Fake Love

This is Drake at his most efficient act of appropriation and one of the most argued-about tracks of the *More Life* era. The production, from Jorja Smith's and Drake's dancehall-facing period, is built on a tropical-house-tinted riddim — clipped, springy percussion, a plucked synth motif, and an airy vocal sample of Rihanna's "Work" bent into the hook. The famous problem and pleasure of the record is the pitched-up chipmunk vocal, a technique Drake lifted from the Toronto-Chicago production lineage, which lends the whole thing an uncanny, doll-like sweetness against lyrics about betrayal. His own delivery is half-sung, weary rather than wounded — the complaint is not that people hurt him but that they smile while doing it, that praise is now indistinguishable from positioning. Lyrically it's the purest statement of his ongoing thesis: fame converts every relationship into a transaction and he cannot tell the difference anymore, and he suspects he's become the same thing. Culturally it was inescapable in 2017, soundtracking a million captions about disloyal friends, and it became one of the definitive songs of the paranoid-social-media mood. Good for the drive home from a party you didn't enjoy.