AND YOU DON'T DO IT FOR THE MAN, MEN NEVER NOTICE. YOU JUST DO IT FOR YOURSELF, YOU THE F**KIN' COLDEST

I know everybody is going to hate me for this, but Thank Me Later by Drake was an excellent, genre-defying album. I wrote it off at first because I thought it was just a generic vapid pop album, but it takes pop hip hop, and R+B conventions (lyrics about clubs, patron, critics, etc.) and turns it into something really honest and introspective. Example: Fancy starts out as a traditional Swizz Beatz collaboration about women in the club. Commodious chauvinism? Not quite. Instead, it turns out to be a testament to strong, independent women with successful careers and confidence. I know it isn't on the intellectual level of a paper by Susan McClary or anything, but it's an honest, good intentioned statement. This introspection is reflected in the textures: What starts out as a bright, busy soul sampling club jam shifts abruptly into a compressed, mellow, dark wash of synths and lo-fi vocals. It's pop, but it's well thought out, it's musical, it transcends expectations, and I love it.

A common criticism of pop music is that it is soulless and stringently strophic; a series of calculated canzones calibrated to appeal to crass consumers, released incrementally to induce vapid excitement. And to some extent, its true: The music is a product. But is that not true of so many pieces of art music? Imagine the composer, all intellect and inhibitions, writing a piano sonata: That sonata will be filed into the ranks of a genre that contains literally tens of thousands of sonatas. How can one make their sonata more memorable then the thousands of pieces made from the same mold? Because the piece isn't an idiosyncrasy in the canon of western art music, it lacks emotional weight.  If the composer is afraid to draw outside the proverbial lines, his or her dear piano sonata will be forgotten quicker then the Thong Song, and our protagonist, Sisqo. If the snake does not molt it's skin, it will be ensnared in it and never grow.

Drake, however, has made an album of the kind of music that people will remember amidst the aural ocean moderated by the pop music industry. Therefore, if he can make an honest, introspective work out of a genre overcrowded with product, the composer can make an honest, introspective work out of a genre overcrowded with intellectualizations and exercises in borrowed processes. Music is not a product, but a passion; Not an aesthetic, but an art.