A Better Views

Yancey Strickler
2 min readMay 12, 2016

The new Drake album, Views, was released two weeks ago to reviews ranging from critical to tepid. Most of the reviews were posted within 72 hours of the album’s release. This is culture in 2016 — someone spends years making an album and the internet gives it all of three days to decide that it’s a major disappointment.

The internet is wrong. The Drake album is as good as anything he’s ever done. We just forget what it’s like to hear something new, the way a song evolves from unfamiliarity to something that lifts us when it pours out of open bodega doors.

The internet isn’t entirely to blame. The album is too long and poorly sequenced. Drake put more stock in constructing a “concept album” synced to Toronto’s seasons (the album goes from winter to spring to summer to fall, which is to say it starts way too slow) than in making an album a listener may enjoy.

So let’s fix this. Over the past week I’ve resequenced and edited down Views into something more listenable. It’s called A Better Views. Make an iTunes playlist, reorder in the sequence listed below, and enjoy a spectacular summer album. And Drake, it’s not too late to do the Kanye and make some tweaks!

A Better Views

  1. Childs Play
  2. Pop Style
  3. Feel No Ways
  4. Still Here
  5. Too Good
  6. Weston Road Flows
  7. Grammys
  8. With You
  9. Controlla
  10. Hype
  11. Fire & Desire
  12. One Dance
  13. Redemption
  14. U With Me?
  15. Hotline Bling

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Yancey Strickler

Author of “This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World”; Cofounder of Kickstarter; Bentoist; http://www.ystrickler.com