Kendrick Lamar can freeze time by surprise-dropping an album because he’s one of the most popular rappers of the century, which is nothing short of a miracle. There aren’t too many albums out there as theatrical as the coming-of-age breakout album good kid, m.A.A.d city or the jazz-infused organized chaos of To Pimp a Butterfly. And shit, if there are, they definitely aren’t platinum-selling pop culture behemoths. Those early projects shaped his mythos, formed his supposed “genius,” and in an era of increasing ephemerality, had enough heft to become indispensable.
Fascinatingly, 2022’s Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers attempted to strip away all the institutional recognition of the first and only rapper to win a Pulitzer. That project is far from my favorite Kendrick, but the music is so raw and uncomfortable, so provocative and sincere, so full of contradictions and hypocrisies. In a moment where our biggest rap stars and legends—Drake, Jay, Kanye, Snoop, whoever—have basically become institutions of their own, in which music is just one department of the enterprise, Mr. Morale’s naked humanity was genuinely risky and exciting.
Less interesting, but an all-time spectacle, was his hating-ass feud with Drake. It’s where the contradictions and hypocrisies that previously made him so real suddenly felt unusually self-interested and corporatized. He whooped Drake by labeling the Toronto kingpin a “freaky-ass nigga,” a “pedophile,” and a hip-hop interloper using regional rap scenes to build his authenticity, all on arguably the biggest rap song of the decade so far. It was hard as hell, a club-ready rendition of his hometown player sound dripping with radioactive bile. But from the jump, it was transparent that Kendrick, who had Kodak Black up and down Mr. Morale and has always been a close collaborator of Dr. Dre, wasn’t actually concerned about claiming the moral high ground. It was all dirt to shovel on Drake’s grave, before Kendrick rode away with the title of greatest rapper of his era. Fine, I guess. Rap beef can be messed up.
Then, as time passed and the meaning of “Not Like Us,” which could always be fairly interpreted as a celebration of Black L.A. culture, became commodified (from Kamala Harris to the NBA), Kendrick’s angle shifted—sublty leaning into the savior complex, the mythmaking, the branding he resisted on Mr. Morale. In September, he released a buzzkill single called “Watch the Party Die,” where his mission moved past Drake and toward burning the rotten core of the hip-hop industry to the ground. He portrayed himself like Clint Eastwood’s disillusioned fugitive in The Outlaw Josey Wales, riding through the West on horseback looking for revenge on the corrupt.
Last month in an artist-on-artist interview, he explained to SZA the real meaning of “Not Like Us”: “Not like us is the energy of who I am, the type of man I represent…. This man has morals, he has values, he believes in something, he stands on something. He’s not pandering.” Did we hear the same song? This was never a battle of righteousness. Next February, he will perform the Super Bowl LIX halftime show, an appearance announced in an ad where he stands casually dressed in front of a massive American flag. With echoes of the Cowboy Carter cover, the image is that of the loose-cannon hip-hop vigilante—the one who years ago told Complex he’s so hip-hop that when he was born, his dad drove him home from the hospital in a Buick GNX bumping Big Daddy Kane—taking control of the biggest, most classically American stage. It’s the kind of heavy-handed, brand-conscious narrative you expect from the Beyoncé and Taylor Swift pop star machine.
All of this context undercuts GNX, Kendrick Lamar’s sixth album. “Now it’s about Kendrick, I wanna evolve, place my skillset as a Black exec,” he says straight-up on “heart pt. 6,” which behind a smoothly diced-up SWV sample steals back the long-running series Drake tried to jack. (Not hard—Drake should get his version scrubbed from the internet.) This is no longer just Kendrick the rapper, but Kendrick the businessman. After Mr. Morale, he left TDE to go all-in on pgLang, the “multi-lingual, at service company” he launched in 2020 with his longtime right-hand man Dave Free. Running a company doesn’t inherently hollow out his lyrics, but it does give all of GNX’s motivational phrases—“Bitch I deserve it all”; “We got the same 24 what you mad for?”; “Few solid niggas left but it’s not enough”—the coldness of quotes from a speech he’s giving at a Black Men in Tech conference. He was always extremely famous, but suddenly he has that mega-celebrity sheen.
