Checking Drake's Hard Drive

Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you're doing well.

What is Drake doing? What is Drake doing? I mean, it seems like he wants us to know or to have some rough idea of goings on in his life and his career, I guess. What I'm talking about is this website that you can log on to right now titled 100gigs.org. Initially, what hooked me into going on this website is that I know it's connected to Drake, and apparently there was some new Drake music on there, at least unheard Drake music on there that might have been worth checking out.

There are actually a few tracks on there from Drake. "It's Up", "Blue, Green, Red" and "Housekeeping Knows", the first of which is an all-out, aggressive, explosive rap banger that sounds like it's a leftover from his Her Loss record with 21 Savage. But even if it is a leftover, it's total fire in terms of the chemistry between the two and the instrumental. Drake is even flowing his off on the track a bit, too. Releasing this song, truly and honestly, is the biggest W that Drake has taken or come close to taking since his whole run-in with Kendrick Lamar. So at least that is a bit of a bright spot in the midst of this whole thing.

There's also another track, "Blue, Green, Red", that I mentioned earlier, which to my ears, given its cross-cultural funky dance groups, might be an Honestly, Nevermind leftover, could totally be wrong about that. But regardless of its origin. If you mess with that record, that song is going to have a lot to offer you.

Then finally, there's "Housekeeping Knows", which actually has a Latto feature on it, which could have actually been pretty big for her if the track ended up seeing the light of day on a proper record, maybe Maybe on For All The Dogs, but I guess, unfortunately, it didn't. It's not really that bad of a track either.

Honestly, despite all of these songs being seemingly leftovers from various parts of Drake's recent career, there's nothing all that bad about them. As far as cutting room floor stuff goes, it's pretty impressive and high grade, I would say. But these songs only make up a fraction of what is essentially 100gigs.org, because the bulk of what is on this website is what looks like hours or rather, gigs of just random videos and behind-the-scenes footage from various points and performances and album recording sessions music video shoots across Drake's career.

I mean, it doesn't go too far back. A fair bit of it is pretty recent. But again, it's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of videos. And one has to wonder, 'Why is Drake putting all of this out?' What is even the point of just putting out all of these free to view, weird, difficult to scroll and sift through behind the scenes videos? Is he trying to prove to us that he actually has been making all of the music that he's been making and that it involves going places and interacting with people and being in studios and being on video sets and stuff like that? I don't know. It's just really a very boring approach to allowing the audience to essentially see how the sausage is made.

Lo and behold, the process of making the music that Drake eventually puts out there seems to be even more boring than the music itself. I mean, perusing these videos, and I have not seen all of them, there's not really a whole lot of chills or thrills to be offered from a025c002_180620_r 460. We just have Drake there just standing in front of the mic in a red light, just trying to get a performance in, trying to get some vocals laid down.

But hey, listen, if you thought that footage was boring, try out A013_C002 013_07059l.Mp4, which seemingly is just a bunch of idle footage of just 40 staring at a desktop, a bit of a piano loop thing. I mean, all this footage proves is what we already have known, that studio-quality watching artists make studio quality music in real time is like watching grass grow.

That's not to take away from the process and say that the concentration and the silence and the focus that making good studio quality music requires is a bad thing or should be a wild fun riot or anything like that. But this is the part of the process that for the audience, generally, is the least interesting. Considering Drake is all about optics and putting out a message, putting out a vibe, putting out a perception, just really not doing anything unless it's going to add to the lore of his brand, of his character, of his career.

One has to wonder, what is even the point of all of this? Is it to show us that the process of making his music actually does require a lot of time and labor, maybe more than it seems like it does when you actually hear the finished product? Or is it to show us, 'Hey, look, you see all these hours of videos of me and my team just boringly working on music, right? Nothing crazy is ever going on, ever. Look at how dull and boring and just whatever everything is. If all these things that I was constantly being accused of were true, wouldn't some of it show up in all of this footage I chose to post up on the internet myself? Would I have this much footage of myself to just throw up online if there were so many bad things happening around me all the time, things that I personally, Drake, was engaging in?'

I will say there is no footage from what I can see of that Bahamas trip that was famously ruined on For All The Dogs. We need embarrassing B-roll of the Bahamas trip stat. I know a vast majority of all the video footage thrown into this 100gig thing is pretty boring, there's at least one interesting clip. It looks like a piece of pretty old footage of Drake working on the hook to Kanye's "Yikes".

There's also in the midst of all of these images and folders what looks like an alternate concept art piece for Certified Lover Boy that involves a really weird, really crude-looking...

Image

Is this a colored pencil drawing? All these nude women, one of them is on a piano and Drake just in the corner looking like, 'Hey.'

There's also seemingly PDF documents uploaded to this thing, which what we're even supposed to do with those, I have no idea. I have no clue. Again, what is the point of all of this?

Once again, it's like Drake is just doing all this random stuff on the internet that doesn't quite make sense because it's just all an attempt to distract from the thing he doesn't want people to be focusing on. Because really, what does any of this say? What does any of this add? What does any of this contribute to him and what he does?

I guess if you're a hardcore, hardcore, hardcore, hardcore fan, you might get some bit of joy out of watching all of these long, silent, boring videos where absolutely, positively, nothing of interest is happening.

But you know what? I actually have trouble seeing guys like DJ Akademiks or even Los Pollos getting much of anything out of perusing this archive of nothing.

What do you guys think about any of this? Let me know down in the comments.

Anthony Fantano, Drake, Forever.

What do you think?

Show comments / Leave a comment