Dear listeners,
On Friday, the rap superstar Kendrick Lamar surprised everyone by releasing his sixth studio album, “GNX,” without warning. It is a fitting finale to a triumphant year for Lamar, who emerged victorious by just about every measure from a high-profile beef with hip-hop’s pre-eminent hitmaker Drake and scored one of the biggest smashes of his career with the caustic diss track, “Not Like Us.” The Compton rapper’s victory lap will continue into new year, too: On Feb. 2, he’s up for seven Grammys. A week later, he is set to headline the Super Bowl halftime show.
On his intricately layered 2012 breakthrough “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” and its grand 2015 follow-up, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” Lamar established himself as an artist capable of epic statements and sweeping concept albums. He also proved to be a musician who takes his time between releases, tinkering with his bars and polishing sonic worlds until they are as close to perfect as he can make them. “GNX,” though, is a different kind of Lamar album: It’s lean, mean and immediate. The beef with Drake, as my colleague Jon Caramanica suggests in his sharp review of “GNX,” seems to have made Lamar more reactive and nimble, bringing him into the present tense.
Accordingly, “GNX” carries its sense of history more lightly than some of Lamar’s denser releases — though it is still an album in deep conversation with the past and present sounds of West Coast rap. In order to evoke that history, Lamar often turns to one of hip-hop’s signature arts: sampling.
Today’s playlist compiles the sources of some of the most notable sonic references on “GNX” — from SWV, Luther Vandross and Debbie Deb — and follows up on them with Lamar’s own tracks, so you can hear the ways he and his producers flip them into something new. It also features a few samples from earlier Lamar hits.
This playlist is just a brief introduction to the samples in Lamar’s discography — “GNX” alone is overflowing with them. But I hope it’s an invitation to listen more deeply to all the references, homages and historical conversations happening between the lines of his music.
Also, a programming note: I won’t be sending out a new edition of the newsletter this Friday, because of the holiday. If you need a Thanksgiving playlist, might I suggest revisiting this one from last year?
Squabble up,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. Debbie Deb: “When I Hear Music”
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2. Kendrick Lamar: “Squabble Up”
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Twenty seconds into Kendrick Lamar’s new single “Squabble Up,” a young girl’s voice bursts onto the track with a simple, singsong declaration: “When I hear music, it makes me dance.” That’s Debbie Deb from her 1983 song “When I Hear Music,” one of the enduring classics of the mid-80s electronic music subgenre known as freestyle. Debbie Deb was just 17 when she met the producer “Pretty Tony” Butler at the North Miami record store where she worked. He told her he thought her voice was perfect for a track he was working on; they recorded her vocals the very same night. On “Squabble Up,” which was produced by Sounwave, Jack Antonoff, Bridgeway and M-Tech, Debbie’s bright, exuberant tone provides an effective foil to Lamar’s deadpan flow, and the interpolation of the original’s bass line and synthesizer tones give Lamar’s song a warped, spacey feel.
3. Beach House: “Silver Soul”
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4. Kendrick Lamar featuring Jay Rock: “Money Trees”
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The melancholic haze that seeps through “Money Trees,” a highlight from “good kid m.A.A.d city,” comes courtesy of the Baltimore indie-pop band Beach House, whose 2010 song “Silver Soul” provides the sample used by the producer DJ Dahi. It wasn’t the first Beach House sample deployed by a soon-to-be-superstar: Just a year earlier, on his debut mixtape “House of Balloons,” the Weeknd employed two different Beach House songs on “The Party & the After Party” and “Loft Music.” Heavy on atmosphere and lightly psychedelic, Beach House’s signature sound was simpatico with 2010s hip-hop’s embrace of slurred, sludgy production.
5. Luther Vandross with Cheryl Lynn: “If This World Were Mine”
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6. Kendrick Lamar with SZA: “Luther”
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Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn’s velvety 1982 cover of the Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell duet “If This World Were Mine” is so crucial to the third track on “GNX” that Lamar references it right there in the title. Easily the album’s most tender moment, “Luther” is a three-minute pause in all the combative braggadocio, as the rapper and his frequent collaborator SZA trade verses that imagine a better world for their beloveds: “I’d take away the pain, I’d give you everything, I just wanna see you win,” they sing together. (Yes, Lamar is feeling it so deeply that he’s singing. Sort of. Not like Luther, exactly, but who among us could?)
7. Monk Higgins: “I Believe to My Soul”
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8. Kendrick Lamar: “Not Like Us”
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DJ Mustard — excuse me: MUSTAAAAAAARRRD — is clearly a fan of the jazz-funk saxophonist Monk Higgins. The producer sampled Higgins’s 1968 recording of “I Believe to My Soul” earlier this year on “Not Like Us,” the knockout blow of Lamar’s beef with Drake. The sample sets the tone with style: A pitched-up snippet of Higgins’s sax opens the track with fanfare, and the severe orchestral stabs that punctuate “I Believe to My Soul” are repurposed throughout “Not Like Us” to menacing effect. Mustard once again returns to the well on “TV Off,” a biting track from “GNX.” If “TV Off” sounds like a sequel to “Not Like Us,” it’s in large part because it once again samples a Higgins tune, this time his 1968 rendition of “MacArthur Park.”
9. SWV: “Use Your Heart”
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10. Kendrick Lamar: “Heart Pt. 6”
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Since 2010, Lamar has been releasing installments in a series of songs called “The Heart” — a title he reserves for some of his most introspective rhymes and, in the case of the Grammy-winning “The Heart Part 5,” some his most trenchant observations about Blackness in America. To listen to all of Lamar’s “The Heart” songs now, a decade and a half into his recording career, is to flip through a well-tended scrapbook.
The 10th track on “GNX” is both a continuation and a reclamation of the Heart series, given that earlier this year, Drake released a Lamar diss provocatively titled “The Heart Pt. 6.” Lamar’s own “Heart Pt. 6,” though, has nothing to do with the beef; it’s a vivid rap memoir of his young-and-hungry early days making music with label mates on Top Dawg Entertainment, including Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul and Jay Rock. To set a nostalgic tone, as if imbuing the entire song with the blurred edges of a flashback, the primary producers Sounwave and Antonoff base the beat around a sample of the R&B group SWV’s dreamy 1996 single “Use Your Heart.” The sample itself echoes Lamar’s themes of youthful promise and future glory: “Use Your Heart” was the first charting hit by then-up-and-comers the Neptunes, the production duo of Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams, just before they revolutionized the sound of early aughts pop music.
The Amplifier Playlist
“Digging into Kendrick Lamar’s Samples” track list
Track 1: Debbie Deb, “When I Hear Music”
Track 2: Kendrick Lamar, “Squabble Up”
Track 3: Beach House, “Silver Soul”
Track 4: Kendrick Lamar featuring Jay Rock, “Money Trees”
Track 5: Luther Vandross with Cheryl Lynn, “If This World Were Mine”
Track 6: Kendrick Lamar with SZA, “Luther”
Track 7: Monk Higgins, “I Believe to My Soul”
Track 8: Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us”
Track 9: SWV, “Use Your Heart”
Track 10: Kendrick Lamar, “Heart Pt. 6”
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