【Her Loss】Pitchfork乐评翻译

Hours In Silence音乐：Drake;21 Savage - Her Loss (Explicit)

这张由北境流行巨星和南方说唱明星带来的合作混音带，有着像录音室专辑的时长，看起来像是两位的绝佳合作，但实际听起来在几乎各方面都差强人意。

There are tracks on Her Loss, Drake’s new quasi-collaboration album with 21 Savage, that seem like the natural evolutions of those on 2009’s So Far Gone. “Hours in Silence,” to take one, is built around a much livelier Memphis rap song that sounds as if it’s being replayed underwater; Drake half-croons through his web of gossip and self-mythology, where cryptic comments on exes’ finstas and villains ripped from mob movies weigh equally on his mind. Like he once did with Lil Wayne, he cedes a little time to a considerably more magnetic rapper from the South before singing, over and over, that things are “my fault,” the lines begging for the “of course not” counterweight from a former lover which would absolve him, but never comes.

That song’s brief turn from 21 finds the Atlanta rapper affecting something just short of a Drake impression, the danger posed by armed enemies made to sound nearly romantic (“They looking for myyyy faaaaace”). But much to its detriment, Her Loss relegates 21 to a supporting role, neutering the textural and thematic contrast that sold “Jimmy Cooks,” the beloved “Bound 2”-style hedge tacked onto the end of Honestly, Nevermind, Drake’s otherwise dance-focused album from earlier this year. There are moments of considered writing and bursts of Drake at or near his mischievous best, but in its middle, the record becomes inert, making the bits of self-conscious misanthropy scan as strained rather than gleeful, as if the id could be focus-grouped.

在Her Loss这张由Drake与21 Savage领衔的准合作混音带里，有那么几首歌听起来像是由2009年Drake的混音带So Far Gone演变而来的。就挑Hours in Silence这一首来说吧，基本是以活力四射的孟菲斯说唱歌曲为基调制作的，就是把伴奏弄成是像在水下的感觉而已。Drake在歌里就他本人的流言蜚语和经历半吟唱着，毒舌地吐槽着他前任的ins私人账号，说着那些帮派电影里的恶棍们在他心目中的地位。就像Drake之前和Lil Wayne合作时做的那样，他在开唱之前先给同样来自南部的更具魅力的说唱歌手表演一番。在后面的部分里，Drake反反复复地唱着“my fault”，以祈求他的前爱人的一句“of course not”来赦免他犯下的错，但对方却从未原谅过他。给人便是这种感觉。

这首歌开头很快就来到了21的verse，他发现自己这个亚特兰大说唱歌手多多少少受到了drake的熏陶，那种全副武装的帮派成员散发出的危险氛围在这里听起来有点浪漫（“They looking for myyyy faaaaace~~~~~~~~~~~”）。但差强人意的是，在Her Loss里21 Savage沦为了配角，再也没有在Drake上一舞曲专 Honestly, Nevermind时结尾听到全专最佳Jimmy Cooks的那种风格突变的戏剧性的感觉，就像在Kanye的Yeezus结尾听到Bound 2那样。歌里很多时刻都可以称得上是Drake最好或近乎最好的作词，都表现到了极好。但到了歌曲的中间部分，就变得有点沉闷了，让drake愤世嫉俗的自我意识宣泄从令人愉悦变得牵强，仿佛是在将本我公布于众批判。

Spin Bout U音乐：Drake;21 Savage - Her Loss (Explicit)

This tension between the acutely memorable and the vaguely forgettable is embodied by the production. The submarine Juicy J and DJ Paul flip from “Hours in Silence” is joined by reworks of Ginuwine (“Treacherous Twins”), B.G.O.T.I. (“Spin Bout U”), and the same Isley Brothers song that previously became JAY-Z and Too $hort’s “A Week Ago” (“Privileged Rappers), all of which play on a late-2000s production style—now effective bait for nostalgists— that treated samples as found sounds to be warped into an alien texture. This suits both Drake and 21’s voices: The former’s ecstatic vocals on “Treacherous Twins” alone make Her Loss worth the streaming bandwidth. But the original compositions for the album are less effective, hampered by mixes that make each element of each beat seem oddly isolated; it makes the music sound cheaper than it surely is. (There is a different kind of cheapness at intermittent play: The hammily stupid Daft Punk flip on “Circo Loco” and the O’Jays sample that pops up halfway through “Middle of the Ocean” only to invite unflattering comparisons to AZ and Nas and Dipset.) Still, tucked between the sameness are pockets of strangeness—like the drawn-out instrumental ending to “Jumbotron Shit Poppin,” at once triumphant and melancholy.

这种强烈的洗脑感和茫然地过耳遍忘的紧张矛盾在专辑的制作上便表现出来。“在水底”制作了Hours in Silence的Juicy J 和DJ Paul又窜出来改编了Ginuwine和B.G.O.T.I. 的作品分别制作出了Treacherous Twins和Spin Bout U，此外还采样了Jay-Z和Too $hort以Isley Brothers为采样源的作品A Week Ago，制作出了Privileged Rappers。以上的这些歌曲都有点2000年末制作的那味，即是将采样歌曲扭曲切分让其完全听不出来是原曲的感觉，这种采样方式现在听来很难不让人回味无穷。而这同样都很适合让Drake和21的声音发挥，前者在Treacherous Twins中轻快的人声就足以让专辑的值得这么多播放量了。但专辑中的其他作品的表现就没那么好了，它们的混音效果让每个伴奏的不同元素都突兀地毫无联系；这也让每首歌听起来都比实际上更加廉价。（专辑制作上各式各样的廉价在曲序上断断续续地呈现着：比如歌曲Circo Loco对Daft Punk歌曲的夸张又拙劣的改编；还有在歌曲Middle of the Ocean中间部分冒出来的组合O’ Jays，而这只会招来人们对AZ和Nas及组合Dispet不太敢恭维的比较。）尽管如此，在专辑千篇一律之间还是有一些奇异之处的，就比如歌曲Jumbotron Shit Poppin那冗长的结尾，既得意又有忧郁之感。

