You'll see what I mean. 

 

It's ironic, too: He's lapsed Jewish.

Expanding on his debut album's theme of ambivalence and conflicted feelings toward fame,[37] Drake's lyrics on Take Care detail failed romances, missed connections,[23] relationship with friends and family,[33] maintaining balance with growing wealth and fame, concerns about leading a hollow life, the passage of young adulthood,[37] and despondency.[28][32] The album's slow jam-styled tracks explore themes of loneliness, heartbreak, and mistrust.[31] The topic of women is prevalant on the album, with songs concerning past and potential lovers ("Marvins Room", "The Real Her"), and about revering ("Make Me Proud") and lavishing them ("We’ll Be Fine").[29] Juan Edgardo Rodriguez of No Ripcord denotes women as "the main force in his songs - he’s consciously aware about what it takes to love them, but simply decides to thrust aside the guidelines because he’s on an entirely different stratosphere from any female average joe."[34]

Music writers have interpreted the album's expositional content with respect to contemporary social climate.[26] Newsday's Glenn Gamboa views that Drake's "emotional self-doubt and realizations about [...] success", along with the album's melancholy mood, "captur[es] today's zeitgeist of uncertainty and diminishing expectations."[38] Music journalist Ann Powers cites Drake's "predicament — the inability to locate oneself within everyday power relations" as "one that's afflicted existential antiheroes throughout modernity."[26] Powers writes that his point of view is that of a "biracial upper middle-class kid [...] from a position of privilege that few rappers would occupy", and views his subject matter as culturally significant, commenting that "his melancholia is that of the overly sated [...] But Drake's relentless focus on the point where money empties out happiness isn't merely autobiographical. It's emblematic of our moment of crashed markets and occupied streets, and it speaks to a generation beginning to question whether the All-American, celebrity-endorsed credit card lifestyle will make them anything but bankrupt."[26] Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork Media compares his "unrepentant navel-gazing and obsession with lost love" to Marvin Gaye's 1978 album Here, My Dear, adding that Drake's "penchant for poetic oversharing" makes him "an apt avatar" for the Information Age.[23]

Drake's songwriting is characterized by wistful introspection,[30] existential contemplation,[33] and minimal boasting,[32] with lyrics that convey frankness,[23] vulnerability, melancholia, and narcissism.[31][39] Music writer Greg Kot comments that Drake does not "indulge in the macho poses that have dominated mainstream hip-hop for decades, and blur[s] the line between singing and rhyming", adding that he "makes his rhymes sound conversational, matter of fact, like he’s talking to the listener one-one-one".[32] Tim Sendra of Allmusic comments that the album's "introspective tone [...] is only rarely punctured by aggressive tracks, boasts, and/or come-ons."[28] Drake's persona on the songs shows traits of sincerity, self-doubt, regret, passive-aggressiveness,[26] and self-absorption.[31][32] Kazeem Famuyide of The Source explains his conflicted persona on the album as being "arrogant enough to know his place as one of the most successful artist in hip-hop, and comfortable enough to realize his own faults in his personal life."[40] Jon Dolan of Rolling Stone writes that Drake "collaps[es] many moods – arrogance, sadness, tenderness and self-pity – into one vast, squish-souled emotion."[25] Kevin Ritchie of NOW notes "an overwhelming sense of alienation, and sadness" on Take Care, calling it "an idiosyncratic, aggressively self-conscious and occasionally sentimental album, one that falls somewhere between languid, finger-snapping R&B and hip-hop braggadocio."[30]

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And God (or simple authentic self-transcendence) is NO WHERE in dude's thoughts.

You can listen to his music and see that.

The stories Drake tells on this album, even more so than earlier songs, are so rooted in his own experience I don't see how anyone — regardless of this whole subject-object thing — could put themselves in his shoes. We are the people Drake is singing about. We don't have a lot of power here. Which obviously makes it less OK how often dude (and guests) use the word "bitch."

...

Drake uses conversational language and rhymes about emotional ambivalence, romantic prevarication and his trust issues. I can't applaud him making a career out of laying those particular cards on the table; doing so hasn't made him treat anyone any better, at least according to him.

But that gets me back to what I was saying before — about the position Drake puts his listeners in when he acts all vulnerable sitting in a penthouse with a publicist right beside him. Despite Take Care's womblike production, I can't identify with Drake – and some of that is because I don't want to. If I did I'd have $25 million and still not be satisfied. I'd be the greatest, but I'd be lonely.

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Post Edited (One Love) : 11/17/2011 7:21:27 AM (GMT-6)

 

I'm talking every song.

He's an amalgam of the life experiences he's had and his own interpretation of those experiences. The perfect example of a "prosopon" falling into "individuality".

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

"Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy. My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God's will and God's love . . . outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. For most people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin."

-------------------------------

"All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality to which everything else is ordered. There I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experience, for power, honor, knowledge and love to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could become visible only when something visible covered its surface."

--------------------------------

"The image of winding oneself round like a mummy, with whatever one can control, dominate, take to oneself and take glory in, sharpens the irony of our scramble to defy our true selves to emerge. It calls to mind, too, the scathing condemnation Jesus laid upon the 'hypocrites' of His day, who were not what they seemed, buy were full of 'dead men's bones and all uncleanness' (Mt 23:27). Such an indictment is leveled at ourselves as we covet our illusions of grandeur, abuse our gifts and use others, objectifying them like stars in our own constellation, which must revolve in their fixed orbits about the main star, of course—ourselves. 'We become the center and God somehow recedes to an invisible fringe. Others become real to the extent they become significant others to the designs our our own ego. And in this process the all of God dies in us and the sterile nothingness of our desires becomes our God'. The false self, 'since it intuits that it is but a shadow, that it is nothing, begins to convince itself that it is what it does'."

--------------------------------------------------------

"Thus the illusory self lives out its lie, abusing its gifts, treating other subjects as objects, conveniently arranged like furnishings in one's room. It finds nothing but bitterness, unhappiness and exhaustion from seeking fulfillment in this profound alienation of the heart from it roots in mystery."

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Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Tell them I'mma need reservations for 20
I've never really been one for the preservation of money, nah
Much rather spend it all while I'm breathing
That OVO and that XO is everything you believe in, I know

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

 

 

But that's what's so sad.  The reason that Drake is so successful is because he is so REPRESENTATIVE of the empty persepctive of a lot of Western young adults.  They "get" him even when he's being his most self -absorbed...and he knows that.

 

Drake's "The Ride"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

--Thomas Merton

 

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Drake's Sophomore Album 'Take Care' Goes Platinum
Posted 12/20/11 3:43 pm ET
MTV News in Music News

 

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Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

 

"What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?"

Yeah...

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

 

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Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

 

Speaking biblically, humanity is incomplete without continuously "breathing" the Creator Spirit of God.

 

Kinda what Denys Turner was talking about in that Atheism Tapes video Tom posted elsewhere.

Does this make sense?

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

 

 

To be honest, I can understand that over-materialism/consumerism ala ghetto nihilism perspective. When I was in college and an agnostic (around 1993-1994), it was "money, hoes, and clothes...all a nigga knows."

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.