Much of The-Dream’s underappreciated body of work has been about eliminating distinctions between rap and R&B. He was a trailblazer that brought hardcore rap sensibilities to an edgeless R&B era. Now, as rappers have adapted soulful songcraft as cover for being selfish lovers, the longtime sensualist has become more interested in making a clear delineation between the two.
The whopping 40-song, triple album, Ménage à Trois: Sextape Vol. 1, 2, 3, is a full-on immersion into R&B, opening with “No Rappers Allowed,” where he declares: “I ain’t no rapper, I just fuck a lot.” On his first album since 2013’s IV Play, The-Dream re-establishes himself as a musical tour de force, all while separating himself from the rap pack. “I’m calling all bodies to the bedroom/I know all the trappers, I know all the rappers/They who you see in the club, and I’m who you fuck after,” he sings on “Bedroom.” This one’s for the bump n’ grind.
Longer than either volume of Lars von Trier’s 2013 erotic epic Nymphomaniac, Ménage à Trois isn’t a listening experience without its pitfalls. The three albums are inundating and unevenly sequenced, but they are also completely and utterly fixating. The-Dream does what he does best: make love songs that treat sex as intrinsic to romance. The key to any moment of true love, he argues, is desire, and he has a rare gift for emulating and exploring that hunger, not just in his writing but in his gently cooed melodies. “Ecstasy” is a word that comes up often on the album, and his never-ending search for it takes him through hotel lobbies, into the depths of tour buses, the backseats of convertibles, turning every sexual encounter into a pas de deux.
In his quest to capture the perfect sexual experience, The-Dream tends to get lost in the moment, and so he often writes songs during the hook-ups happening inside his songs. It’s a bit of songwriting Inception that has become his hallmark. “Nikki’s Dialogue,” which continues a long-running Prince homage featuring one of The-Dream’s most recurring characters, finds the singer forcing his estranged lover to eat crow, teasing her about a failed marriage and weaponizing the lost album Nikki: The Chronicles. On “Drop Some New Shit,” he’s coerced into making new music to incentivize a lover: “Not for them, not for her, not for him/But at least drop some new shit for me/You need somethin’ you can fuck to (I know)/Remind me why I loved you.”
For The-Dream and the women in his songs, there is often no distinction between the pleasures of intimacy and those of a perfectly articulated tune. Sometimes, the sex is so good it takes precedence. “And man, that shit’s so fat, I can see that shit from the back/I only wrote one verse and I already got off track,” he sings on “Ready,” as if literally penning his verse mid peep show. To him, pure satisfaction beats any lyric. Sometimes the pleasure is in the process and sometimes the pleasure is the process.
There’s as much dialogue as narration in The-Dream’s sexcapades, although he’s almost always paraphrasing. He gives the impression that there are conversations, personal exchanges, that his perspective isn’t the only one that matters here. On “The Paris of the West,” a casual fling comes with warnings about attachment (“I can be your everything until everything ain’t enough”). On other occasions, his words are clearly meant as commands to his partner. “I’ma send a picture of your pussy to my ex’s DM/And you gon’ send a picture of my pussy to your ex’s DM,” he sings on “Yours and Mine,” granting him a measure of control over all involved.
The-Dream always seems to exert control in his songs, sometimes for the worse. “You want it rough, nice and slow/The only time I hit a girl is from the back/And the only time I slap a bitch is on the ass,” he says on “Super Soaker,” undoubtedly referencing two separate arrests for domestic violence in 2013 and 2014, one on charges of felony assault and strangulation, reckless endangerment, and child endangerment. Here, he’s controlling his narrative, something he does well. His meta-writing can blur the lines between his ravishing world of song, his process, and real life; in a moment like this, he goes from seducer to manipulator. There is assertive and then there is domineering, and it’s a line he has sometimes found himself straddling.
Given all he’s done, as a genre-bending pioneer and a writer for himself and others, The-Dream has a case as the King of R&B’s last decade plus, and Ménage à Trois only strengthens his grip on the proverbial throne, especially with continued nods to kings of the past (Michael Jackson, Prince, etc.) as sex totems. He carefully studied the greats and continues to honor them; his work here runs the entire stylistic gamut. The seven-minute “On the Regular” turns new jack swing into a sludgy alt R&B jam by osmosis before it opens up to reveal a piano serenade. On “Gorgeous,” he captures the swing of throwback steppers R&B. “I Like” flips trap’n’b into snap music. “Everytime I Kill Her” embodies the post-fusion slickness of Dream acolytes like Trey Songz. Recently, R&B has begun to untangle itself from rap, reversing an integrative process to which The-Dream was instrumental. But Ménage à Trois proves he’s always right at home.
