Every so often, Kendrick Lamar steps into the present.
The rapper, 37, is so mindful of hip-hop history, his role in it and the internal logic of the genre that it often seems like he’s performing on a different playing field than his ostensible peers. He’s a man on an island, and contentedly so.
That’s part of what made his feud with Drake, which began in March and stretched through the spring and summer, so bracing. Not only did it place Lamar in the immediate present, and with real stakes on the line, but it underscored a streak of apparent disgust and resentfulness that emerges anytime he’s being pulled into the now. What’s happening in the moment is in essence a distraction from Lamar’s larger creative mission.
His eventual triumph in the tug of war was led by the mainstream success of “Not Like Us,” one of the most popular songs of his career and, more important, an immediate contribution to the cultural zeitgeist. It was Lamar using Drake’s typical weapons against him — an acknowledgment that even if Lamar prefers not to pay attention to prevailing winds, he can ride them if need be.
From a distance, “GNX,” his sixth album, which was released with no announcement on Friday, has some of that same immediacy. On the two opening tracks, “Wacced Out Murals” and “Squabble Up,” Lamar is rapping with the seething indignation he weaponized so effectively during the beef: “I’ll kill ’em all before I let ’em kill my joy”; “Before I take a truce, I’ll take him to hell with me.”
But this is only one part of what Lamar is doing on “GNX,” an impressive but slight collection of flag-planting thumpers, puffed-chest posse cuts, conceptual experiments and moments of introspection — though nowhere near the intense internal interrogation of his last album, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.” It’s a palate cleanse of a sort, potentially casting off the last dregs of the Drake kerfuffles, and also, given its thematic unevenness, potentially a place holder between more substantive releases. Drake is, at most, a spectral presence on this album — there’s nothing as savagely personal as “Meet the Grahams,” the vicious salvo Lamar released in May. Lamar appears keen to move on.
But what that means is that he’s eager to move back — back in time, back into history, back into his comfort zones. Taken literally, that’s Los Angeles, a city with rich musical history that Lamar has been scrupulously updating for over a decade now.
In places on “GNX,” he’s both directly and indirectly aligning himself with Los Angeles’s past. (The title is an apparent reference to a limited-run Buick muscle car of the mid-80s, like the one he poses with on the album’s cover.) Some are light allusions: “Squabble Up” samples Debbie Deb’s 1983 club classic “When I Hear Music” — not a Los Angeles record, but one that invokes the electro that was permeating the city’s early hip-hop in that era. “Heart Pt. 6,” which samples an early Neptunes production for the R&B girl group SWV, also recalls the slow-and-low soul of “The Freshest MC in the World,” a sleeper 1994 Los Angeles classic by the Ice Cube affiliate K-Dee. That song is part of an ongoing series in which Lamar narrates his back story — linking his history to that of his city. And “TV Off” is a clear companion piece to “Not Like Us” — also produced in part by Mustard, using a sample of the same live performance that anchors that hit.
The most pointed and startling link to Los Angeles rap’s past is the sample of 2Pac’s “Made _____” — reportedly one of his final recordings — on “Reincarnated.” In part this is a slight to Drake, who used an A.I.-generated 2Pac vocal on one of his dis tracks. But mostly it links Lamar to one of the most contentious and assertive moments in Los Angeles rap history. Unfortunately, he applies this energy to a song in which he inhabits characters — one appears to be John Lee Hooker — in a manner that veers perhaps too close to the exposition-dense work of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
The biggest surprise is that the most overt invocations on the album are of a New York rapper: Nas, perhaps the first true hip-hop star whose primacy was predicated on his gift for dense narrative, but who for a stretch was derailed by the needs and urges of the marketplace. Early on the album, Lamar cites him directly — “Won the Super Bowl and Nas the only one congratulate me” — in a nod to Drake’s mentor Lil Wayne’s disappointment that he hadn’t been chosen for the halftime show. The almost severely sober “Man at the Garden” is a structural callback to Nas’s “One Mic” from 2002, the ne plus ultra of a rapper at his peak still riddled with frustration, a contemplative reset that re-established him as a beacon of righteousness and classicism after a few years in the hitmaking wilds. Lamar mirrors Nas’s slow build to a scabrous eruption, followed by exhaustion. Perhaps pointedly, nothing that follows this song, which appears fourth, matches its intensity.
And then there’s the album closer, “Gloria,” a song-length metaphor in which Lamar appears to be rapping about a woman who’s stood by him through thick and thin, needling him and inspiring him in equal measure. The reveal at the end is that he’s rapping about his pen, or his creative craft — a light groaner that feels indebted to Nas’s extended gun metaphor “I Gave You Power” (or for that matter, Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.”).
Songs like these are relics of a different era, with different values and metrics of success. In many ways, that’s the version of the genre that most entrances Lamar, and which he slots the most neatly into.
Throughout this album he is, as ever, a rapper of determined dexterity. Even his loosest flows — “Peekaboo,” “Dodger Blue” — are sturdy, precisely interwoven. As hip-hop has veered hard toward melody and away from lyrical density in the last decade, he has remained resolute. But his greatest albums — “To Pimp a Butterfly,” “good kid, m.A.A.d city” — are full-scale theater with cohesive through lines. “GNX” feels closer to “DAMN.,” a slightly lesser but more accessible album, with its intense and punchy high points.
Production on the new album is led by the duo of Sounwave and Jack Antonoff, who give Lamar pulsing, throbbing beats to smash up against. The remainder is given over to small sparks: guest appearances from younger Los Angeles rappers, the best of which is AzChike on “Peekaboo”; some effective mariachi singing from Deyra Barrera; a quick wink at the Atlanta surrealist Fabo on “Hey Now”; some lithe guest vocals by SZA.
It all makes “GNX” less a coherent statement of purpose than a collection of approaches, a burning off of loose energy before something much more focused and contemplative. Call it the storm before the quiet.
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