Kendrick Lamar hurled loads of damning judgments in Drake’s path all through the course of this 12 months. He’s spoken concerning the Canadian star’s historical past with girls, his shallow, stream-seeking music, his siphoning off of younger artists’ untapped power to remain related. A compelling case might be made for every of these accusations, although their stench has appeared to largely fade with time. Essentially the most pointed and chronic of those indictments, nonetheless, is the one which was launched in “Euphoria,” sculpted the form of “Not Like Us,” and is now the driving pressure behind the sonic path of Lamar’s latest album, GNX: the concept that what separates Kendrick and Drake, the 2 faces of hip-hop’s Millennial era, is Drake’s perceived refusal of a religious — and possibly even ancestral — obligation to contribute and name again to a specified cultural lineage that precedes him.
If the technique to win this feud was to level out how Brother Graham has needed to globetrot and acquire collaborators to substitute for his lack of a real, longstanding connection to a group, then it is sensible that Kendrick has concluded his greatest 12 months in nearly a decade by persevering with to flex how robust his arm is from Southern to Northern California all through GNX. He pulls in artists who’re buzzing at a floor stage on his dwelling turf —Dody6, AzChike, Peysoh, Lefty Gunplay, Hitta J3, and extra. Mustard and Sounwave lend the West Coast’s resonant, playful bounce to a fair proportion of the manufacturing; the late LA rapper Drakeo The Ruler’s signature method is resurrected and used as a roadmap. However past his weaponized use of a hyperlocal focus and regional shows of expression, Lamar additionally tries to emphasise the area between him and Drake by drawing parallels between his forebears and himself on the already-divisive “Reincarnated.” Produced by Sounwave and Jack Antonoff, the track is a reimagining of 2Pac’s “Made Niggaz” during which the Compton rapper channels Black musical icons from the early twentieth century to the 90s of his childhood to the current day.
The primary verse seems to reference John Lee Hooker, the Mississippi-born blues singer and guitarist who made himself a larger-than-life fixture in American music between the 40s and 60s. Kendrick offers a slice of the artist’s life, precisely detailing how Hooker, as a 14-year-old, was kicked out his reverend father’s home for having a guitar; the blues, at the moment, was a secular taboo for spiritual people. He follows Hooker’s development from an formidable teen, to a breakout star within the Detroit scene within the 40s to probably the most heralded musicians of the twentieth Century, his music ultimately used as a faceless supply of soul for White America to attract from commercially and culturally. In 1997, 4 years earlier than Hooker’s demise, the Chicago Tribune paid him a go to at his sprawling ranch dwelling within the San Francisco space. They made point out of the singer having white standout artists like the Rolling Stones because the opening act on his excursions and Eric Clapton in his backing band within the ‘60s and his restoration to the general public consciousness within the ‘80s because of acolytes like Bonnie Raitt. Outdoors of his window, a few peacocks frolic; contractors are carving a guitar out of white stone; he has eight automobiles. “Not unhealthy for the son of Mississippi sharecroppers,” they observe. Assessing the scenario on “Reincarnated,” Lamar wraps up Hooker’s story from the blues legend’s POV: “However I manipulated energy as I lied to the plenty/Died with cash, gluttony was too engaging.”
Within the track’s second verse, Kendrick goes into the story of an angelic-voiced feminine star of the Chitlin Circuit period — possible Billie Vacation or Dinah Washington. “Had all the pieces I needed, however I couldn’t escape dependancy/Heroin needles had me in fetal place, restricted,” he says from her perspective, detailing the dilemma on this chapter. Lamar’s narration on this a part of the track brings to thoughts the Tom Surgal-directed documentary, Hearth Music, from 2021, which matches by the evolution of free jazz, an avant-garde iteration of the music that gave rise to style titans like Solar Ra, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and Don Cherry. Although the vast majority of the movie is spent outlining how this wave of artists innovated by bringing jazz again to its roots as improvisational Black music, ample area is given to honoring the artists who pushed themselves to the brink of madness, dependancy, and unhealthy well being in pursuit of their desires — many by no means making sufficient cash to completely maintain themselves and struggling an early demise.
To shut the observe, Lamar inserts himself into this timeline of cautionary tales. Like he’s performed many instances prior to now (DAMN., in some ways, drew from the Hebrew Israelite doctrine that claims Black individuals must get proper with God with a purpose to rid themselves of the curse that retains us in precarious conditions), he personalizes the battle between good and evil right here. In a dialog with God, Lamar takes on the position of Lucifer (or reveals that he appears himself as Lucifer generally), a disgraced musician who bought too grasping alongside the way in which. Nonetheless in an inside battle of who he actually is, God reminds him: “each particular person is just a model of you.” With this reasoning, you could possibly argue that Kendrick is simply the newest host of a spirit that’s traveled by all these individuals at one time limit. Will he—like Hooker, in his framing—get too snug being wealthy and a celebrated determine for all American individuals as an alternative of talking to the precise group he comes from? Will he, like Vacation or Washington, fall sufferer to a detrimental behavior? Or will he be in a perpetual state of limbo, not understanding the place to face?
