Key Takeaways
- Drake’s long-teased fourth album VIEWS arrived in 2016 after a two-year rollout packed with mixtapes, beefs, and memes like “Hotline Bling,” only to be slammed as lazy and uninspired despite massive sales.
- A decade later, Complex argues that VIEWS is Drake’s best album and a reclaimed classic, defined less by cohesion than by towering highs like “9,” “U With Me?,” “Feel No Ways,” and global smashes such as “One Dance” and “Controlla.”
- VIEWS helped invent the streaming-era “binge rap album” built to serve every version of a superstar’s fanbase, influencing later polarizing-but-beloved projects from artists like Playboi Carti, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, and J. Cole.
Drake hadn't even really started recording his fourth studio album when he revealed the title.
"Views From the 6," he tweeted on July 15th, 2014, in a tone that read either as straightforward or melodramatic, depending on where on the Drake-hater spectrum you fell. It was a title so obscure that non-Toronto people didn't even know what "the 6"—a term coined by local rapper Jimmy Johnson—referred to.
The album didn't come right away.
After a blistering start to his career with Young Money, which saw him release four projects in the span of four years, Drake would take his time. This is the beginning of what would become habitual: the years-long Drake rollout.
This album didn’t arrive for two years but its existence was always in the ether. In the meant time, here were real-life physical interactions with Diddy, a critically acclaimed mixtape, credible ghostwriting accusations, a beef and subsequent evisceration of Meek Mill, a collab tape with Future, and the "Hotline Bling" meme.
So the long delay was part of the reason why, when VIEWS—the "From the 6" got dropped at the last minute—finally did drop on April 29th, 2016, 948 days after Nothing Was the Same, the response was so hostile. Drake overcompensated for time away from the field with an 81-minute, 20-song behemoth that was dismissed almost immediately, in part because of its unusual success on the charts. (It debuted at No. 1 moving 1.04 million units, partially boosted by the streaming numbers of "Hotline Bling," which was tacked on at the end as a bonus cut.) VIEWS was deemed "lazy," a retread of old Drake ideas and sounds and concepts. Pitchfork wrote that the album was "what happens when venting turns into whining." Complex was kinder but not full of praise, giving it a "B+", saying it was what "going through the motions" felt like, eventually placing it 15th on its albums of the year list.
The most famous criticism came from Joe Budden—technically a working rapper at the time—with a relentless takedown, saying the album sounded "real fuckin' uninspired" in a rant not only launched his media career but sparked a brief lyrical back-and-forth with Drake.
A decade since 2016 ( ultimately an all-time great rap year), it's wild to think how off base everyone was. Not only is VIEWS one of the highlights of that year and a clear-throated classic, but it's Drake's best album, dwarfing Take Care and Nothing Was the Same. It presents Drake at the peak of his powers; refining that chilly sound he and Noah "40" Shebib had been tinkering with for years. It somehow manages to be Drake's most ambitious album—in the way it takes itself so seriously, finding ways to move into new sonic pockets while maintaining a level of commercial precision—and his least ambitious, in how it lingers on topics and templates he'd already established, lyrically and at times musically. It's why I can think of few rap albums from the 2010s that have been reclaimed the way VIEWS has.
Some of it is simply success. Usually when an album is commercially successful but critically dismissed, mob rule takes over, and the kids who were in middle school and high school dancing to this shit decide where it fits into the canon. But what also deserves some context is where Drake and the rap game were at when VIEWS dropped. After years of being mocked—for singing too much, for being too commercial, for being too Canadian—he had finally been somewhat accepted as a legitimate rap star, largely on the strength of his own output: the global sounds of Take Care, the cohesiveness of Nothing Was the Same, and braggadocious If You're Reading This It's Too Late—ghostwriter controversy notwithstanding.
By 2016, there was a real expectation that Drake had a capital-C rap classic in him. During an era where the terms and language of greatness were still being set by Illmatic and The Blueprint—the kind of album that walks the line between introspection and narcissism more finely, that presents a coherent, singular piece of work, that pushes something forward sonically.
And yet that's not what VIEWS is. It's a project aggressively designed to serve not just the Drake fan, but every version of the Drake fan. He didn't follow the traditional template of what a rap classic should look like. He instead created a new template for the rap classic in the streaming era. VIEWS sparked the binge rap album: this is Drake in relentless, overwhelming abundance, in all shapes and sizes. Trap Drake. Global Drake. Spiteful Drake. What critics called lazy, uninspired, or treading water was really just fan service. And as rap has splintered into micro-scenes and hyper-specificity, that's become the dominant mode of the rap classic.
VIEWS isn't a classic for its cohesion, or a lack of skips. It's a classic for how high the highs get. Even putting aside the forever songs—"Hotline Bling," "Controlla," "One Dance"—there is pantheon-level Drake shit on this album. The stretch from "9" to "U With Me?" to "Feel No Ways" is about as strong as it gets. All ridiculously paranoid, melodramatic, and defensive, with Drake locked into a different pocket. (Every six months the footage of Drake testing the monosyllabic flow on "9" gets shared around like old Michael Jordan footage.) The third verse on "U With Me?," where his voice breaks, is the best on the album, while "Feel No Ways"—driven by a sunny, '80s-inspired beat from Ye—is maybe the most honest breakup song he's made: one in which it's not clear who's breaking up with whom, or who even comes out the victor, with the grievance and the guilt being indistinguishable.
What made VIEWS different from other Drake albums—and what's part of its thesis—is that it was recorded almost entirely in Toronto, and the city's cool detachment and melting pot of sounds comes through. You hear it in the local references, the slang, the accents. But you also hear it in the way Drake blends worlds: the way the Brandy sample is used on "Fire & Desire" or how Pimp C dropping a verse on a song featuring DVSN makes sense. Lyrically, the album dwells on the isolating, self-pitying narcissism that comes with being upwardly mobile and newly, uncomfortably rich. It's an album of quotables—"Why you gotta fight with me at Cheesecake/You know I love to go there"—more than genuine lyrical exercises. In fact, on the one pure rap collab on the album, he gets completely smoked by Future on "Grammys." Still a great song.
Sometimes the album's excesses go too far. The draining, middling opener "Keep the Family Close" is a misstep, which is stunning when you consider Drake has otherwise mastered the album intro. And "Pop Style"—with or without Kanye—is a limp excuse for a banger. But perfection isn't the point. Nowadays rap classics are defined by their impact on the artist’s closest fans and the sales spikes they produce rather than sturdy ideas and consistency. And even as I look at some recent albums that I believe will be remembered as classics—Playboi Carti's MUSIC, YoungBoy Never Broke Again's MASA, J. Cole's The Fall Off—they all share that same purge quality: commercially dominant, critically divisive, built to serve every version of their respective fanbases. It's hard to imagine any of them without VIEWS.
In fact, years later Drake would say it consciously the best on "Wants and Needs": "Come with a classic, they come around years later and say it's a sleeper."
