Drake Album Covers

The three Drake covers documented here make a useful visual sequence because each solves the problem of depicting a superstar differently. Take Care is intimate despite its lavish setting: Drake is physically present, but the composition makes success look lonely. Five years later, Views pulls outward. The city becomes the subject as much as the artist, with Drake composited high above Toronto on the CN Tower.

Iceman moves in the opposite direction again. Instead of showing a recognizable portrait or skyline, the cover isolates one sparkling hand in darkness. The face disappears and a gesture carries the identity. Read chronologically, the archive moves from person, to place, to symbol.

Views is the most literal merger of Drake's public identity and Toronto. Caitlin Cronenberg photographed the cover material, and the finished sleeve places Drake on top of the CN Tower even though the tower later confirmed that the figure was composited into the scene. The manipulation is part of the point: the image is not documentary evidence of Drake sitting on the ledge, but a deliberately impossible portrait of an artist looming over the city associated with his career.

That makes Views a useful contrast with Take Care. The earlier cover builds its mood inside a private, ornate room; Views turns a public landmark into the stage.

The most dramatic change comes with Iceman. The cover can be recognized without a face, skyline or large title. A rhinestone glove and hand gesture do nearly all the work. The Michael Jackson association gives the object an immediate pop-history reference, while the clean black field makes the image unusually easy to copy, parody and remix.

That progression is the strongest visual thread across the three stories in this archive: identity shifts from the person in the frame to the world around him and finally to a single object.