“Life Is Good”

Future and Drake have been trying to get a collaboration right for a while now. Going back nearly a decade to 2011’s “Tony Montana” remix (which wasn’t without controversy), the stars simply can’t seem to get one just right. There’s Future’s “Never Satisfied,” which ends abruptly to avoid a Drake verse. There’s Drake’s “Blue Tint,” which uses a dollop of Future like frosting. They spent all of their tag-team project, What a Time to Be Alive, cutting in on each other, so much so that the mixtape ends with two solo songs. Their latest song together, “Life Is Good,” isn’t so much a Drake and Future collaboration as it is a Drake song and a Future song smashed together.

Maybe that’s why, despite it not really working, it’s already one of their best team-ups yet. They both get to occupy their own space, freeing them up from having to, you know, gel or even coordinate. Through this split-screen experience, Drake gets to go all petty king and continue to pretend Pusha-T hasn’t rattled him unimpeded (“Niggas caught me slippin’ once, okay, so what?”), and Future is straight stick talk, taking private jets and Dracos to London, his Promethazine-laced blood boiling. There isn’t even a transition. You can’t blame them for trying. It worked for Drake with Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode.” Where that song felt like a little three-act play, this feels like trying to pull a fast one.

The great Director X-directed video seems very much like an attempt to draw your eye away from the seam of an illusion. The two stars shadow each other as co-workers across a series of odd jobs: garbage men, an Apple-like tech nook, a burger joint, and as members of the video’s camera crew. They are side-by-side in nearly every shot. It’s not enough of a distraction, even with cameos from 21 Savage, Lil Yachty, and Mike-WiLL Made-It. “Life Is Good” is an empty ploy trying to keep a mutually beneficial relationship musically viable. At this point, it’s safe to wonder if the most influential rap star of the last decade and the biggest rap star of a generation are simply incompatible.