The Singles Jukebox

TSJ’s response track forthcoming…

[Video][Website]
[4.20]

Micha Cavaseno: Supposedly this is a diss track. This proposed “diss record” does not provide more content based on the defamation or ridicule of the subject, a one “Robert Williams,” beyond talking about the success of his girlfriend compared to himself. WOOOOOO. DAMN. THOSE SOME HARD BARS AUBREY. Ultimately just an extension of Drakk’s continued boozy nothings, it’s a wonderful world where we love a middle-class Torontonian child actor teasing his peers who’ve lived the existence he likes to embody and receives fawning praise from the kind of people that Aubrey Graham probably feels are beneath him. It’s a testimony to how sick “Drake” is as a brand. Oh, and that beat fucking sucks.
[0]

Alfred Soto: “Trigger fingers turn to Twitter fingers” is a line for our times, parts of which were carved by Aubrey Drake himself. The sinister and minimalist wobbly sequencer would help a rapper less indifferent to stresses and less arhythmic than Drake. On the evidence Meek Mill has little to worry about.
[4]

Nina Lea Oishi: For a guy who explicity calls out ex-girlfriends in his music, along with their place of work and location (“Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree“), Drake doesn’t get as vicious as another rapper might in “Back to Back.” But Drizzy isn’t Eminem, and he doesn’t need to be — “Back to Back” cements his dominance in this stupid little Twitter spat as well as his solid place in the rap game. I mean, the concept of “Back to Back” is clever as hell, referencing Drake’s two-in-a-row diss tracks along with the Toronto Blue Jays second series win over Meek Mill’s hometown Phillies. Drizzy gets some solid zingers in there too (“Is that a world tour or your girl’s tour?”). I mean, I couldn’t have cared less about who writes Drake’s raps. But Aubrey Graham has hardly ever sounded so confident, and “Back to Back,” while not mind-blowing, is still a hell of a victory lap.
[7]

Megan Harrington: I’m sympathetic to how insulting it feels when someone you don’t even consider up to your standards lashes out at you, but this is still punching down. 
[2]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: You’ve already read a bunch of people take Drake to task on muted sexism, pettiness and memes and how it relates to a mediocre diss track that somehow gets spun twice over in clubs (seriously, I saw it happen), so let’s focus on what matters: wrestling! Meek Mill sampled the Undertaker’s immortal gong sound for “Wanna Know”, a pop-cultural statement of intent, hinting that Meek was beyond reproach in the same way the WWE icon was. “Rest in Peace,” the track said with its opening seconds, the game all sown up. But it was already too late: the speed of the internet age made Meek the loser, having waited too long to respond. He was the Undertaker returning a year and change later to screw Brock Lesnar out of a championship opportunity, but everyone remembered how Lesnar humiliated him and broken his winning streak in front of the world (in the most tedious way ever, natch). Meek thought he was the Phenom, but he couldn’t even be Viscera. (There’s a Vine that backs this up, even though it turns Safaree into Paul Heyman, Lesnar’s manager.) Anyway, Lesnar and Taker had a blowout at Summerslam that was fun but ended up in a non-finish; there was no payoff and few hints at more in the future. Also, at some point Drake started doing the Too Sweet (hallowed high-five alternative to geeks everywhere) and photoshopped Canadian wrestling legend Bret “The Hitman” Hart into an OVO t-shirt. It’s two overgrown men making wrestling references in public, and as an overgrown man that does that on a daily basis, that makes me so happy. The undercard is so much more interesting anyway, guys.
[5]

Crystal Leww: A throwaway diss track response that deserves to be treated as such. Drake pokes fun at Meek Mill for supporting his girlfriend on tour while simultaneously giving Nicki ups for being a boss bitch, and it’s sufficiently confusing, just like Drake himself. Not quite a single, but not a bad mixtape track either.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: Good beat, good flow — Drizzy sounds nimbler here than he has in a minute — but the tired “battle” with Meek Mill is just that, tired.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Drake is insufferable when he’s introspective, but when he’s roused to take notice of anything outside his own navel he can be quite charming. I hesitate to use a word like “authority” to describe what he achieves here — “following the script of traditional masculinity more closely than he usually does” would be a truer description — but damned if it isn’t attractive.
[5]

Andy Hutchins: I saw Chef last week: It’s a beautiful love letter to food, but also a movie that gets to the heart of what talented people do in crisis, and argues that spite is ultimately counterproductive when love can inspire more. Crisis came last month for Drake, but the closest he gets to spite or menace (for other men, anyway) is a sneer, maybe a smirk; when beef comes to his table in the form of a complaint that there are too many chefs in his kitchen, his direct response is not inviting the world into that kitchen to see the magic, but a piping-hot dish of what the people want. All Drake has to do to “win” any beef in 2015 is turn to argumentum ad populum, and “Back to Back” — explicitly titled to suggest that all Drake does is win and get his music played — is a taut, well-crafted tautological triumph that didn’t even really need the retrograde jabs about Nicki Minaj having a more successful career than her younger and recently incarcerated boyfriend. “You’re not getting to me,” Drake affirms in other words, while wondering what it will take to get Meek Mill to clap back on his second response to a series of tweets that features no addressing of the substance of those tweets; “it’s fucking molten, see, it’s fucking molten, you asshole!” (He forgot the “Do you know how hard my whole staff works?” part, though.)
[5]

Brad Shoup: It was a fun couple days on Twitter dot com, but other than that I don’t give a shit. I can’t imagine how many pills I’d have to charm out of Drake’s entourage to elevate this from decent diss track to biographical bullet point. The synths mimic ominous movie strings, but from four floors down. The drums chirp like crickets; I guess that’s an ode to Meek’s response. I’m so fucking bored.
[4]