Broke Boys音乐：Drake;21 Savage - Her Loss (Explicit)

Things never quite coalesce. On the intriguingly atonal first half of “Broke Boys”—a beat odder and heavier than anything Drake has rapped over in ages—he sleepwalks through a passage that aims to tout his decades-long commercial dominance but communicates, instead, just how flat his output has become, a project that now privileges year-over-year incrementalism over fits of excitement. “Nothing had changed,” he raps, “I’m just harder to please.” He then notes that Ferrari has begun to produce SUVs, and that he and his friends have already ordered several. “We ain’t got a choice,” he says. You imagine him pointing to a conveyor belt.

每个音乐元素都并非都向着一个方向走。比如歌曲Broke Boys无调得有趣的前半部分，它的伴奏比这么多年来drake用过的任何一首都要奇怪和黑暗。他像梦游一样在伴奏上随便唱着，目的是为了宣扬他在十多年的音乐生涯里的商业霸主地位，但实际上传递出来的却是他的作品现在听起来是多么的乏味，专辑也是更倾向于年复一年的“交作业”，而不是由热情驱使了。“什么都没有改变”他唱道，“只是我现在更难满足了。”接着drake又唱到法拉利现在都开始生产SUV了，而他和他的老铁们都订购了好几辆了。“我们没有选择”，他说。你可以想象到Drake是指着一条流水线产业链上的传送带说出这句话的。

At its beginning, Her Loss hints at a looser, more natural interplay. After a brief intro from Atlanta’s Young Nudy—whose roving inner-monologue style would have been a welcome destabilizing force on this album—Drake opens “Rich Flex” with the kind of rapping-to-one-another hook (“21, can you do somethin’ for me?”) that blows past So Far Gone to recall groups from the 1980s and early ‘90s. And throughout, he and 21 are most effective when they either imitate one another, as 21 does on “Hours in Silence” and Drake does on “Major Distribution,” or when they retreat to their opposite stylistic poles: Drake bounding across “BackOutsideBoyz” like the only man to ever be sad in a nightclub, 21 rapping on “More M’s” that “I been in them rooms/I never did no contemplating,” his trademark economy of language unsettling as ever.

在专辑的开头即暗示了Her Loss这张专辑里慵懒自然的相互作用。亚特兰大说唱歌手Young Nudy在Rich Flex里作了一段简短的intro，那种律动地独白式风格本该可以作为这张专辑里受大众欢迎的不稳定基调力量的。随后，Drake以对话式的副歌开启了专辑的篇章(“21, can you do somethin’ for me?”) ，那种So Far Gone的味道让人回想起了80和90年代的组合们。从整张专辑来说，两个化学反应最强烈的情况就是以下两种：drake和21互相模仿对方时，比如说Hours in Silence里的21或Major Distribution里的drake；亦或是唱着和他们风格完全相反的歌时，比如Drake在BackOutsideBoyz里给人的那种“俱乐部只有我是心碎男孩”的感觉，21在More M’s里唱着“我曾与他们的处境相同，但我从未犹豫不决”，21标志性的语言艺术一如既往地令人不安。

Rich Flex音乐：Drake;21 Savage - Her Loss (Explicit)

It’s the muddy, Drake-dominated middle ground that mostly doesn’t work. As the album’s title seems to promise, Her Loss is littered with bitter, very online barbs for women who have betrayed Drake and 21, wronged them in other, indeterminate ways, or simply drifted into the digital expanse. Both artists, but especially Drake, have staked songs on this going back years; what drags down Her Loss is not so much a moral failing as a creative one, the sense that Drake is turning a big dial labeled MISOGYNY while looking to an imagined audience for approval. This is occasionally colorful (from “On BS”: “I blow a half a million on you hoes, I'm a feminist”), but more often, it’s tiresome, even sort of depressing. Quips about group chats sound as if they’ve been sourced from Twitter, and punchlines like the already infamous one that trades on rumors Megan Thee Stallion was lying about being shot by Tory Lanez cast Drake as desperate to provoke, rather than in his ideal mode: someone tortured by the competing impulses to withhold and to overshare.

这含糊的以Drake为主导的中心地带并没有派上什么用场。正如专辑的标题看起来所预示的那样，Her Loss里充满着对所有背叛过Drake和21的女人们的挖苦和冷嘲热讽，以其他不确定的方式冤枉着她们；或是单纯地往数据方面讲。两位艺人，特别是Drake，都“押”了许多歌曲在这音乐颓废的一年；与其说专辑Her Loss是一次道德上的失败，不如说是创作上的令人失望。给人感觉是Drake推着一个标榜着厌女主义的大转盘向他设想的听众们寻求认可。歌曲On BS里的歌词“I blow a half a million on you hoes, I'm a feminist（我在你们这些女人身上花了50万美元，我可算是个女权主义者了）”偶尔听起来算有意思，但更多是无趣，甚至有点令人失望。歌词里一些关于群聊的风趣话给人感觉是从推特上偷的，还有一些punchlines，比如利用Megan Thee Stallion在被Tory Lanez枪击一事上撒谎的谣言，将Drake刻画成一个渴望挑事的人，而不是他和听众理想中的模样：一个被既想压抑情绪与又热衷于分享间的相互矛盾折磨的人。