His opening verse gives it some nice variety in texture, and there are some good things about his rhymes—good things that are, as usual, spoiled by his overall mien. He's just so unlikeable. So smarmy and processed. And this lets Mary's singing shine even brighter here than it might otherwise. Because she of course has one of the great, raw, naturally beautiful voices in the world. You just can't wait 'til Drake shuts up so you can hear it.

The melody is one of the strongest ones we've heard Mary sing in a long time. And the beat is nice, too. Made by Jim Jonsin and Rico Love. All spare and moody. Almost like a low-key version of the beat Timbaland made for Ginuwine's "Pony." I mean, it's not that nice. "Pony" is like, what? One of the top ten or fifteen beats in the past fifteen years.

Oh, also, in case you haven't heard, Drake is in a rap beef with Common. Which is like the time in the early '90s when KRS-One got into a rap beef with Prince Be from P.M. Dawn. Except if instead of KRS-One it was the other guy from P.M. Dawn.

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It's hard to think of a current rapper who’s gotten as much out of this tradition as Drake, the 25 year old who is “hip-hop’s current center of gravity.” The Song For Women is not a new staple in hip hop—go back to LL Cool J’s breathy “I Need Love,” Eric B. & Rakim’s “What’s On Your Mind” or ATCQ’s whimsical “Bonita Applebum” for a basic tutorial in the craft—but Drake is just especially good at it. If there is one thing that no one does better than he does, it's the Song For Women.

Drake writes songs like “Best I Ever Had” and “Fancy.” At concerts, he uses lengthy interludes to point at female fans in the audience and say what he likes about each of them: Her pink shirt, her smile, her poster. It doesn’t really matter what it is. Sometimes, he invites one of the women up onstage so that he can kiss her.

“The biggest thing about that song,” Drake said of “Best I Ever Had” just a few years ago, “is that a lot of women come up to me and say, ‘That’s my song, because it really makes me feel special.’”

Surprisingly, there’s one moment on Take Care that actually addresses the Song For Women, and the way women are treated in albums like Take Care. It’s not Drake who acknowledges it, but Kendrick Lamar, a rapper from Compton who just released his first major album, Section.80, last July, and who is currently opening for Drake on tour. The song, “Buried Alive,” is a brief addendum to “Marvin’s Room,” Drake’s ode to the desperate drunk-dial and all of the bitches in his old phone.

On “Buried Alive,” Lamar raps in a halting flow about giving up his old narrative to “go and get some head off the strength of my music.” He remembers having drinks with Drake in Toronto before he’d signed a deal and talking “casually about the industry and how the women be the tastemakers for the shit we making.”

After wrestling with this idea, Lamar decides at the end of the track that he’ll give in to the industry’s needs: “So dig a shovel full of money, full of power, full of pussy, full of fame/And bury yourself alive.”

Then, buried alive, he dies. Blame it on the tastemakers.

***

Destined for Top 40 radio at the moment mixing ends, the Song for Women always has a nice-sounding hook and lots of compliments about a particular woman. The rapper sometimes make an attempt at convincing said woman that her mind is just as sexy as her body. (This is often done clumsily.) Generally, the woman is celebrated for having some careful balance of “street” and “class.” She can have “brains” so long as she also give “brain.”

The music industry (and Kendrick Lamar) inform us that female listeners are hip hop’s main consumers, so artists like Drake feel a compulsion to write the track that makes doe-eyed, sing-a-long fools of us all. It’s proven to move units, after all. So the Song For Women is also very condescending—not necessarily to the woman it claims to be about, but implicitly so to the women who will buy the album and sing along to the song in the shower.

I’ve resisted Drake’s music for a long time, and I’ve done so in part because I think there can be a stupid, righteous honor in resisting those Songs For Women. Take Care is the first Drake album that I’ve ever liked. The album, most of which is produced by Toronto producer Noah “40” Shebib, is full of angsty pianos and sparse drum lines. It often sounds beautiful. Drake has even ditched the hashtag rap construction (“two thumbs up/Ebert and Roeper”) for a more fluid narrative in his rhymes. I get it now, I think: Drake’s life is complicated because Drake is rich and restless and eternally heartbroken and bitter about something a woman has done to him, and that’s his story. And that’s fine. At least on Take Care Drake’s complications have become somewhat interesting.