Thankfully, that doesn’t completely kill the vibe of GNX, a victory lap on a Möbius strip, blending the man-on-a-mission intensity that powered him through his duel with Drake with a homage to the West Coast that follows in the footsteps of “Not Like Us.” Bringing a whole roster of L.A. roughhousers along for the ride, Kendrick’s rapping—competitive and acrobatic—splits the difference between funny and vengeful. “Nigga feel entitled ’cause he knew me since I was a kid/Bitch, I cut my granny off if she don’t see it how I see it,” he raps fiercely on the hyphy house party “tv off,” probably the most ridiculous line about a granny since Rio Da Yung OG tried to buy cough syrup off his boy’s grandmother. In his first verse of “hey now” his venom takes on the hushed flow of Drakeo the Ruler chattering over nature sounds. The stripped-down bounce of the Mustard-led beat is irresistible even if it sounds like RonRonTheProducer with the training wheels on.
The guests are memorable, too, though Kendrick doesn’t cede enough ground to them. After g-funk synths enter the picture halfway through “hey now,” Kendrick and Dody6 engage in a jittery back and forth. Kendrick is so magnetic that the forgettable Drake shade sticks out: “Ayy, shit get spooky, every day in October,” he raps, with the syllable playfulness of E-40. On “peekaboo,” his Drakeo imitation (maybe a little Young Slo-be in there, too) is shakier than before, but AzChike’s lighthearted menace steals the show. Kendrick is a good host when all the street rappers gather to talk their shit on the posse cut “gnx”: Peysoh is smooth with it, YoungThreat sounds like a ghostly spirit.
Coming on the heels of the beef, though, the regionality of the album seems more like an elaborate gotcha to Drake rather than a musical pivot sparked out of passion. That missing spirit is in the production, too clean and synthetic. The way-too-neat funky basslines of “squabble up” should be so fat that they rumble like an old muffler, like P-Lo’s Mac Dre homage does on LaRussell’s Majorly Independent. Mustard’s backside of “tv off” is drowned out by these cheesy blaring horns that feel made to go dumb in Nike commercials. Kendrick reps L.A. hard on the mellow “dodger blue,” shouting out local high schools to hammer home the granularity. But he wastes Wallie the Sensei and Roddy Ricch by having them harmonize on chillwave synths, a sin when you have access to basically every g-funk producer alive or dead. He could have at least dialed one or two of the coolest (non-Mustard) L.A. producers of the last decade, like RonRon or JoogSZN or Low the Great. Instead the two producers credited on almost every track are Sounwave (expected) and star whisperer Jack Antonoff.
Elsewhere, buried in between the L.A. treadmill anthems, are softer melodic joints that could have been on DAMN and a few creative writing exercises. Fine enough is “luther,” a lullaby with SZA that is innocuously sweet and easy to listen to, punched-up by a Luther Vandross sample that melts into the orchestral flourishes. Unlistenable is “reincarnated,” a homage to Tupac at his most paranoid and disoriented, where Kendrick writes from the perspective of old-time artistic influences. These writerly songs he’s prone to, like this one or TPAB’s “Mortal Man,” have always been more technically impressive than anything else. It doesn’t help that “reincarnated” also feels like it exists to spite Drake for making that AI Tupac song that I forgot ever existed.
Viscerally engaging is “wacced out murals,” where you can overlook the overly glossy thumping beat because the salty raps have so much genuine hunger behind them. Unfortunately he’s not worked up about anything worth caring about: He’s mad at Snoop for finding Drake’s AI Tupac song funny. (Again, I only remember this because Kendrick keeps bringing it up.) He’s mad at Lil Wayne for feeling snubbed that the Super Bowl didn’t go to him. He’s mad at the entire rap world because nobody congratulated him on booking the halftime show except Nas. Riveting. I’m all for airing out petty grievances in your raps, but when you’re also chatting about saving the essence of hip-hop there has to be something deeper at the root. Instead, it’s the usual dick-swinging of the hip-hop elite. Acting as if the genre hinges on Kendrick’s personal journey to Black excellence: Is that the life of a hip-hop outlaw? Is that watching the party die? My man, the party might be at your crib now.
