How does Drake's top album rank on a classic scale?
Nothing Was The Same is Drake's best album.
Before Take Care even crosses your mind, here's what Drake told Rap Radar when asked which project is his favorite:
"[Nothing Was The Same] is probably my most concise album and within that concise offering was a lot of great shit," explained Drake. "I like the ratio of like, you know, there are not too many songs on that album that I can look back on and do something different there."
Drake's right. There's not one miss on Nothing Was The Same. He doesn't even touch the rim.
Each track is like a Steph Curry 30-footer; you think to yourself "there's no way he's hitting that" even though you've seen him do it for years now, then as you're mid-denial, the ball is in the net, Steph is shimmying and you're shaking your head in disbelief. Repeat cycle.
So yes, Take Care has timeless tracks, and it will get its classic rating one day, but this classic rating article belongs to the most concise album of a generational artist.
How this works: To even be labeled a classic, a project has to be considered at least a 9 on the 10 point system, so every project that is rated in this series starts at a nine. The remaining point will be calculated by the three categories: impact, replay value and outshining peers.
For example, an album like Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy would get the highest possible score on outshining peers at 100% of 0.33, bumping it from a 9 to a 9.33, and that process would repeat for every category.
Impact
Sorry in advance if the opening words led you to believe this would be a 4-minute read dedicated to admiring Nothing Was The Same.
Nothing Was The Same was the climax of early Drake.
After six projects, Nothing Was The Same was Drake proving he had mastered the balances between being egotistical and being vulnerable and rapping and singing. There was nothing more for that version of Drake to prove, so he retired it.
With If You're Reading This It's Too Late, the second phase of Drake's commercial career was underway, and the sound he had just proven to perfect was retired altogether.
Rap as a whole began to retire certain practices in 2013, and while an argument could be made that the biggest artist perfecting the genre's most marketable sound led the revolution, I don't think so.
2013 was THE year of impactful projects, but Nothing Was The Same, as great as a project as it was, wasn't one of them.
Chance the Rapper became SoundCloud's first superstar with Acid Rap, paving the way for unsigned artists to utilize streaming services to reach formerly restricted heights. Childish Gambino's Because the Internet was equally unconventional and successful.
Nipsey Hussle took being an independent artist to a new level with his selling of 1,000 copies of Crenshaw at $100 per copy.
Meanwhile, Kanye West was getting called crazy over Yeezus--a project that would go on to set the norms for an entire wave of rappers nearly five years later.
Earl Sweatshirt released his critically-acclaimed debut album Doris and re-sparked a wave of clever monotone rapping popularized by MF Doom.
Oh, and a group called The Migos introduced a flow that would take over the next few years on their mixtape Young Rich Niggas.
And that's not even half the projects released in 2013 that still have an impact on music today.
Danny Brown's Old. Travis Scott's Owl Pharoah. Meek Mill's Dreamchasers 3. Kevin Gates' Stranger Than Fiction.
The list goes on, but hopefully, you get the point.
2013's impact deserves its own chapter in the book of rap, but Nothing Was The Same doesn't warrant more than a sentence since Drake used the project to write the perfect ending to the end of an era.
While not impactful on the future of the genre, the album deserves something for being the biggest of its time.
Impact: 0.10
Replay Value
Spoiler Alert: Nothing Was The Same gets a perfect score for this category. Go ahead and skip to the Outshining Peers portion if you want more critique; the Replay Value category is all praise.
From 40's production to Drake's lyrics, all the way down to the classic cover art, everything about this album has aged to perfection.
Drake mainly sticks to rapping throughout, and when he does decide to harmonize, he doesn't do it with vocal performances that need extreme mixing like on Take Care. A majority of the singing is left in the hands of truly talented singers like Jhené Aiko and Sampha, so there's no noticeable decline in quality due to the reliance on past software. And even when Drake does decide to harmonize on tracks like "The Language" and "Connect", he tones it down to a point that's manageable for him without major edit assistance.
Then there's the rapping.
On "Tuscan Leather", Drake pays respect to Lil Wayne, acknowledges his unconventional stardom, flips Ellen Degeneres' name into a bar, touches on his relationship with the label and Nicki Minaj, fires a warning shot at potential sneak disses with the ABC's, and vows to be around a decade from now.
All of this happens in the first half of the album's first track.
Before Drake gets rewarded a perfect score, there's one more track that has to be pointed out to show how high of a level Drake's pen was operating at on this album.
Jay-Z is considered by many to be the greatest rapper of all time. He raps for two minutes on "Pound Cake", with his sole goal being to humble Drake by rattling off his own resume. He lets everyone know this is his goal by starting his verse off with, "I had Benzes 'fore you had braces."
How does a then 26-year-old Drake respond to a certified legend dropping two minutes of subliminal shots at him on his own song?
"Fuck all that happy to be here shit that y'all want me on/I'm the big homie, they still be tryna lil' bro me dawg."
He then follows those opening lines up by calling himself the greatest of the generation and saying he's leading his career better than the all-time greats.
The confidence Drake operated with on Nothing Was The Same resulted in a timeless album.
Replay Value: 0.33
Outshining Peers
This one should be relatively short. Drake outshines everyone and this is Drake's best album.
But for the sake of getting you to stay on the site longer and doing the category justice, let's break it down.
Everyone knows Drake's peers. There's Drake, the heart. There's J. Cole, the mind. And there's Kendrick Lamar, the spirit(not 100% sure if this was Kendrick's unofficial corny label but it sounds right).
With J.Cole and Kendrick Lamar established as Drake's peers, Nothing Was The Same is in a brightness battle with Kendrick's good kid, m.A.A.d City and Cole's Born Sinner.
Quality-wise, there's no legitimate consensus as to which album is the best of those three. GKMC hasn't received its classic rating yet(spoiler alert: it's a classic), and Born Sinner is considered by many to be J.Cole's best album.
Nitpicking between those three would need a separate article on its own.
Drake operating out of such a high peer group is both a positive and a negative for him in this category. He automatically outshines a majority of rap, but even his best project can't be championed the way it deserves because his peers' projects steal some of the spotlight.
Outshining Peers: 0.26
Current Classics Leaderboard:
1.) Man on the Moon 9.76
2.) Nothing Was The Same 9.69
2.) PARTYNEXTDOOR 2 9.35
3.) Lil Uzi Vert vs. The World 9.33
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