It sounds like another rap: Spacing out the lines / to infiltrate people’s minds. But it goes beyond infiltration: It’s intimacy that Drake really craves: “I want you to leave with the feeling that I was talking to you the whole time. If I pointed to you, you’re probably right, I did point to you. I probably was talking about your friend, you know?”
Drake and 40 swivel at the same time and start tapping the keys of their laptops, cuing up the first track off of Nothing Was the Same, a song called “Tuscan Leather”—a title, Drake tells me, named for a Tom Ford fragrance that some say smells like a brick of cocaine.
The truth is I have no idea what to expect. The paradox of Drake is that he’s so multiple, he might write a love song sung by an Idol contestant (“Find Your Love”) or something so raunchy you can’t play it for kids (“Practice”). He could be rhyming about the kingdom of his material world, and then crooning about his spiritual state. He’s a mama’s boy who’ll cut you up, though his tough-guy posturing seems occasionally halfhearted because, after all, he seems so kind of…decent.
Now comes the music, in a sudden blast, like green light through fog, the first notes strange and dissonant, in a lurching 3/4 beat. The intro hurtles and whiplashes, and a woman’s voice, as if on helium, floats through the chaos, in the highest register, sorta funny and ghostly and beautiful. (It turns out to be a Whitney Houston sample.) The sound is an evocation of something that feels nostalgic and new, exuberant and menacing, at once. Which is when Drake’s voice breaks through, rapping, pumped up, spitting nails. Both inside and outside the song itself, he keeps repeating, How much time’s this nigga spending on the intro? How much time’s this nigga spending on the intro? It feels like bedlam.