Tag: kendrick lamar (page 1 of 1)

Illustration of a melting snowman tipped sideways out of an upside-down ice cream cone. The snowman has a mustache and a deadpan expression. A Santa hat sits knocked off to the side. Drawn in loose black line art on a white background.

May 29, 2026 / 0 Comments

Make Them Care

I tried. I really did. It’s been two weeks since Drake’s ICEMAN came out, and after giving the album a few fair listens, I can acknowledge the bops and his skill as a rhyme slinger when he’s properly motivated. And while there are many things he’s trying to make the audience do on his most important release since the early part of his career, the one thing he couldn’t do is make me care. He acknowledges early on in “Make Them Cry,” the introductory track, that he should be maturing. He says “40” is pressing him to dig deeper, but over the next seventeen songs, he doesn’t do that. Instead, before he even gets to the end of this opening salvo, he reverts to his toxic masculinity and tendency towards ruminating over transactional relationships.

In the last six months, I’ve been buoyed by fresh music from De La Soul, Nas, and Conway the Machine that showcase points of view that have matured with age. Each artist acknowledges how life has affected them while still delivering the boom-bap in their own unique ways. In between spins of ICEMAN, I’ve found Conway’s You Can’t Kill God With Bullets to be a palate cleanser. The East Coast rapper whose face doesn’t move tells an incredible story of loss and grief that runs in parallel with his success in hip hop and business, all while elevating his lyricism and delivering the motivational hustler anthems he and his upstate New York compatriots are known for.

De La Soul’s Cabin in the Sky is primarily a beautiful eulogy for Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jalicoeur, a seminal member of the trio who passed away in 2023. This is the group’s first release since his untimely death, and it never sways far from reckoning with his absence, celebrating his life, and honoring his spirit with what is ultimately an uplifting collection that fits right in with their long discography filled with records that have reflected where they have been at each stage of their life.

Nas’s collaboration with DJ Premier, Light-Years, has remained in rotation since its release, particularly his collaboration with AZ, “My Story, Your Story.” What I have appreciated about Nas’s most recent bodies of work is that you can feel his status as an elder statesman without him having to depart from the style of rapping with which he came onto the scene over 30 years ago. You don’t have to change what makes you you to show growth. Just don’t hide who you are, and we will connect with it on wax.

At some point in a long musical career, you should want to trade disposable hits for substance, especially after your crown has been tarnished and your character has been questioned but that seems beyond Drake.

Losing the 2024 beef with Kendrick Lamar gives him an opportunity ripe for showcasing emotional work, and I give him credit for acknowledging his defeat, but what he goes for on this album isn’t reflection or even resurrection but revenge. “Make Them Pay” is the strongest song on the album, with rhyme schemes and flows that are effective flips and rebuttals of those two-year-old bars from Lamar. None of those directed at Dot land more than a glancing blow, but those aimed at people to whom he has real relationships and affection sting. There’s genuine sentiment behind the clever barbs for Lebron James, J. Cole, and DJ Khaled. Ultimately, though, there’s little meat on the bone. He comes across as an internet reply guy, self-satisfied with finding the perfect meme or attempting to ratio the Original Poster over interrogating his own role in the situation.

Maybe the problem, though, is that Drake is more of a character to be portrayed than who Aubrey Graham is as a person. We don’t know that guy. We only get to know “the boy,” a nearly 40-year-old man-child who can’t believe that these transactional relationships he’s been in may be emotionless arrangements for the other parties as well, be they women he’s dated, collaborators, or famous friends. Is the real man, Aubrey, the kind of person who thinks shouting out Adin Ross and Samuel Bankman-Fried in 2026 is a flex? That’s the kind of person whose album cover gets adopted by Trump’s White House for feeling MAGA-coded. For every time I get amused by a punchline or the way something is delivered, there’s another where I just shake my head at the incredulity. Being a memelord at this big age is not the move.