On the album, he finally sounds comfortable enough with (if also deeply critical of) himself: “I’m hearing all the jokes, I know that they tryna push me,” he raps on the Just Blaze-produced “Lord Knows,” “know that showin’ emotion don’t ever mean I’m a pussy/Know that I don’t make music for niggas who don’t get pussy/So those are the ones I count on to diss me or overlook me.” Drake’s learned how to deal with his haters; he’s learned to celebrate his boys from Toronto; he’s learned to celebrate his wealth and his fame. He sounds a little bit older. At times—listen to “Look What You’ve Done,” his tribute to his mother, uncle and grandmother—the album is even genuinely moving.

But the king of the Song For Women still doesn’t really know how to deal with his female tastemakers—even if he did want to find a way to critique the music industry on this album, he made sure that he didn’t have to do it himself. Drake certainly raps about women, but that’s a different construction entirely from writing to women. Instead, outside of the Song For Women construct, Drake writes mainly to other young men who have had bad breakups with women they might have loved, and he uses the words that those men would like to use with one another when they talk about those women in public. He says “ho” and “bitch” just as much as every other rapper in the game, and still gets away with lots of music critics celebrating his emotional depth and self-awareness because he’s often singing while he says it.

“Bitch I’m the man, don’t you forget,” he reminds exes in “Shot For Me.” “The way you walk, that’s me/The way you talk, that’s me.” He sings it in a soft, affecting voice, and it sounds nice. It’s something you want to sing along to.

***

Earlier this year, Frank Ocean, the singer-songwriter affiliated with the group Odd Future, released his debut mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra. It includes a track called “Songs For Women,” which has its very own intro, “Bitches Talkin’.” On the intro, Frank and two girls argue about what tape to put in the deck; the bitches want some Jodeci but Frank wants Radiohead.

“What is a Radiohead, anyway,” one of the women says disinterestedly as Frank cuts off Kid A’s “Optimistic” and “Songs For Women” comes in. The track is a genius parody of songs like “Best I Ever Had” and “Fancy.” And it’s just as catchy.

Ocean chronicles a relationship with an old girlfriend who’d once gotten “chills” when he harmonized to “Otis, Isley, Martin.” After a while, she “don’t even listen to” his songs, “but she be bangin’ that Drake in my car.” Over the course of the song, Ocean progresses from singing an intentionally clumsy “la da da da da” to “get at women” to singing an emotional “la da da da ah ah/’bout heartbreak” and “love lost.” Ocean creates a mindless radio song—“la da das” and all—that serves as a winking critique of the form. Drake’s Songs For Women have none of this complexity, and that has much more to do with the artist’s ability than he, or Kendrick Lamar, might care to admit. “See, I just don’t play fair/but it’s fair enough,” Ocean sings, as the song winds down.

On Take Care, Lamar (and, by extension, Drake) admit that the Song For Women requirement isn’t fair to the performer. But it’s also not fair to the listener. On Yelawolf’s new album, Radioactive, the Alabama native gets in a nod to the agreement as well. After “Throw It Up,” a wonderful track with guest verses from Gangsta Boo, a woman, and Eminem, there’s a brief interlude before the start of “Good Girl.” Eminem gets a call from Yela, and fields some advice: “You know what I was thinking, man? I think that the one thing that the album don’t have that it might be missin’, is like a song, for like, for girls.”

“What do you mean, for like, bitches?” Yela responds. The conversation sounds awkward, like a father explaining female anatomy to a young son.

“Nah, girls,” Em explains. “Like a love song… Yeah, man! Bitches like love songs.”

The wink doesn’t change the content of the song, but it makes the entire two-step of the Song For Women more conspiratorial. It lets us believe that by singing along, we’re both playing the industry in equal part.

On Take Care, Drake’s Song For Women is “Make Me Proud,” a duet with his label mate, Nicki Minaj. On it, Drake delivers the worst, most basic Drake verse in recent memory, and that’s coming from someone who considers most Drake verses to be, basically, the worst.

