![]() Yet, he also seems obsessed with life and his legacy: “What happens on earth stays on earth” booms at the beginning of a few tracks. Here, it sounds like he’s fiending for a shootout. , Kendrick questions his qualifications as a role model because of his temper. Kendrick uses it to denounce his celebrated public status after a friend asks him how to respond to the friend’s son being killed: “He said: ‘K-Dot, can you pray for me?’ / It’s been a fucked up day for me / I know that you anointed, show me how to overcome’ / He was lookin’ for some closure / Hopin’ I could bring him closer / To the spiritual, my spirit do no better, but I told him / ‘I can’t sugarcoat the answer for you, this is how I feel: / If somebody kill my son, that mean somebody gettin’ killed.’” Throughout Damn. Not all violence in the album is gangster, however. He threatens to kill, or at least expresses a willingness to do so, on “DNA.,” “ELEMENT.,” “XXX.,” and “FEAR.” Kendrick is at his most gangster with fighting words like, “I’ll chip a nigga, then throw the blower in his lap / Walk myself to the court like, ‘Bitch, I did that!’” on “XXX.,” running lyrical laps around a sine-wave bass line and chilling sirens. Losing his temper is another recurring aspect of Kendrick’s temptation, and on Damn. He acknowledges that giving in to temptation is nothing new on “LUST.,”: “I wake in the mornin’, my head spinnin’ from the last night / Both in the trance, feelings I did, what a fast life / Manager called, the lobby called, it’s 11:30 / Did this before, promised myself I’d be a hour early / Room full of clothes, bag full of money, call it loose change / Fumbled my jewelry, 100k, I lost a new chain / Hop on the bird, hit the next city for another M / Take me a F and do it again.” The production is the sound of the feeling you get when you’re drunk and horny and stand up too fast Kendrick’s singing is at an impossible, goosebump-inducing falsetto, conveying his desperation as, “Blood rush to my favorite vein / heartbeat racing like a junky.” He details his battle with the devil on “YAH.,” singing in a delicate croon, “I know he walks the Earth / But it’s money to get, bitches to hit, yah / Zeroes to flip, temptation is yah / First on my list, I can’t resist, yah.” We’ve been here before: Kendrick battled the same temptation on TPAB with the Devil, dubbed Lucy. Instead, each track feels like you are in a different part of Kendrick’s head, a frantic stream-of-consciousness from the greatest rapper alive. What follows is different from Kendrick’s past albums, without a story arc in the traditional sense. The album begins with “BLOOD.,” a monologue concluding in Kendrick losing his life. ![]() These are the words of a haunted prophet trapped in a cycle of temptation, at least on this earth. Despite the extra time, the world still collectively did not have its shit together when Damn. He actually meant “ya’ll got until April the 7th to get ready to get your shit together on April the 14th, when my album will actually come out,” since he made fans wait an extra week. 23 that “ya’ll got till April the 7th to get your shit together,” hinting at an album. He warned with the release of “The Heart Part IV” on Mar. ![]() For Kendrick, it was merely a collection of throwaways from TPAB. Within another year, he released Untitled Unmastered, an eight-track mixtape that would have been a notable achievement for any other rapper. In 2015, To Pimp A Butterfly changed the face of rap: an epic production team provided a live instrumentation-heavy backdrop for Kendrick to discuss his conflicts with fame, identity, and community and compare them within the larger context of the African-American experience. ![]() City ’s cinematic coming-of-age story of his childhood in Compton elevated him to superstar status in 2012. Kendrick Lamar is the greatest storyteller rap has ever seen. ![]()
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