Drake’s Chart-Topping ‘Toosie Slide’ Could Spell Disaster For His Next Album

Drake, in typical Drake fashion, rocketed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 this week with his latest single, “Toosie Slide.” The song had all the ingredients of a chart-topping smash: a mindlessly catchy hook, a viral TikTok challenge and a captive audience stuck at home with nothing better to do than stream music. “Toosie Slide” dethroned fellow Canadian superstar The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” from atop the Hot 100 and helped its creator shatter a slew of chart records, reminding listeners that even if Drake isn’t the most technically gifted rapper of this era, he is certainly the most commercially savvy.

But the immediate success of “Toosie Slide” sets a disconcerting precedent for Drake’s next album, about which he has shared little information and which has no release date yet. While Drake has frequently turned his chart-topping hits into viral smashes, “Toosie Slide” is his most shameless commercial ploy to date. For arguably the first time in his career, Drake has gone from a viral trendsetter to a trend follower, and if “Toosie Slide” sets the template for an entire new studio album, the results could be disastrous.

For nearly as long as he has made music, Drake’s art and social media fluency have gone hand in hand. His 2015 smash “Hotline Bling” launched one of the most enduring memes of the decade; “God’s Plan” overflows with lyrical zingers that were designed to be dispensed in 140-character chunks; “In My Feelings” shot to No. 1 on the Hot 100 thanks to one of the most ubiquitous (and ill-advised) dance challenges of 2018. Drake hits aren’t just catchy songs; they are social media phenomena that become staples of the cultural lexicon.

Already, “Toosie Slide” has enjoyed a similar ascension up the Billboard Hot 100 and Streaming Songs charts. The song earned a whopping 55.5 million U.S. streams in its first week, and on Tuesday, it edged out “Blinding Lights” to become the No. 1 song on Spotify’s global Top 200 with more than 6.1 million plays. But “Toosie Slide”’s instant success was hardly effortless. According to Vulture, Drake recruited dancers and social media influencers Toosie, Ayo & Teo and Hiii Key to create dance moves for “Toosie Slide” and flaunt them across their social media platforms. The result was a viral dance challenge for a song that hadn’t even been released yet. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with hiring social media influencers to turn your song into a viral hit; artists have stooped lower before and will continue to do so in the future. But it reaffirms that “Toosie Slide” is only a song by the loosest definition of the word; it is a product, first and foremost, a cynical (and successful) attempt to reverse-engineer a viral hit in an age when virality is anything but predictable. That Drake pulled it off is a testament to his overwhelming popularity. But hiring a team of influencers to blast the “Hip-Hop Hokey Pokey” into the stratosphere is hardly the type of move that deserves applause—especially when fans clowned on Justin Bieber for trying to accomplish the same thing with “Yummy” a few months ago. (It failed: Despite Bieber’s best efforts, “Yummy” stalled at No. 2 on the Hot 100 behind Roddy Ricch’s indomitable “The Box.”)

The overarching problem with “Toosie Slide” is that, for perhaps the first time, Drake has entered “How do you do, fellow kids?” territory. Previously, the rapper’s biggest viral hits spread like wildfire on social media without his intervention—or at least, without him making it known. This time, he’s made no attempt to hide his thirst to score a No. 1 hit by any means necessary. It suggests that while the 33-year-old Drake is still the biggest commercial rapper in the world, he may be starting to lose touch with a generation of listeners 10 to 15 years his junior.

This virality-first, music-second approach to writing songs does not bode well for a new Drake full-length. You can call his last two studio albums, Scorpion and Views, a lot of things: bloated, genre-hopping odysseys in desperate need of a quality control technician. But those albums are nothing if not ambitious, with Drake indulging his every artistic whim across 20-plus songs, short attention spans be damned. To forsake those indulgences for a collection of mindless bangers centered around eight-second hooks optimized for TikTok would be the worst decision Drake could make, especially as an artist who is admittedly concerned with his legacy and critical reception.

Of course, it’s more likely that “Toosie Slide” is just an effortless one-off that Drake deployed to buy time and remind the world how popular he is. Some singles are meant to live and die by their virality rather than set the tone for an entire album. If that’s the case, then props to Drake for scoring another easy win. Still, compared to the lead singles off his last three projects—Scorpion’s “God’s Plan,” More Life’s “Fake Love” and Views’ “Hotline Bling”—“Toosie Slide” falls woefully short. Here’s hoping that, in between filming dance tutorials, Drake uses his free time inside that wild new mansion to write something with a little more substance for his next full-length.

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