Kendrick Lamar performs at a Las Vegas festival on June 12, 2021. Credit: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via TNS
There’s a song in the middle of Kendrick Lamar’s new album “GNX,” surprise-released Friday, in which he raps like Tupac Shakur.
This isn’t a new comparison to make. Since the beginning of his career, the Compton, California-based rapper has often been touted as Shakur’s spiritual successor — take, for example, the title to an interview with Vice in 2012: “We Asked Kendrick Lamar If He Was The New 2Pac.”
At the time, he answered that question humbly, saying something about being “a student of the game,” but Lamar has spent the better part of a decade leaning into this comparison, going so far as to stage a phantom interview with the martyred Bay Area legend to conclude his jazz-inflected 2015 opus “To Pimp a Butterfly.”
This connection between two of West Coast hip-hop’s greatest storytellers has never felt as immediate or explicit as it does on the sixth track of “GNX,” titled “reincarnated.”
The song samples Shakur’s 1996 song “Made N****z” for a vivid excavation of Lamar’s imagined lineages, laying his soul bare as he answers to God. It’s another ambitious, staggering feat of narrative songwriting in a career filled with them, over a beat so heavy and funky you can feel the bass shaking the upholstered leather seats.
Lamar, more than ever before, actually sounds like Shakur; his usual caterwauling, nasal register gives way to a flow emerging from the pit of his stomach, proselytizing with the same intensity Shakur harnessed from great Black orators Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., whom he modeled his delivery after.
It is the centerpiece of the album that is, somehow, magnificent in ways Lamar has never been before. Whereas other records leaned into the sprawling scope of his storytelling instincts, this one is laser-focused; it hits like a punch to the jaw.
Is there a single artist on Earth who commands as much attention, respect and reverence as Lamar does? When he was trading barbs with Drake earlier this year, a large part of the beef’s draw was that it felt more vital and alive than Lamar’s music has felt in years. He was energized, lithe and agile in ways his tangled, self-lacerating 2022 double album “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers” never was.
Throughout this musical phenomenon, Lamar sounds rejuvenated by pure, unmitigated hatred, his volley of disses culminating with “Not Like Us,” arguably the greatest diss out of the West Coast since “Hit ‘Em Up.”
Lamar turned his rival’s utter humiliation into a chart-topping block party stretching from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, playing it five consecutive times at “The Pop Out” — Lamar’s televised concert in Inglewood, California, celebrating Juneteenth — as West Coast-based musicians, athletes and gang members flooded the stage.
There’s another hypothetical version of Lamar’s album that exists as a continuation of that victory lap, gathering all the big names in hip-hop that surrounded him on that stage in Inglewood’s Intuit Dome into a certified event album, spilling over with features, bonus tracks and addendums. That album probably has “Not Like Us,” along with all the other diss tracks, giving it the potential to break streaming records and become the biggest spectacle of the year.
“GNX,” thankfully, is not that album — it’s not content enough with itself to be that album. Lamar is a rare breed of rap star, and so despite the fact that the album will probably break streaming records and turn into the biggest spectacle of the year anyway, it’ll do so on his own terms.
Muscular and sumptuous in equal measure, “GNX” captures Lamar at his hungriest — on the attack, with something to prove. To say he sounds revitalized is a severe understatement; Lamar is rapping out of his mind.
He’s always been at his best when he has a bone to pick, and throughout “GNX,” Lamar is digging graves.
On the opener, “wacced out murals,” he’s recalling his younger days as a battle rapper facing off in the Nickerson Gardens projects in LA, sending shots at anyone in his way. Even the perceived slights lead to swipes at Lamar’s longtime influence Lil Wayne, edgelord comedian Andrew Schulz and Snoop Dogg, who issued a mea culpa to Lamar approximately six hours after the album dropped.
The beat, a menacing blend of strings, sirens and buzzing synth bass, has the sort of creeping Bay Area bounce that rapper Too $hort might’ve glided over in the ‘90s.
Throughout “GNX,” Lamar is synthesizing West Coast hip-hop’s past and present, rapping over slick G-funk or hyphy with a rich array of West Coast voices, ranging from Compton rapper Roddy Ricch to LA-based Mariachi singer Deyra Barrera.
On “hey now,” he’s smack-talking like he’s Drakeo The Ruler, the late LA legend whose cascading, expressive flow he adopted on “Not Like Us.”
He brings along underground LA rappers Hitta J3, YoungThreat and Peysoh onto the title track, throwing them onto a stuttering, syncopated beat that forces each voice to find a new pocket to settle into.
On “squabble up,” he’s blacking out, freewheeling over a delightful Debbie Deb sample on a song that’ll undoubtedly rattle trunks across the West Coast for at least the next year — and it’s not even the craziest song on “GNX.”
When Lamar yells Mustard’s name on “tv off,” as the LA producer’s beat switches from romping strings to imperial fanfare, it stretches out for eight bars, charging up a verse that puts pedal to the metal. His bars are wonderfully unhinged here, drawling and deadpanning, rhyming with gleeful abandon as the 808s rumble around him.
On an album that refuses to take a victory lap, “tv off” is “GNX”’s most triumphant moment, letting loose for one of the most joyous releases of the year.
Rating: 5/5
