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Xquisite

Overview
"Drake" is a Toronto born rapper-singer who follows the timeless philosophy that it's impossible to create a successful song without gripping an audience on an emotional level. From the beginning of the album, every track articulates a specific emotion in a deceptively simplistic way. "Over my dead body" plays the role of a prologue and sets the tone of the album before "Shot for me" keys Drake's most prominent hip hop contribution: "Creating a female market". Another notable aspect of this album is that the collaborations with rappers are far less important or as prevalent as the Toronto singer, The Weeknd's influence on it; hence the brand OVOXO (OVO=Drake's "October's very own" + XO= "The Weeknd's tag") is stated throughout signifying that Drake isn't oblivious to how big of an impact The Weeknd's style had on the album.
Defining Track
Headlines is the album's premiere track and although it follows the hip hop mainstream formula of "psuedo singing about a specific element of fame", he offsets this by choosing to rap about the acknowledgment of his artist integrity and skill rather than about his girls or money. There is even a stanza toward the end of the song where he emulates a conversation about getting musically complacent with a girl and how she is "expressing all those feelings". From there, he transitions back to himself and how his competition in hip hop are "Soap opera rappers all these ni**as sound like all my children." Although he seemed to be defending his transition to emotional vulnerability by saying this, acknowledging the most prevalent direction your enemy's will come from when attacking you is always a wise marketing strategy.
Final Thoughts
Drake walks the constant tight rope of representing the mentality of Hip Hop while creating a large array of song's that emotionally contradict it. Although Take Care was by far the most relevant of every album in 2012, R&B hip hop is not fully hip hop. Drake can not fully embody the over-encompassing image people desire from the genre, but the day Hip Hop loses it's pioneers, the genre as a whole collapses.

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