Drake’s “Nice For What” Is The Bittersweetest Song I’ve Ever Known
By: Marcus K. Dowling
Tags: Drake, Feminism, Music, Rap, Women

Drake’s “Nice For What” Is The Bittersweetest Song I’ve Ever Known

Aaliyah stans can’t sing Lauryn’s spirit this well, dammit.

I adore Lauryn Hill to the level that I have every bar she ever rapped or verse she ever sang committed to memory. I was so inspired by The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill that I listened to her excellent 1998 release every day for 18 months, plus owned a four-foot tall “Ex-Factor” promotional poster. But, alas, by the time that she released Unplugged, her heartbroken, hasty and half-written, yet still magical and impacting 2003 follow up, the Lauryn I knew was gone. Moreover, the heart and soul of my love for soul music had been ripped out, savaged, then placed back into my body. Thus, while it is magnificent, Drake’s current single “Nice For What” is some straight butt-trash that I don’t have any time for (but will stream another million times). I feel this way if for no other reason than he already loves Aaliyah the way I love Lauryn and thus, in my mind can’t authentically make a song that seems so heartfelt. “Nice For What” is probably the most bittersweetest thing I’ve ever known. By heart. Already. Damn.

L. Boogie has more creative talent in her right pinkie finger than 100 musicians could use in ten lifetimes. She was the nexus at which Joni Mitchell meeting Stevie Wonder combined with Rakim’s warrior heart and the passionate politics of Angela Davis occurred. Ms. Hill was ill-equipped for popular music in 1996. Back then, pop took rappers and made them charlatans, hard edges on polite radio fare, exclamation points raging where periods once ruled. Lauryn Hill’s message shined brighter than all the world’s shiny suits and bling bling combined. I sincerely feel that between heartbreak, having a family and popular culture wanting her to be a dolled-up cooing clone, instead of fighting the machine, she quit it at her peak.

Lauryn Hill plainly stared the mainstream music industry in the face and called them the liars and pimps that they are. Nobody likes an unwilling whore, and she fell off precipitously, as life on the pop margins is like a million cloudy days blocking the sunshine of mainstream love. In retaliation, she changed her times, and as a professional mother, let her rhymes raise her babies (all five of them), art influencing life.

Drizzy is a fascinating artist to be tying his art to Lauryn Hill’s creative legacy. For as much as he’s an actor-ternt-sanga, he’s also the artist whose five-foot two-inch tall mother cried into his chest in depressive angst. He’s also known for encapsulating his “devil may care” mantra toward life in song. Also, in having Aaliyah’s face tattooed on his body, he probably cares more about 90s R & B than I ever did by just putting up a poster on my wall. In fact, while wholly inspired by Lauryn Hill to get my “lover and a fighter” tattoo on my own back ten years ago, I couldn’t get myself to the point where Hill’s wood-carving cover of Miseducation seemed made for my skin. Instead, I opted for a fist with brass knuckles holding a rose.

“Nice For What” was released in the same week as Cardi B’s debut album Invasion of Privacy. Invasion of Privacy is a release that was the first New York/East Coast influenced hip-hop album by a female artist since The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to hit in such a way that it left an immediate and indelible imprint on popular culture. It’s again beautiful, yet bittersweet that hip-hop is now mainstreamed to a point where it’s big enough to support Lauryn Hill and another hip-hop artist. Ultimately, if Jay and Bey are the new parents of the culture, Lauryn is the grandmother. She’s older, wiser, a memory of the legacy mixed with the talent for timeless impact. Lineage-wise, Drake exhuming the ex-Fugee’s spiritual essence while Cardi B is simultaneously living her “best life” is a magical, yet still, to me, potentially lousy hip-hop moment.

Maybe that’s my issue with Drake’s New Orleans bounce inspired cover hit. Co-opting the Earth Mother of mainstream hip-hop feels sacrilegious. When he says “she had a man last year…life goes on,” over a female empowering club banger that feels like Webbie’s “Independent,” it feels like it cheapens the best song ever written about the romantic inadequacies of Wyclef Jean that led to Hill’s career-tragic professional decline. “Ex-Factor” isn’t just another ballad. It is one of the most iconic, broken-hearted torch songs ever performed, and an anthem that still leaves an indelible mark on women worldwide.

In fact, Drake is such a real fan of Lauryn Hill, that he made the song exactly three minutes and 30 seconds long. Three minutes and 30 seconds you ask? Yes. Lauryn’s time-splitting duet with Bob Marley for “Turn Your Lights Down Low” includes Hill saying “loving you is a like a song I replay, every three minutes and thirty seconds of every day.” If you’re going to get Lauryn right, you have to mix multiple levels of sacred and keep God and Jah locked in the room with the Devil. The period that inspired “Turn Your Lights Down Low” is right around the time of the height of the “era of good feeling in her on-again/off-again relationship with Rohan Marley. This epoch directly proceeded the period that created the space for “Ex-Factor” to exist. Thus, it’s a nice nod. Drake doing call and response with Lauryn paralleling Lauryn and Robert Nesta Marley’s lovelorn redemption song as a coda for “Nice For What?” It’s the little things.

Maybe I’m a curmudgeon. Or, perhaps, I’m a diabolical hater. Possibly, it’s just that the inevitability of Drake is just wearing on me, and the idea that he’s allowed to be a man for all seasons and all people seems like a step too far. It’s a virtual impossibility to me that one artist could be so uniquely gifted as to wear Aaliyah’s face on his body, but sing Lauryn’s spirit so well. But, “Nice For What” is easily the bittersweetest song I’ve ever known. By heart. Already. Damn.