The photo dump is, by now, a well-honed genre of Instagram post. Caption it something like “July”, or even better, a specific date range, as if your life is so interesting it needs a full-time archivist. Add a few pictures of family and friends; a few selfies, ideally with an artfully cluttered backdrop; and some other visual flotsam, like zoomed-in photos of funny shop signs, or a five-second video of a tree.
Drake , a man with a private jet and a Toronto mansion so opulent he calls it “the embassy”, thinks on a bigger scale. Yesterday, he unveiled “100GIGSFORYOURHEADTOP” : a barebones website containing roughly 100GB of files for download, organised in folders with terse, all-caps names like “2_SOTA” and “THEO_EDITS”. The first three files are new songs – “It’s Up”, with Young Thug and 21 Savage ; “Blue Green Red”; and “Housekeeping Knows”, with up-and-coming Atlanta rapper Latto – and they’re all pretty good, though maybe not huge hits.
The rest? Hundreds of video clips and dozens of photos spanning Drake’s entire career. The shorter his hair and the bigger his beard gets is the best way to date them. This is, essentially, a XXXL Insta dump, with the same vibe of faux-arty casualness: many of the clips are abstract, and seconds-long; one folder, “2_SOTA/MIAMI_STORM”, consists entirely of moody shots of a Miami storm at dusk.
We see Drake listening to songs in the studio; listening to songs stretched out on a sofa ; listening to.