Fucking Drake.
[2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: As we make our way to the end of Fucking Drake’s imperial era (among other things), the cracks in his edifice are beginning to show. “Staying Alive” is inherently nothing (it’s the lead single for the third post-peak DJ Khaled album, for god’s sake) and ends up being even less than that. This kind of hyper-minimal, amorphous post-trap works for Lil Baby more often than it doesn’t (as recently as a few months ago he gave us the verse of the year on Vince Staples album over something very similar) but combining his ghost in the machine voice with Drake’s smooth loverman act ends up creating an utter absence that even the memory of the Bee Gees cannot fill. It’s three guys ready to play supporting roles when a song this pointless needs a star turn. 
[0]

Nortey Dowuona: I hope Lil Baby has a long, prosperous career, in which he will not have to talk to Drake.
[3]

Rose Stuart: There is one specific circumstance where this song hits, and that’s being drunk and depressed on your birthday. But those circumstances have passed, and seeing as this is TSJ’s last review, I think it’s only right that none of us be forced to listen to these artists ever again. 
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Ever wanted to know what Saturday Night Fever would sound like at the strip club at 4am on a Monday?
[3]

Josh Winters: Well, you can tell by the way Drake spits his flow he’s a woman’s man, no time to throw. Music’s mid and the vid’s routine, I’ve been feeling this since 2016. And now it’s alright, it’s okay, that you may not want to press play. We can try to understand Fucking Drake’s effect on man. Whether you’re a himbo or whether you’re a fuckboy, you’re stayin’ a [5]! Stayin’ a [5]! Feel the city weepin’ and everybody sleepin’ so you’re stayin’ a [5]! Stayin’ a [5]! Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha! Stayin’ a [5]! Stayin’ a [5]! Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha! Staying a fiiiiiiIIIIIIiIiiIIIIIIIIiiiiive, oh, when you’re Drake!
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: A charitable view would be that Drake and Lil Baby’s enfeebled efforts to sap all of the Bee Gees’ vitality are a satirical metacommentary, winking so slyly at the camera that it could be mistaken for a sleep-deprived eye twitch. It could be inferred that, beyond their protestations, they recognise their mortality; that indeed, they are haunted by it. Are they present, or are they already ghosts? If life is just moaning about women, is it life at all? If only we had more time to contemplate. Oh well — for the moment, you could just whack on a bit of N-Trance.
[3]

Brad Shoup: “Wants and Needs,” but without the needs. A lovely mellotron-like figure flows in and out of itself while the features copy each other’s homework.
[4]

Michael Hong: Complete misuse of the interpolation — Drake’s autotune isn’t the issue, but when the most familiar part is at the front and you’ve already heard how despondent Drake’s made it, what’s the payoff?
[1]

Jibril Yassin: Some of Drake’s best songs involve a seeming lack of effort on his part but there’s something to be said about failing to lift an interpolation into something resembling the inspired. I can’t believe I’m already yearning for the days when DJ Khaled clutched Four Loko cans with more effort than what’s being displayed here. Fucking imperial phases really make you think shit lasts forever sometimes.
[0]

Anaïs Escobar Mathers: This sounds like every other mid Drake song with only the Bee Gees reference and DJ Khaled yelling his own name (we know his wife isn’t doing that, y’all) breaking up the monotony. 
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: I hate hearing DJ Khaled’s same-in-every-song proclamations (you know the ones), Lil Baby is to my ears a dull, lowest-common-denominator rapper (so of course he’s huge), and Fucking Drake just moans in autotune over and over. Khaled’s records are the epitome of capitalism and conspicuous consumption writ into streaming 0s and 1s, and this is, impressively, one of his worst ever.
[0]

Al Varela: Worst DJ Khaled and Drake collab to date. This beat is DISTRESSINGLY bad. It’s one thing for the song to not even have a trace of disco influence, but the beat is so flimsy and empty it sounds like a preset. Drake is so badly implemented that his vocal sounds like the acapella version of itself. Him lazily singing “Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive” with his trademark monotone is so forced, it’s not even ironically funny. Lil Baby is clearly just here for the favor. The whole song reeks of hack work. Another instance of Khaled desperate to keep the meme alive through his Drake leverage and stupid videos, hoping to convince you that maybe he’s still funny and it’s worth buying into his “success” bullshit. I’m ready to stop dignifying this clown when you are.
[1]

