The Singles Jukebox

Score is not…

[Video]
[4.12]

Jibril Yassin: Drake and Future’s latest has a bad stink of shall we say, unfinished business, to it. 
[2]

Michael Hong: You’d think that almost ten years after their first collaboration, Future and Drake would have some chemistry. You’d think that they wouldn’t attempt to pass off scraps of a Drake track attached to the beginning of a Future track as a collaboration, much less a track. And if you didn’t even feel like giving Future and Drake any benefit of the doubt, you’d at least think they’d be smart enough not to have each part separately produced with the transition being a snippet of a four-year-old interview.
[2]

Julian Axelrod: “It never happened,” Future infamously murmured when asked for comment on What a Time to Be Alive. Fair, but at least I remember what “Diamonds Dancing” sounds like.
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Drake and Future can make a good song (“Diamonds Dancing,” “Scholarships”) but that’s through concerted efforts to bounce their strengths off each other. The disjointed nature of “Life is Good” just makes it feel like two half-decent tracks played back-to-back.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Clip show rap at its finest. “Life is Good” is an able demonstration of why you like (or at least tolerate) these guys — Drake doing his faux-gangster sneer over chilling synths, Future luxuriating in his melodies — but only in small doses. Even beyond the jarring transition between the two artists (if they hadn’t shot a video together, I would assume they hate each other’s guts), “Life is Good” feels like the peak of a style of rap focused on memeable lines rather than overall coherence. It’s enjoyable when it works, but it’s ultimately too piecemeal to ever feel like a song.
[6]

Brad Shoup: I don’t need him rending his puffy jacket: this is the level of regret — annoyed, burying himself in his job — I want from Drake. The snare ticks like a plastic office clock. Future’s half has bass blasts detonating from 20 miles away. He sounds checked out: even his woos are diminished compared to “Jumpman”. Also: this is a bad way to construct a song!
[4]

Alfred Soto: Life must be good if Drake can’t be bothered to do his taxes. After a good line about confusing fame and clout, he cedes the track to a script-numb Future. What’s that line again about life being good?
[5]

Andy Hutchins: It’s dark. It’s swirly. It’s braggy. A song called “Life is Good” probably should sound a little more like Future’s pinky-ring valuation boast and less like his assertions about Osama or Drake’s self-obsession and attempt to brush off his loss to Pusha T with a literal “So what?”; this song in particular did not need to attempt a “Sicko Mode”-style beat switch, as there’s no major change in tone to signify. But two of rap’s finest hook-writers and hook-performers wrote four minutes of hooks and then performed them together, and somehow that’s a lot better than a lot of the joint album they dropped years ago. Keep it simple, I suppose.
[6]