Terrible Tuesday: Drake's Habibti Had a Critical Revolt Hiding Inside a Mixed Score -- and Yesterday's Chart Proved It Right

Drake’s eighth album, Habibti, released May 15 to a Metacritic score of 59 – “mixed or average,” the aggregator’s own middle tier, not a disaster by that measure alone. But a middling aggregate score is doing a lot of work to flatten what actually happened in the reviews underneath it. Consequence gave the album a D, with critic Kiana Fitzgerald writing that it’s “lost at sea” and panders rather than connects, despite crediting a handful of individual tracks – “Classic,” “WNBA” – with landing. Pitchfork, more measured on paper at 6.5, still described the record in terms that aren’t a compliment stacked next to each other: “alternatingly hypnotic and hollow.” Those are two outlets looking at the same material and finding the same fault line, even when their numbers land in different places: a record that sounds good in the room and says almost nothing once you’re listening for it.

That fault line matters this week specifically because of what happened to the album’s own deluxe expansion. Habibti (FOMO), released October 2, added four tracks, including “Solar Eclipse,” Drake and Don Toliver’s collaboration built by lifting the hook and chorus melody of Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” wholesale – the record this column has spent two Mondays and a Friday feature tracking as it set the all-time Hot 100 record for weeks at No. 1. “Solar Eclipse” debuted at No. 5 the week “Choosin’ Texas” finally lost that record. This past Monday’s column noted the obvious tension in that: a new song charting on a borrowed melody, sitting three spots behind the song it borrowed from. This morning’s chart makes the tension moot. “Solar Eclipse” has fallen completely out of the Hot 100 top 10, one week after it arrived there.

That’s not an unrelated data point – it’s the Consequence and Pitchfork complaints playing out in real time, on the exact song built to test them. “Lost at sea” and “hollow” are abstract critical judgments until a song built on someone else’s record-breaking hook, with nothing of its own underneath that hook, can’t hold a chart position for longer than seven days. A song with real songwriting under its surface tends to have some staying power beyond its opening week, even a modest one; a song that’s mostly a repackaged chorus borrowed from a bigger, better record has exactly the durability you’d expect once the novelty of the theft wears off. “Solar Eclipse” didn’t get dethroned by a stronger competitor. It just stopped being new, and there was nothing else holding it up.

None of this makes Habibti a catastrophe on the level of last week’s subject – a 59 is not a 43, and the album’s best tracks genuinely have defenders among critics who otherwise found the record wanting. What’s terrible here is narrower and, in a way, more useful as a lesson: an album with a real, specific, repeatedly-stated critical complaint – that some of its biggest commercial swings are hollow at the center – got the cleanest possible confirmation of that complaint, measured in days rather than opinions. The chart did the fact-checking the reviews couldn’t.

Hero image: Drake, press photo. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.