GNX

Kendrick Lamar

Marie Ronnander

If we learned anything about Kendrick Lamar in the past year, it’s that he can be one spiteful motherfucker (respectfully). His hate-fueled beef with Drake ran grand-canyon-deep – and had us sitting on the edge of the couch munching popcorn the whole time. All this energy seems to have accumulated, causing Kdot (Kendrick Lamar) to release a surprise album bolstered by a wide variety of local LA artists like Ddody6, Llefty Ggunplay, YyoungTthreat, and more. As his new track “reincarnated” says, he “put 100 hoods on one stage.”

When this album showed up on Spotify, I geeked. Upon hearing the first song, “wacced out murals”, I knew that spite had (I would maybe choose a clearer verb; crept its way, infiltrated, taken over?)spiked his music. The man’s mad at everybody: Snoop, Wayne, and Drake (again). The following songs ranged from out right ego trips to gentle lullabies with SZA’s honey- sweet voice.

My first listen of the album left me genuinely upset. He’d moved on from the raw honesty behind Mr. Morale, and hads embraced the low grade God complex that comes with the rap industry. Everything is a competition all the time. But after a few listens, the anger in the music grew on me. We live in an angry time. With every listen, I recognized a new nod to modern? culture, with samples from Tupac and name drops from musicians off of TBAP what is TBAP. He even mentions Drake’s AI Tupac a couple of times (it really pissed him off). Kendrick is feeling himself, that’s for sure, andbut he’s showinggiving us a new side of himself in the process