Kendrick Lamar – “DAMN.”
Year Released: 2017
Like: Mos Def, Common, D’Angelo
Songs to Try: “DUCKWORTH.,” “PRIDE.,” “DNA.”
Pulitzer Prizes aren’t handed out to everyone, only the most deserving and most impressive receive such an exquisite reward. In April 2018, the Compton-hailing virtuoso Kendrick Lamar received the Pulitzer for his 2017 album “DAMN.,” an album that divided both critics and the public.
Throughout the course of “DAMN.,” themes of funk, underground hip-hop, R&B and even psychedelic rock surface, supporting the voice of Lamar, who released this album after his success on “To Pimp A Butterfly (TPAB).” TPAB took the concept album idea Lamar played with on “Good Kid m.A.A.d City” and amplified its story and idea.
On “DAMN,.” however, there is no discernable story or concept, besides the album starting and finishing with gunshots, depicting the metaphorical death of Lamar.
With the song titles showing an obvious trend (“FEAR.”, “PRIDE.”, “LOVE.”), “DAMN.” is an album that’s quizzical in its upfront homonymity. An album where a millionaire recording artist tackles the real-life scenarios and feelings the public combat daily.
Nu-funk artists like Thundercat and Steve Lacy are employed for their sound on groovy tracks like “PRIDE.” and “FEEL.,” while modern producers such as The Alchemist or Mike WiLL Made-It are tapped for the more street-based tracks.
After all, Kendrick Lamar’s name and being has achieved its cultural ovation due to his genius approach of blending popular culture with an eclectic, diverse cast of collaborators.
The soul and humility that was a forefront of GKMC participates more on “DAMN.” from backstage, permitting emotion to not interrupt Kendrick’s raw interpretation of the human condition.
“LOVE.” is a phenomenal expression of this idea, where Lamar croons to an unnamed muse about his feelings and his intentions, while still having his So-Cal gangster-ish lifestyle written on the sleeve of the instrumentals. His lyrics stay relevant, they peel back a façade of Grammy nominations to depict a guy that’s just wanting to caress and sip champagne with his sugar.
Where “DAMN.” is lacking, however, is in its album context. Specifically positioned tracks and comprehensive themes were meticulously employed in Lamar’s previous albums, but his most recent project is more of a compilation style, where electric songs like “LUST.” can stand back to back with the gushing “LOVE.” or the banging single for the album “HUMBLE.”
This lack of sonic linear integrity projects the album in ways that remind the listener of his “untitled unmastered.” EP, where while the project consists of good songs, but the wholeness of the album is hindered.
The overall mood of “DAMN.” is that it was the album consisting of explicit styles and sounds that Kendrick wished to make (an idea that he has publicly expressed), but between great songs, great ideas, passionate song writing and expert hip-hop lyricism is the gleaming issue of flow. The album sounds “good” both on shuffle and in sequence, but “great” albums have structure and concept, an avenue that “DAMN.” is lacking in.
Kendrick Lamar – “To Pimp A Butterfly (TPAB)”
Year Released: 2015
Like: Ghostface Killah, Earl Sweatshirt, Black Star
Songs to Try: “Wesley’s Theory,” “Complexion,” “Alright”
This is my preferred album in Lamar’s recent discography. Over 20 minutes longer than “DAMN.,” “this album’s complexity and specialty lies in its wholeness.
Where his most recent album focused on a popular sound that pushed Spotify streams, TPAB is the display of an artist, with their close-knitted posse and their established sound behind their back, showcasing a modern grab-bag of genre experiments.
Tapped for production on this album are the likes of Pharrell Williams, Terrace Martin, Knxwledge and the label Brainfeeder’s founder, Flying Lotus. When coming into the second track on the album “For Free? – Interlude,” we already see an entirely different sound than what was played with on “DAMN.” Avant-garde, free-jazz rhythms are layered atop Lamar’s egotistical, preacher-like Def Poetry rhymes.
Ego is a huge part of this album, with a key poetic verse being rehearsed in the margins over the album’s timespan. This poem tells the tale of a caterpillar’s rise into the butterfly, a real-life metaphor that Lamar relates to on several occasions over these captivating 79 minutes.
This verse (after being elaborated on through the course of the record), ends the album off with K-Dot reciting it to a decade-old interview of Tupac Shakur. Lamar found this interview, cut apart selections from it, wrote out banter between him and Shakur and attempted to find common ground between his fame and that of a dead man’s legacy.
Songs like “King Kunta” or “How Much A Dollar Cost” are projections of Lamar’s questionings. Does he deserve the fame he has been given? Should his constituents respect him as the king that he has arisen to? How much is his money worth, when his artistic visions are what got him rich?
“Institutionalized” takes the vision of a previously imprisoned MC (implied to be Lamar himself), and comments on the brainwashing that happens in the music industry. How artists are often hypnotized into having dollar-signed eyes and thoughtlessly signing contracts.
“Momma” shows Lamar as someone who thinks he knew everything, until he returned to his home, only to find his fame had blinded and biased his understanding of the world.
“For Sale? — Interlude,” “These Walls” and “u” tread dangerous waters, as examples of Lamar’s most dissonant material ever released. Their unusual usage of reverb, delay and production experimentations heighten Lamar’s overboard mentality, vocally going ham in a volatile mind state.
The persona Lamar takes on “DAMN.” is safe and calculable, whereas his performance on “To Pimp A Butterfly” would rather become boycotted before its unpredictable guts are apologized for, forgiving no listener, challenging them and their understanding of conventional hip-hop.
Everything on TPAB, in my musical opinion, is more solid than what’s found on the album that granted Duckworth’s Pulitzer. The songs are more rewarding, its motives and ideas are franker and the collaborations are better than ever. Before fame skewed Lamar’s style, he fought recklessly to contest the normalcies of hip-hop, and ended up creating a “Dark Side of the Moon” for those caught in an urban Orwellian social and political climate.
Rem Jensen can be reached at [email protected]