The track is condescending to an almost satirical extent. There is no wink. Drake drops the natural beauty lyric (“I love it when your hair’s still wet/Cause you just took a shower”), the body image lyric (“Running on a treadmill and only eating salad”), the brains lyric (“Sounds so smart, like you graduated college/Like you went to Yale, but you probably went to Howard”), and he closes with some nonsensical interpretation of female protest (“That’s why you wanna have no sex/Why you wanna protest, why you wanna fight for your right”).

Take Care’s Song For Women is padded with the usual inanities, a tribute the feminine qualities he thinks women want to hear him care about in a song. In the remainder of Take Care, though, when the Howard grad happens to become the bitch or the ho that won’t text him back, Drake stops addressing women, even in this rudimentary form, and turns toward his “soldiers” to rap to them about women.

In an interview with Stereogum earlier this month, Drake said that the music he’s making now has a “sex-driven chauvinistic undertone to it” because “that’s just where I’m at in my life.” There’s an appreciative level of self-awareness there, especially for a young artist who’s probably only going to get smarter as he gets older. But we’re already accustomed to chauvinism in hip hop; on Take Care, the women who are not Drake’s matriarchs are either treated like impassive, mindless listeners who need to be told they’ve made someone proud, or they need to be put in their place for doing him wrong. The “la da das" are only so distracting here.

In an unreleased verse from “Aston Martin Music” off of Rick Ross’ 2010 album, Teflon Don, Drake raps that he “hate calling the women bitches, but the bitches love it.” It’s one of many places where Drake, who’s changed a lot as an artist since we first heard him, gets tripped up in his own duplicity. “Sex-driven chauvinism” is the basis for a lot of other rappers’ narratives in hip hop. For Drake to conflate this new persona with the one who tries to make women “feel special” is an abuse of the privilege, and of the tastemakers’ tastes.

Drake’s not the prototype for the sensitive rapper anymore. He just plays one on his Songs For Women.

Emma Carmichael works at Deadspin.

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"Evolve already," said the button Dan Savage wore to a Gay Pride reception at the White House last night. Well? Oakland rapper Lil B, at least, seems to be listening. His new album, I'm Gay (I'm Happy) came out yesterday on iTunes. I've been listening to it this morning, and it sounds really good.

Of course, there is the basic level good of a prominent artist choosing "I'm Gay" as a title for a rap album. And Lil B has been saying nice things about it, too.

"I hope that I can turn some of my fans that might be homophobic or supporters that might be homophobic and say, "You know what, we're all one people. This is love." It's just respect, and I did that to bring people together and bring more love and to spark the minds of people and not let words and judgments and stereotypes stop you from loving."

There are other interesting things to talk about. And if I had more time this morning, I would try think of a more fluid transition to write here.

The cover of the album is an homage to that of Marvin Gaye's 1976 classic, I Want You, with Ernie Barnes' famous painting "Sugar Shack," which was also featured in the opening credits to the TV show "Good Times."

Gaye's influence on hip-hop, always huge, has been especially prominent lately, with Tyler the Creator stating a preference for boogieing to his music in pink panties in "Yonkers," and Drake naming his new song "Marvin's Room," after the late singer's personal recording studio (where it was recorded) and everybody else jumping on the track to make their own versions. And Big Sean with Roscoe Dash and Kanye West setting the mood with "Marvin Gaye and Chardonnay."

Here's another good song from "I'm Gay."

Gay, Gaye, Game... I have a terrible weakness for bad puns and childishly obvious word play. And no idea what to do about a title for this post.

Previously: Rap Music Is Good Now Because Rappers Aren't Afraid To Be Weird

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Canada is totally ruling in music these days, huh? What with Arcade Fire winning the Grammys and Justin Bieber getting to make IMAX movies about his life and also record songs with gangsta rappers, and Drake being so popular for reasons that I can sort of understand (he's certainly talented, Drake) but strongly disagree with. Why does everybody want to listen to someone whine about how hard it is to be rich and famous and drunk and high and having sex all the time through an autotune program and over music that sounds so much like Phil Collins in 1986?

