Exodus by Bob Marley & The Wailers

Take Care

Drake

Vulnerably rap-singing his way into cultural ubiquity.

As the title suggests, Take Care is a testament to the theory that the best art requires time. After his studio debut Thank Me Later—an album Drake himself felt was rushed—he enlisted musical savant Noah “40” Shebib to draw on the very Toronto sound they’d pioneered—the sweet spot between rap and R&B that had defined the acclaimed 2009 mixtape So Far Gone.

It worked. Even though he was just in his mid-twenties, the child actor turned rapper had mastered his identity. Rather than exuding a manufactured image of what a rapper “should” be, Drake is fully himself on tracks like “Marvins Room,”a hit that became known as the drunk dial heard round the world.

“We got a standard we gotta live up to. And we got a track record of the legacy we got to always protect.”

Drake

On “Headlines,” one of Take Care’s standout pop moments, he cops to being motivated by some of the response to Thank Me Later: “I had someone tell me I fell off/Ooh, I needed that.” It was this honesty that allowed Drake to rap-sing his way into cultural ubiquity, ushering in a wave of commercial hip-hop draped in vulnerability.

Exodus

Bob Marley & The Wailers

Songs about the tension between the hope that every little thing will be all right—and the worry that it won’t.

In the years leading up to the recording of Bob Marley’s ninth album in early 1977, Jamaica had experienced a tremendous swell in political violence, with gang and paramilitary groups affiliated with the country’s two main parties—the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party—killing each other in triple-digit numbers. Marley had stepped in to try and alleviate the mood with the Smile Jamaica Concert shortly before the country’s elections in December 1976, only to be shot during a home invasion two days before the show. He played anyway.

What you hear on Exodus is the tension between the hope that every little thing will be all right and the creeping worry that it won’t. Marley recorded the album during a self-imposed exile in London, a distance that cast his optimism about Jamaica in a cautious light. And while his politics had never been of more public interest, the album’s most uplifting songs turned inward toward matters personal, romantic, and spiritual: “Three Little Birds,” the lovelorn “Waiting in Vain,” the legacy-defining “One Love.”

“Exodus is Bob and the band’s most groundbreaking record in terms of what it did for them as artists and what it did for the music in general… It was such a revolutionary sound.”

Ziggy Marley

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Take Care

Exodus