Alex Clifton: If you put “sad Bee Gees” and “mumbling” into one of those AI art generators, you’d end up with this mess. Fucking Drake ruins the party again!
[0]

Ian Mathers: There was a Twitter prompt recently about what irrational and frivolous law you would pass if you were suddenly a total dictator. I couldn’t think of anything, but “DJ Khaled isn’t allowed to be credited as the artist for these things” might be a contender. Maybe if he brought anything interesting or distinctive to the production and/or writing (the right artist could do a lot less than Khaled and still make the credit feel legit, to be clear). Just say it’s a Fucking Drake song. And I’m fucking exhausted of that guy.
[3]

Iris Xie: I hate you sooooo much Drake. I’m so glad that this website has existed so we could go “Fucking Drake” for its eternity, you creepy grooming-ass self. 
[0]

Will Adams: Brag about your apparent invincibility over that soporific beat all you want, boys. Just know that you’re nothing without the Jukebox. NOTHING.
[3]

Hannah Jocelyn: I don’t hate the hook — I like how the “ah-ah-ah-ah” is shifted to the last two beats of the previous measure, but the empty space implies he had an interpolation and nothing else to back it up but the laziest internal rhymes possible (what is it again, “want me to fry, want me to dry?”). There used to be Drake memes mocking his “sensitivity” and his passive-aggression — recognizable traits, but this has no personality and is also… nihilistic? Drake doesn’t sound too thrilled about staying alive — Lil Baby’s verse is generic but at least he sounds happy to be there. Even though he’s had a handful of big hits since “The Story Of Adidon”, it feels like Fucking Drake gave up completely around that time, and since then has fucking succeeded only because he’s too big to fail. I used to think a line in Kanye West’s “Famous” went “No matter how hard we try/we’re never gonna die”, and I feel that about Drake’s continued failed self-sabotage. Certified Lover Boy’s corny memes had no lasting impact, Honestly, Nevermind would have killed anyone else’s career, “Staying Alive” would be some Dose of Buckley-type asshole’s #1 worst song in 2009, yet everything he does continues to be a hit. I’ll give him this, though: as of now, he’s outlived his harshest critics. 
[3]

Tim de Reuse: Acts whose names you know because you know their names on a song that quotes a song that you know just because everyone knows it — a whimpering ouroboros of self-reference. The beat shivers in place. Lil Baby’s autotune shakes like a wine glass about to shatter. Semantic porridge. And so Drake’s career shall be, long after the archive of this site has passed into memory; long into the next millennium, long into the period where picture-perfect holograms of him perform from an endlessly regenerating AI catalogue of his mildest hits in oxygen bars around the moons of Saturn. Content mush for the content gods; forever and ever, Amen.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: It feels fitting: the Jukebox dies, DJ Khaled releases another one, Drake contributes yet another slight Drake verse that could have come out any time in the seven-year crawl since Drake last released a good album. The timbre of the drums changes like the seasons, the guests on the track switch out. I accept it. None of us goes on forever. We will be outlived by the stars in the sky, by the winds and the rains, by continental drift and rivers eroding great valleys, by DJ Khaled and Fucking Drake.
[4]

Oliver Maier: I keep trying to write a blurb that feels fitting for the occasion, a dissertation on what Drake means, the decade of Drake, how Drake is us and we are all Drake and blah blah blah. In the end, I don’t know if it’s that deep. What I do know is that this song is a chore to sit through, a three-legged victory lap by Drake and Lil Baby with DJ Khaled alone in the stands absolutely losing his shit. Sometimes a song is just some rich guys cashing in and it doesn’t deserve some of the smartest, funniest people on the internet explaining how it sucks. The Singles Jukebox is about more than Drake. Pop music is about more than Drake. The biggest, surliest star in the night sky is still only a fraction of the universe.
[0]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: What if the real Singles Jukebox was the friends we made along the way, and the worst songs were some of the best at bringing us together.
[10]

Mark Sinker: congratulations we played ourselves 
[7]