Anyway, I kept on jogging, because I'm trying to get into better shape so as not to die as soon as sometimes it feels like I'm going to, and lord knows I can't seem to stop eating too much, because of all the delicious restaurants in New York City, so I'm left with exercise in extreme heat to burn off the many calories I consume. And I kept on enjoying the Fucked Up record. It is really terrific! I like their last album a lot, The Chemistry of Common Life, which came out two years ago. I love it, in fact. But while I just got the new one two days ago, I think I might end up liking it even more. The songs are maybe more melodic? The vocals, sung by the very large and often shirtless singer with the incredible punk-rock name of "Pink Eye," seem to be more like singing and less like shouting than they have in the past? (Or maybe I'm just bringing some pre-concieved idea of what this band's "artistic growth" would be like to my initial listens? I'm not sure.) And there seems to be more of presence for the secondary singing of the sweet-voiced lady bass player. Which, I like that. As I get older, I notice myself liking more sweetness counterpoint with my heavy feedback-distortion-caterwaul rock music. This is not so surprising to me.

The album is a concept album, apparently. A rock opera, actually, about which I haven't yet gleaned much from the lyrics. But Pitchfork's Larry Fitzmaurice explained some in his review earlier this week:

"The story of David Comes to Life is fairly complicated and, at points, heavily meta. It concerns a factory worker named David Eliade who falls in love with a woman named Veronica Boisson. They conspire to build a bomb together and death, destruction, and redemption follow..."

And I jogged, thinking about how much I was liking this album, and because I'd gotten to see the cool airplane landing on the water, and thought about the possibility that it was bringing this great band to New York City, just as I was here listening to them, and because I'm as self-obessed as the next guy who thinks he's the center of the entire universe, it occurred to me that the title of album might carry some more significance for me. My name is David! And I am jogging here in the hopes of getting healthier. Could this album be the thing through which I myself come to life this summer? I was ready. It was all making a cosmic sort of sense. I picked up my pace, and breathed deep into my lungs.

But then, soon after that, I had to stop jogging and walk the last five or six blocks back to apartment. Slowly. But the album still sounded pretty awesome.

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I've listened to both albums, and both are excellent. I enjoy the irony behind The Weeknd's high-pitched crooning of hard lyrics on "Wicked Games" ("Let me see that aaaaasssss!/Look at all this cash!") à la Nate Dogg. Ocean's nostalgia.Ultra offers a lesson in keeping it real as, on a song like "Novacane," he sings about falling for a college girl with a "stripper booty" who makes extra money "for tuition doin' porn in the Valley." But through my countless listens to both albums, there's one thing I'm not hearing—R&B. Not even the hipster variety.

It's not so much that the term "hipster R&B" is inaccurate. I'm no hipster, but if The Weeknd and Frank Ocean are getting mad love from people who consider themselves hipsters, then I suppose hipsters can call it whatever makes them feel comfortable. But as non-hipsters like to say, let's keep it all the way real. Calling it "hipster R&B" is a nice way of saying it's R&B that white people like (black hipsters notwithstanding), and here's my problem with that: It's myopic, lazy, and it sounds to me like a form of musical segregation that's not entirely based on genre.

Here's a proposal—how about we call it "nappy-headed pop"? If that sounds even slightly politically incorrect or lazy, then you understand my frustrations with the term "hipster R&B." It's not with the term "hipster"; it's with any hipster or white critic labeling a black artist "an R&B artist" just because he or she sings a little.

On nostalgia,Ultra Ocean does his own version of The Eagles' "Hotel California" ("American Wedding") and MGMT's "Electric Feel" ("Nature Feels"). House of Balloons lifts a huge sampling of "Happy House" by Siousxie and The Banshees and samples indie rock group Beach House not once, but twice ("Loft Music" and "The Party & The After Party")! Call me close-minded, but samplings like this don't sound like R&B. They don't pass the hearing test. They sound like black artists who are playing with rock and pop, just as white artists like Esthero and Francis and The Lights (a collaborator on Drake's Thank Me Later album) do, and you don't see anyone calling those two artists R&B in any form.

