The kind of news story that relies on quotes from Twitter is seldom the most accurate gauge of public mood – whatever opinion you want to underline, you can doubtless find someone with 38 followers spouting it – but, in the case of Honestly, Nevermind, said stories might have a point. “New Drake album shocks followers with radical change of musical direction” offers one, complete with the news that at least one Twitter user thought its contents amounted to “trolling”.
The issue is that Honestly, Nevermind – at least until its final two tracks – is essentially a house album, and that is not traditionally a genre in which rappers dabble. It’s a move that is not entirely without precedent. Drake’s 2017 mixtape More Life had a sprinkling of house-infused tracks, most notably Passionfruit. Kanye West sampled Hardrive’s 90s New York house classic Deep Inside on Fade, from The Life of Pablo; P Diddy made a documentary about how much he loved Ibiza, while, if you delve back into the late 80s, you can find house tracks by the Jungle Brothers and Queen Latifah. But these are isolated incidents. For the most part, hip-hop and house are a twain that seldom meets, perhaps for the reasons once suggested by Outkast’s André 3000: “To the average guy in the street, house music is kind of connected to the gay community … in the ’hood, they think [if you listen to house] you’re gay or white.”
