Drake’s “Janice STFU” on Every Corner
A couple of months ago, on Juneteenth, back when summer was still in its early phase of surging innocence—flowers opening, grass blades freshly sprung from the dirt—I was sitting on a wide lawn at Governors Island, having a picnic with some friends. Swell day: Our blankets were littered with snacks and wine bottles. In accordance with the folkways of my rough generational cohort, someone had brought chocolates studded with small doses of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The skyline floated like an uncanny but beautiful projection off to our side. There was a Bluetooth speaker on the ground connected invisibly to somebody’s phone, and, around halfway through the hang, the speaker started playing song after song by Drake.
It doesn’t take much, especially under conditions like these, to get me swaying. The tune that did it this time was the newish song “Janice STFU,” off Drake’s recent album “Iceman.” The songs on the album—released simultaneously with two others, “Habibti” and “Maid of Honour,” a nod to the streaming-spurred contemporary practice of dropping an unmanageable barrage of new music into the feeds of unsuspecting consumers—are viciously petty exercises in score-settling and braggadocio. “Iceman” is mean and infectious, downbeat and relentless, and, in keeping with its comically unsubtle title, cold.
Here go some representative lines from “Janice”:
What’s the score here? One giddy declaration of personal resurgence; one deviant sexual threat delivered as a total non sequitur; a sudden pang of jealousy (“you boys got big”) dressed up as a claim of precedent arrival (“off my name”); three lines of dismissive, hate-spiked insults, just to drive the point—in case you missed it: I’m better than you—home with the finality of a tent’s stake through soft summer soil.
On one level, this is simply more of the same from Drake. In summer as well as in winter, beneath a beach umbrella just as much as under the cold carapace of a Toronto sky in December, rap’s pretty boy little brother is sort of always talking about the many grievances he’s picked up along the way. “I got enemies, got a lot of enemies,” he proclaims almost triumphantly in the hook of the 2015 song “Energy,” as if the accumulation of adversaries were a badge inevitably accompanying great success. Elsewhere in the song, he issues a complaint that always makes me laugh: “I got girls in real life tryna fuck up my day.” There’s also this, which sounds somewhat avoidable: “I got two mortgages, thirty million in total.” Nobody’s ever put so much rhythmic and rhyming effort into revealing, wittingly or not, that he needs to think about downsizing and searching out some more levelheaded new friends.
Still, Drake is known as a master of the summer banger, whose lyrics, across the years, have surely launched millions of vaguely hostile or sexy—but always, in either case, vague—Instagram captions, because he’s got some versatility and an ear for popular desires. Take “One Dance,” an almost undistractedly romantic ditty from 2016, or the yearning, dirty-macking R. & B. of “Marvins Room” (2011). He can—it’s easy to forget, given the recent travail of the protracted, often mutually ruinous battle he lost to Kendrick Lamar two years ago—get sweet and sour, cool and warm, grateful for his blessings, or obsessed with the hordes of underminers pretending to wish him well.
Alas, poor Drake! Losing to Lamar knocked him down a few rungs in the hip-hop firmament over which he’d so gaudily and spitefully lorded for more than a decade. The great occasion for and theme of “Iceman” is his hoped-for resurrection, his return from being “buried alive.” He’s not in a summery mood. “Janice STFU” takes the melody of its chorus—put through some syrupy, saddening machine—from the upbeat and charmingly repetitive song “I Follow Rivers,” by Lykke Li. In the chorus—“Reach me, baby / Call my phone and say you need me, baby / I’m so green, you gotta teach me, baby / From Vancouver, you a BC baby”—Drake’s voice carries a slightly Auto-Tuned edge, and the verses seem to refer to any number of opponents, imaginary or real, inside the “industry” and without, people who are less authentic or, to be more specific, more successfully inauthentic than Drake.
All summer I’ve heard this song everywhere, spreading with nocturnal menace from the windows of cars as they speed through my block, or from the middle of a circle of friends around the corner or in the park. It offers a vision of the season that gets less press than the primary-color nostalgia—sand and waves, endless trips on winding roads—that often dominates our talking and thinking about the summer. Don’t forget: it’s also a time of relentless comparison and dashed expectations, of regrets that linger hotly until the great puddle of August threatens to drown you pore by pore. Think of the protagonist of Éric Rohmer’s 1986 film “The Green Ray,” a young woman named Delphine, who’s recently broken up with her boyfriend and can’t seem to find a summer activity fit to get him—or, really, her loneliness, which quickly crowds out the silhouette of the man—off her mind. One friend, freshly coupled, leaves her in the lurch. Another circle of acquaintances makes her feel like the odd woman out. She goes to the Alps, then Biarritz, on and on, looking for signs in the faces of strangers and in the sky. The whole picture is a stylish sulk, and so is the summer itself if you’re not getting what you want.
Be honest! Think of that kid from high school with parents richer than yours, who, all these years later, persists in his prosperity, showing his suspiciously even teeth on the prow of some boat in the middle of the neon Mediterranean—you look at this kid’s IG and wonder, sweating in your apartment, Why not me? We talk often about the too-swift death of summer, how it echoes and seems to quicken our own mortality, amplifying our fears of the grave, and fair enough, but sometimes the best thing a summer can do, depending on your mood, is end.
Drake’s livid vision of the season, his cathartic admission, might go something like this: I did everything right, let everybody party in my pricey house, made hits that got kids laid, worked my way out of the corny scene of children’s TV and into the center of the coolest genre known to man, and all for what? I look online and everybody looks happier than I am. They’re on trips with their families and I’m in this palace alone. Nobody gives me the credit I’m due. Everybody’s trying to forget me, after all I’ve done.
To which all you can say is—sorry. Maybe next summer’ll be better. ♦