With 25 songs, there are a few exceptions, of course. There’s a little bit of bite on “8 Out of 10,” a little bit of bang on “Talk Up,” and some soulfulness in “Sandra’s Rose.” The airy production on “Summer Games” is what most of the album aspires to. But the best song on Scorpion, by a long shot, is one you’ve probably heard a thousand times already: “Nice for What.”
Whereas most of Scorpion feels like a stiff turtleneck on a summer day, “Nice for What” is Drake dropping the collar. At 93 BPM, it’s the only song that feels seasonally appropriate. On it, Drake samples the chorus from Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor,” a song that was released in 1998 but that will never get old. He turns the song into a duet of sorts, with his elastic flow bouncing off and bleeding into Hill’s ecstatic singing. I could mostly do without Drake’s version of female empowerment (ladies, rest easy: Drake gives you permission to take selfies and show off), but Drake doesn’t seem to be striving for profundity. It’s one of the rare light songs on Scorpion, and there’s something sonically sublime about the merging of these two voices.
Coming sixteen songs in, “Nice for What” is a welcome respite from Scorpion’s gloom. Especially now. It may be unfair to bring the world, or even the season, into assessments of contemporary art. But it’s hard to listen to Scorpion in a vacuum. It’s on your phone, and so is the news. The current climate is conducive to bright escapism (i.e. Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy) and insightful processing (i.e. Kendrick Lamar’s D.A.M.N.). Most of Scorpion is neither. Drake raps about the child Pusha-T accused him of hiding (“I wasn’t hiding my kid from the world / I was hiding the world from my kid”) and his love life and how he is the best, woop. All of it feels myopic, like the Six God can’t see beyond the haze in his immediate periphery—and worse, at 25 songs, it feels self-indulgent.
Fortunately, just as a playlist can double as an album, an album can be pulled apart for pieces of a playlist. “Nice for What” was soundtracking the summer yesterday, and it will continue to do so tomorrow—the rest of Scorpion be damned.
