Drake - Room For Improvement (2006)
Before he was known as the guy who sings songs which cause your girlfriend to openly talk about wanting to fornicate with and hypocritically gets mad at you just for having female friends, he was just a rapper with a generic, dime-a-dozen style. The audio equivalent to penny candy. There's not too much you can say about Aubrey Drake Graham that hasn't been said before, except that he seems like the type to dip french fries into Strawberry-Shortcake-flavored McFlurries. Find ONE other blog that has said that, I dare you. Shit, you can even tell him I said that!! I DON'T EVEN GIVE A SHIT!!
Drake may have (controversially so) gotten a ghostwriter at some point later in his career, but to my knowledge, he actually wrote all of the lyrics on this album, which means Drake is essentially being more honest with his audience on this mixtape than his later work, which proves true by just the album title!! There is SO MUCH room for improvement! In fact, there damn near could be an entire empty football stadium in that regard! Okay, it's not that bad, I just wanted to say that, kinda like how I wanted to say this was a good mixtape, but I'm like Drake: Too honest, and who the hell knows actually wrote this review.
The beats sound pretty much exactly like as if you went back in time to 2006, went into your local gas station, and bought a bootleg album of beats, which boasts having some chill R&B instrumental joints "for the ladies", and the album cover is some shit like the producer standing in front of a burning car while two helicopters are floating in the air behind him. If only THAT was the album cover! YOU GO KILL 'EM, AUBREY!!!
The mixtape doesn't necessarily do anything absolutely audibly horrifyingly wrong (add the words "Turbulence" and "Pre-Historic" to that sentence and you have an Aesop Rock lyric!!) but everything comes off as horribly generic. The entire mixtape sounds like something you bought from a guy in Houston, upon being pressured with "Come on, man, I'm just a guy tryna make it" and "It's just five dollars my man" in the mid-2000s and then regretted buying.
One interesting thing of note is the track "S.T.R.E.S.S." that deals a lot with his parents' divorce, being of mixed race, going to a predominately white school, and dealing with the stress of suddenly becoming a TV star. Just the fact that Drake is actually rapping about the problems that comes with being black in America is really interesting to me, because (at least to my knowledge, mind you) he never touched on this subject again later in his discography. At least, out of all of the material I've heard from him, it's never been as on-the-nose as this.
Overall, even with the few moments that show minor promise, I don't think you'll find even the most diehard Drake fans having many positive things to say about this mixtape, or about their last relationship, but I guess that's to be expected on both fields of discussion.
5/10
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Feel free to check out this mixtape for FREE on DatPiff!
