Evolve With the Flow: How Drake and Kendrick Found Their Voices

Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s new albums are vastly different hip-hop artifacts, but they both feature rappers honing in on their message by exploring the outer reaches of the most elemental tool available to them—their voices.
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Overtones: Evolve With the Flow: How Drake and Kendrick Found Their Voices

by Jayson Greene

April 8, 2015

Overtones examines how certain sounds linger in our minds and lives.


Your voice is the entirety of your instrument as a rapper, and you have to make everything happen with it. This fact has always acted as a sneaky equalizer. At the upper reaches of the industry, you can buy a lot of skills that rapping requires: You can pay someone, or many people, to supply you with hot lines; you can enlist producers to wireframe song structures, hum ideas, or even record nearly-complete songs before you arrive. But the time must come when it's just you and your voice in that booth.

Drake's If You're Reading This It’s Too Late and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly are vastly different hip-hop artifacts, made by artists who use their voices in vastly different ways. And yet, in the gulf between them, something does emerge, something invisible but real. With both records, you hear two artists honing in on their message by exploring the outer reaches of the most elemental tool available to them.

Drake has had voice issues for years, at least as an MC; for someone with such a preternatural sense of his own star power, he has often sounded curiously uncomfortable or unnatural when rapping. On his earliest releases and up through his debut album Thank Me Later, his default mode was more transmission than flow. To take one example, “The Resistance” had him repeatedly picking up with a new thought at the end of each line:

Livin*’* *inside a moment, not taking pictures to save it, I mean
**How could I forget? My memory’s never faded, I
**Can’t relate to these haters, my enemies never made it, I
*Am... still here with who I started with

This is a great way to sound conversational, to make listeners forget that there is a ticking meter pushing along your thoughts, but it only works if you can sound casual. Drake's delivery, meanwhile, was a barrage of eighth notes, each syllable exactly the length of the one before it.  The style prioritized legibility over spontaneity and ended up sounding about as natural as a “Degrassi” script. In his early career, the downbeat was an appointment Drake could not afford to miss, which occasionally gave his rapping a teeth-setting edge, like an assistant following you around a little too eagerly. The way his voice was mixed—high and clear, far above the muted music—served as an acknowledgment of his slightly formal, arms-length relationship with the beat.

Things started shifting with “Worst Behavior”, from 2013's Nothing Was the Same. The beat, produced by DJ Dahi, was a seething hive of conflicting rhythms, and Drake, suddenly emboldened, played tag with it, rapping in irregular bursts of exclamations and interruptions. He sounded confident for the first time that if the downbeat strayed a millisecond from his reach, he could catch it. It was the first real hint of rhythmic play in his rapping.

On If You’re Reading This, he doubles down on this approach with gusto. It’s the most alive he's ever sounded. He's no longer a careful reciter, but a gleeful bender of words: “Sold a couple Bentleeeeeeys laaaaaaaast weeeeeek—them were my OLD toys,” he stutters on “6 God”, stretching out the boast with abandon. His somersaulting delivery on “6 Man” flips his stiff old flow from “The Resistance” so that the stresses fall on different beats, loosening up all the spaces in between and filling them up with darting shapes.

Irregularity is how we mark life in our environment—a moving shadow in the corner of your eye alerts you to a mouse scurrying across your floorboards; leaves rustling in the “wrong” direction might tell you that a golden retriever is about to crash through the trees. So as Drake learns to break up his own cadence, the “lonely king” vibe that he's been working to project since Take Care starts to come into focus anew. He sounds triumphant; he sounds desolate; he sounds like a rapper competing only with himself and saddened by that fact. He sounds like the only person left alive on the planet.

Kendrick Lamar often sounds desolate on To Pimp a Butterfly, but he never sounds alone. His records are swarming with squabbling voices that have something—usually indignant or deflating—to tell him. Lamar, of course, is responsible for them all: On “u”, he's a sobbing family member, excoriating Lamar for neglect; on "You Ain't Gotta Lie", he plays his own mother, admonishing him for preening. Listening to the album sometimes feels like standing in the middle, unnoticed, of a large quarrelsome crowd—a rally, perhaps, or someone's family reunion. Through all these spaces, Lamar is always visible, but he is often not at center stage.

As the cast of characters proliferates, so do Lamar's flows: He sometimes seems to be rapping in three voices at once, an internal monologue mixed up with an external one and dipped in the ambient chatter he absorbs through every room he steps in. He has almost destroyed the beat in his music, as if to acknowledge that the most important stories we tell are usually the messiest, the ones that don't arrive in straight lines. The music he's chosen—cramped, hectic jazz—packs more sonic information into a small space than any other popular form, and Lamar crams every available space with his words.

He's always been a wordy rapper, one more drawn to long chains of unfolding thought than tight, pithy quotables, and on Butterfly he is purposefully offering us more than we can absorb. In hard technical terms—breath control, complexity of rhyme schemes, variation of flow—Lamar is the best rapper working, but how he deploys that skill on Butterfly is far more interesting than the skill itself. He seems to be aiming for the point where all knowledge has been interrogated, all corners of an idea exhausted. On the outro to "Momma", he brings the fader down on himself while still rapping furiously, his voice doubled up. On "For Free?", he leaps off of piano sforzandos until there is no legible forward motion anymore—try nodding your head to it and see what happens to your neck.

Lamar's flow tells us that there is more information out there—conflicting viewpoints, sides to a story, ways of looking at a single incident—than we can ever imagine. His lyrics are almost impossible to quote neatly, because to drop a line on either end of the quote is to snip off something vital. The most exhilarating moments on Butterfly have him following this holistic impulse, like when he explores the tug of resentment toward a panhandler on "How Much a Dollar Cost" over three increasingly bitter verses that link into one long crescendo; to pick out just one evocative bit from the song—"Sour emotions got me lookin’ at the universe different/ I should distance myself, I should keep it relentless"—can’t help but remove a crucial part of the thought process. Lamar wants us to try to see everything at once, to be confused and exhausted, just like he is, so we might experience some of his truth.

Drake and Kendrick’s different approaches teach us a lot about the men behind them. They have fundamentally different goals: Drake wants to tell you his story; Lamar wants to tell everyone's story at the same time. The little soap opera of backbiting between the two rappers might stem as much from philosophical difference as it does competitive drive. When Elliott Wilson interviewed Drake in 2013, the subject of Lamar’s incendiary “Control” verse came up, and Drake's dismissive response was: “How does that verse start?” It was an incisive point, but more than anything it served to highlight the separation between their ambitions. In both cases, you can hear two artists hammering out their master plan in the details. There are many ways to break a style down into component parts, but they are all subsumed into flow. The flow is who they are, and as they make the millions of tiny agonizing decisions that smooth it out, they get closer to the purest versions of themselves.