Being Drake is cool, but, sometimes, it isn’t. At the end of 10 of his 12 albums, Drake has delivered a personal State of the Union, summarizing the spoils of victory and the snakes and charlatans that lurk in the shadows. The flows are conversational and uninterrupted; the beats are unadorned with any musical flourishes beyond drums and a swirling, muffled vocal sample; the vibes are aspirationally cinematic with the lacquered climate-controlled energy of a BMW commercial—he is Drake, the Ultimate Rapping Machine.
Despite the silly grandiosity of these songs, these Drake outros have also offered some of the most incisive and clear-eyed rapping of his career; this charisma and technical mastery is what separates Drake from the scores of other rappers who are attempting to be the next Drake. With Drake’s most recent album closer “Jimmy Cooks” emerging as a song of the summer, here are all of the Drake outros, ranked