Drake's Poetry Book Is 168 Pages of Corny IG Captions
Drake's new poetry book, Titles Ruin Everything, is what happens when someone is constantly told that they're more clever than they actually are. Across 168 pages of single-line text, Drake quips about women, sex, women, money, fake friends, women, and women. Ever heard a Drake song before? You've basically read the book!
Lord Byron, he ain't. Instead, Drake's poetry book reads like if Barstool Sports commissioned E. E. Cummings for an anthology of pick-up lines, except even less artful. It's Bushisms two decades later.
Written with longtime songwriting partner Kenza Samir and published by century-old bookseller Phaidon, Titles Ruin Everything is supposedly both a prelude and tie-in to a forthcoming album, though things do not bode well if Titles Ruin Everything is indicative of what that album's quality.
Titles Ruin Everything's "provocative musings translate [Drake]'s wit and talent for wordplay into potent stanzas," said publisher Phaidon in a statement. "Together, these meditations on fame, romance, and relationships offer an unfiltered view of the artist’s inner world."
To put it more succinctly, Titles Ruin Everything compresses a bunch of Drake zingers into a tidy package, sort of like how meat grinders compress pork chunks into sausage casing.
To Phaidon's credit, Titles Ruin Everything is quite attractive, as far as little books go. It's produced in a small soft cover edition with a pleasantly matte cover and a nice heft to the pages.
As for what's inside, well, a little less attractive: Titles Ruin Everything was clearly written by the guy who reportedly contemplated calling an album Hard Feelings Harder Dick.
Every available $20 edition of Titles Ruin Everything has sold out from Phaidon's web store since the book released on June 24 but you can still find copies on third-party retailers like SSENSE should you wish to experience the "magic" for yourself.
Either way, enjoy a brief sampling of Titles Ruin Everything's winningest moments, which I selected from a review copy.
After sampling them, I have an inkling that you'll agree with my conclusion: Titles Ruin Everything is actually a collection of scrapped Instagram captions.
Given that this book is ostensibly Drake's foray into poetry, I'd have preferred something more adventurous rather than Richard Prince-ified poems. How 'bout an attempt at iambic pentameter? Some sonnets? An acrostic? Even just ordinary lyrics would by an improvement.
Sometimes the book is clever, sometimes it's clunky ("Having trouble figuring out if you're a devil missing a horn or a unicorn"), sometimes it's lightly misogynistic ("It's always some unemployed ho tryna work my nerves"), and, frequently, it's quite bad ("There are two types of women in this world / women who like giving head and women who I don't like").
But that's all subjective. It's okay to enjoy the book and it's okay to enjoy Drake. Still, even the truest, most shameless Drake devotees, the ones who think "Those guys are so burnt out / We can smell it from here" is Pulitzer Prize-worthy, would have to agree that Titles Ruin Everything's plethora of empty pages is pretty egregious.
Like, a not-insignificant number of the books 168 pages are half-blank.
Poetry books are, more than any other, entitled to quirky layouts but rather than adding weight to Drake's locker room repartee, Titles Ruin Everything's sparse pages only underscore the prose's vapidity.
Like, the only way that "My therapist told me I need to stop listening to what people tell me / but if I take her advice wouldn't I be listening to what people tell me?" could read worse is if it was accompanied by a picture of a grinning Minion.
I doubt fans will mind, though.
Drake's famous not for his subtlety but his sincerity. Even Titles Ruin Everything's subtitle reminds you that it's ostensibly a stream of consciousness. You're getting unvarnished Aubrey Graham for better or worse. You can guess where I land.
This is Titles Ruin Everything's sole strength, however.
If Drake's best heart-on-sleeve songs offer a window into his unvarnished soul, Drake's poetry book is a peek into his brain, with all the quotability and cringe that entails.
That means that Titles Ruin Everything is really for fans alone. As for the rest of us, perhaps we ought to take a page from Drake himself: "If I didn't know how to keep my comments to myself / I'd be commenting stfu."