Of course, R&B should be allowed to evolve. Not everything needs to sound like an extension of the Motown and Stax tree or like it belongs on Quiet Storm radio formats. I'd even go so far as to say The Weeknd's album has shades of early Timbaland and Prince, two artists who changed the way R&B sounded forever. Go back and listen to So Far Gone and listen to Drake's ode to Timbaland entitled, "Bria's Interlude," a reworking of "Friendly Skies," an R&B duet Timbaland produced for Missy Elliott and Ginuwine from Elliott's debut album, Supa Dupa Fly. R&B as a genre has evolved over the years, no question, but the artists we associate with R&B evolved as well, sometimes moving beyond the genre with which they were first associated.

Chris Brown's new album F.A.M.E. is a prime example of this evolution. Listen closely: Are we really listening to R&B or are we listening to pop? Different ears, different opinions, I'm sure; but if we can't all agree on it being R&B, then why would we categorize it as R&B or compare it to other R&B albums in the first place? My guess, probably because he's black. But I'll be damned if CB's "Beautiful People" is an R&B song (it's dance music) or "Look At Me Now" is R&B (it's a rap song with moments of melody). Are we really going to debate who has the better R&B album between Chris Brown's F.A.M.E. and Adele's 21? I don't think we should, simply because one album is not R&B (F.A.M.E.) and one album is (21).

All this automatic categorization of black artists who sing harkens back to the social roots of the R&B genre. Before R&B was even called R&B, the record industry and magazines like Billboard categorized it as "race music," shorthand for any black artists who sang with a backbeat behind them. For years, white artists who made similar music never had to worry about being designated as "race music" until 1958, when Billboard began using "R&B" instead. The switch made it possible for acts like the late, great Teena Marie and current artists like Robin Thicke to chart in the R&B category. Unfortunately, many critics still referred (and refer) to those artists with the term "blue-eyed soul," which is a nice way of saying they're white singers that black people like. Equally hackneyed is calling black singers who white people like "hipster R&B"—or, for that matter, "nappy-headed pop".

None of this is to say critics quick to describe Chris Brown or The Weeknd as R&B (or hipster R&B) artists are racists; hardly the case. (Disclosure: I used to work at VIBE alongside Sean Fennessey who authored the Village Voice piece about Frank Ocean, The Weeknd, and where I first read the term "hipster R&B," and who I consider a straight-up great guy.) But what I am urging is that we not be so quick to categorize all black singers as R&B—because what starts to happen then is we cut off the opportunity to have a real discussion about R&B as a genre.

The Weeknd, Frank Ocean, Chris Brown and Drake are not the only things cooking in R&B and the way they are being used as some sort of encapsulation of the whole genre is sad. On April 5, the timeless R&B band Mint Condition will release their new album 7.... I've listened to it and it's great. Meanwhile, the singer Lloyd, who has a respectable track record of releasing good material, will be coming out with his fourth album King of Hearts on April 19. Raphael Saadiq, he of the once-popular-but-no-longer-together R&B group Tony, Toni, Tone, is releasing his new solo album Stone Rollin' on May 10. And yes, Adele's 21 is arguably the best R&B album released in 2011 thus far.

If we want to have a real discussion about R&B—where it's at, where it's going, who is doing it right, who is doing it weird, and who is really not doing it at all no matter what the critics say—let's talk about all of these artists. There are some really good white artists making R&B (Adele) and there are some really good black artists who are not making R&B. Even The Weeknd himself tweeted, "The Weeknd is not a group, a band, or an R&B duo act..." Sure, he was tweeting about his personnel, but I also get the feeling he wanted to make it clear his music is not R&B. Let's listen to the music carefully, place the albums in their proper categories (if you're even into that sort of thing), and then discuss based on what we hear, not what we see.

Jozen Cummings is a writer living in Harlem whose work has appeared in Vibe, The New York Times Magazine, Paper and various other places. You can check out his blog Until I Get Married or follow him on Twitter.

