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, 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 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 parts into a sausage casing.
To Phaidon's credit, Titles Ruin Everything is quite attractive, as far as little poetry books go. It's a small, bound, soft cover edition with a pleasantly matte cover and a nice heft to the pages.
As for what's inside, well, maybe not so 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.
There aren't any dedication pages in Titles Ruin Everything but, if there were, Drake's Instagram comment section definitely deserved a special thanks. Otherwise I don't think this thing would exist.
Nothing personal against Drake himself, but the effusive praise heaped upon every lunkheaded caption that accompanies his many selfies has always baffled me. Not because the writing is necessarily terrible, but because the reception is always so outsized compared to the witticisms themselves.
Like, I have a feeling that the folks floored by Drake's social media braggadocio would be equally blown away by a book of limericks.
Pure speculation here but I have an inkling that Titles Ruin Everything is actually a collection of scrapped Instagram captions, which isn't a good or bad thing, just a, well, thing. Knowing that this book is ostensibly Drake's foray into poetry, I'd have preferred an attempt at iambic pentameter, at least. Maybe a few sonnets?
Instead, Titles Ruin Everything is a mélange of wordplay and turns of phrase destined to live forever as, well, IG captions for a legion of Drake's followers. Sometimes it's 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. We're all guilty of it sometimes.
However, 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 must agree that Titles Ruin Everything's plethora of empty pages is pretty egregious.
Like, a not-insignificant number of those 168 pages are half-blank.
Poetry books are certainly entitled to some quirky layouts but rather than serving to add weight to Drake's sports bar repartee, Titles Ruin Everything's sparse pages only underscore the vapid prose.
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 Minion.
But this raw presentation is only gonna make Drake's poetry book more appealing to fans, I suspect.
Drake's famous not for his subtlety but his sincerity. He perpetually presents bare emotions in Instagram captions, in songs, in Titles Ruin Everything. Even the book's subtitle reminds you that it was ostensibly written as stream of consciousness. You're getting unvarnished Aubrey Graham, here, and he wants you to know it.
Titles Ruin Everything's strength is, like with so many Drake endeavors, its directness. 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.
Titles Ruin Everything is for the fans, plain and simple. To the rest of us, perhaps we ought to take a page from Drake's poetry book: "If I didn't know how to keep my comments to myself / I'd be commenting stfu."
