This is one of the most morbid musical releases in history.
Drake, the self-proclaimed king of Toronto, frolicking around his glass-protected trophies in his mega-mansion amid a global pandemic as the entire world faces joblessness, restriction, and illness.
Maybe the ski-mask represents the untouchable status and privilege he possesses. How completely unaffected the upper classes are, even by a catastrophe that stops the entire world from operating as usual.
Or maybe it represents Drake's own extraction from the artist he once was: the lovable, sensitive young man who's genre fusing and heart-on-his-sleeve emotions would galvanize millions of fans, now replaced with a directionless and fumbling man reaching his mid-30s, realizing how the veil hath fallen. Isolated too, but surrounded by beautiful, expensive things - so many of them accolades and products of his past.
The shoehorned Tik Tok virality-baiting. Dance instructions are delivered with the enthusiasm of somebody reading the phonebook. He doesn't have to try, he knows that you'll make the content anyways. What else do you have to do with your miserable little lives right now?
Michael Jackson - a fellow music superstar. A Disco icon with jovial hits that have filled dance-floors for generations. Now a far more complicated figure to most. What music we enjoy of his is always undercut with grim and unsettling darkness. At least we can think back on the memories of his music, and the simpler times it reflects. Maybe the Toosie Slide knows there isn't anything to dance for now - and that's why it drags it's feet as if marching towards the grave, one retweet at a time.
It's almost a brilliant piece of performance art, but... you know it's not. It's one of the most artistically bereft musical icons continuing to run himself in smaller and smaller circles, any sense of moralism or humanity shedding away more with every step. Right foot step. Left foot step. Slide.