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The happening of the secret concert seemed to actually be kept a pretty good secret as there were only a few people who tried to crash the door. Presumably if this were not the case, it would have been more of a madhouse, but whether it was the rain or the tight lips of those involved in the Rosewood Movement, the whole thing was not particularly overcrowded. That being said, there were a few people who weren't on the list who tried to make their way inside. One particular social media technology founder and his party were originally denied at the door and then, after business cards were exchanged in a "Do you know who I am? I am this guy!" sort of way, a compromise was reached and two people from the party of five or six were allowed to enter.

Although the party was supposed to start at midnight, Kanye and his friends did not get there until around 1 a.m. Until that point it was unclear as to what was happening, whether it was just a party, whether there would actually be performances, or if a lot of people who weren't used to wearing suits would have to continue standing around awkwardly wearing suits for an indefinite amount of time.

Around 1:30 a.m., Kanye finally took the stage. His labelmate and longtime friend John Legend was on a grand piano as an accompanist, and there was a third person who was behind several keyboards. The show itself started as a series of stripped down hits from Kanye's repertoire, and the first quarter of the set was pretty mellow, as though the fact that everyone was wearing suits meant that things weren't going to get particularly exciting.

After five or six songs, as he brought out Estelle for 'American Boy,' the energy level of the show hit another gear. Kanye started going through his more upbeat numbers including performances of the song he produced for Drake, 'Find Your Love,' and he also used a sample machine on stage to create new interpolations of his own hits like 'Flashing Lights' and a new song that samples the Billy Joel song 'Movin' Out (Anthony's Song),' which is about a boy who doesn't like the new male companions of his newly divorced mother. It was very, very good, but it's also hard to go wrong when using that chorus.

One of the highlights was a performance of 'Say You Will' off "808's and Heartbreak," in which he explained the inspiration for the song; that it was mostly to do with women who were indecisive in committing to sexual endeavors. Examples cited were girls who on a Friday night said they would come over to have sex but changed their mind at the last minute, leaving Kanye in a lurch. He was also not thrilled when girls would not send him sexts (dirty pictures via e-mail or MMS) when he was on the road. It sounds like a stupid complaint, but it was much more reasonable sounding the way he articulated it. It seemed like a very annoying problem to have!

What resonated through the whole show was how much fun Kanye was having. As the crowd was small, probably no bigger than 200 or so people, many of whom were personal friends of his, he was just playing music he was very proud of and enjoying the adoration and positive energy of the small room. Even as the planned set ended, he kept going through the MPC to find new songs he could do-and it should be noted that John Legend and the keyboardist were insanely impressive as they kept up with his ranting, changes to songs and random jamming out with his samples. At one point, Kanye started pounding on the keys so hard that at the end of the song he came out looking hazy, and he said he felt like a drummer who was on the first night of his tour and had just completed his first solo.

There were a few very minor missteps on the night. First was the fact that Mos Def was in the building, but not near the stage when their collaboration 'Two Words' was being performed, and so Kanye was looking around for the rapper to no avail. Next was the fact that the drink of choice, at least by the Rosewood Movement, was the creatively named "Rosewood." It is: sauvignon blanc, cranberry juice and a simple syrup. You can guess how that tasted.

The dress code was pretty heavily enforced, but the only men who seemed to enter sans suit were David Beckham and his hanger-on buddy. Pulling the "It's not really that cold and other people are actually sweating but I'm still going to wear a beanie" move, he was perched up in one of the upper booths with no Victoria Beckham in sight, though he did have some cute-ish British girls with him. To his credit nothing particularly salacious was happening with their party-and the background on his new Blackberry Torch was a picture of his family.

After the performance was over, Kanye and John Legend walked off the stage to join their friends who were there supporting the Rosewood Movement, including Pusha T of the Clipse, Big Sean, Mr. Hudson, longtime manager and friend Don C, Ibn Jasper and Virgil Abloh. After a little more lounging, the venue started to empty out. Kanye started towards the exit, through the crowd, and he went out of his way to thank people individually, friends and strangers alike, for coming to his show. He seemed genuinely very, very happy.