We almost get to something approaching self-reflection on “Firm Friends,” ICEMAN’s penultimate track. Over a stripped-down Conductor Williams production dominated by slow-tempo piano strikes, Drake’s rhymes glide over the song, earning the popular compliment of modern hip-hop fans, “He’s talking, bro!” And he is. He talks directly to individuals, institutions, and, perhaps, even himself as he explains where his head is at right now and how he plans to operate in the future. At one point, he threatens to turn “The Boy” into “The Man,” but worries that people won’t understand.

And that’s where he loses me again. If you’re truly the greatest rapper alive as you continuously claim, that’s what you’re supposed to make us do.

Understand.

November 27, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Next Movement

The music video for Kendrick Lamar’s “squabble up” pays homage to “The Next Movement” video by The Roots. They are placed in the same setting—an enclosed room with green walls where you never see anyone enter or leave, but the occupants are constantly shifting—and both videos start the same way, with a few seconds of silence before the first musical notes hit.

In 1999, The Roots were both pushing back on the shiny suit/hyper-commercial era of hip-hop and also announcing the arrival of something new: the thrilling Soulquarian era of black music that they were generating in the Electric Lady Studios in New York with D’angelo, Common, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, and others. There were more commercial artists of the era, but none influenced the culture more than the merger of hip hop and soul and the rise of Dilla Time, as Dan Charnas puts it in his book of the same name, that Questlove and his co-conspirators delivered to us.

I’m unsure if K. Dot began this year intending to shift the culture. The operating plan seems to have grown organically as his thesis solidified throughout the beef with Drake. “I’m what the culture feeling” led to him wanting to be explicit about which culture he meant. The impact of “Not Like Us” on Los Angeles and its ability to generate mass appeal for a very South LA, very California sound seemed to spark a more extensive idea about what he wanted to do with his label and his work.

“The Pop Out: Ken and Friends” further confirmed this was magic in a bottle. Since it happened, I have thought a lot about Kendrick’s performance during that show. He flubbed the lyrics in both “euphoria” and “Not Like Us” and could never get “The Colonizer” section of that song correct once. Making quotable, punchline-dense hits is light work for him. He made those songs to win a rap battle, but they aren’t meaningful, incredibly thoughtful pieces.

They won’t win him any literary awards.

They did wake people up, though.

Music audiences didn’t know they were hungry for authenticity, cultural specificity, or even a return of the boom bap in rap, but we were. I was. In the aftermath, I have locked in with bombastic, honest, and enthusiastically unique albums. Tyler, the Creator, Glorilla, and Doechii put out whole bodies of work that felt free from chasing trends and were precisely the music they wanted to be making.

And now we have gnx and Kendrick’s “The Next Movement” moment. Lamar is ready to expand beyond his solo introspective work and utilize this next phase of his career as an artist and tastemaker to put the West Coast on, unite disparate communities, and uplift people. As Spence Kornhaber put it, it’s populism with a point. Thirty-plus years after Dr. Dre’s The Chronic brought about the rise of the g-funk era and LA laying claim as the center of the hip-hop universe, Kendrick Lamar seems to be generating that same gravitational force.

Get on board, get left behind, or be prepared to squabble up.

Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash

May 5, 2024 / 0 Comments

Kendrick Lamar’s West Side Rallying Cry

On my 20th spin of Not Like Us, I figured out why Kendrick Lamar‘s latest is so electrifying. The last time LA hip hop was up was Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap at the GRAMMYs in February of 2019. His death a couple of months later, followed by Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and several others less than a year later, turned the city and the music melancholy and insular. The pandemic would soon follow, and the LA sound has rarely found a reason to celebrate since then. You don’t take the lap when the victories are rare, fleeting, or pyrrhic.

The energy is different today. As I walked around my neighborhood with that Mustard beat blasting on repeat and Kung Fu Kenny going dumb with his South LA accent turned all the way on, I had this vision of people opening up their windows, poking their heads out, smiling, putting on their house shoes, and coming out to step to this. It’s not merely a diss record. Not Like Us is a West Coast rallying call.

The song is the fourth diss track that Lamar has released this week in his ongoing battle with Drake, though the consensus is that he won. Not Like Us includes strong bars covering the scandalous accusations many people glom onto. However, it is overwhelmingly an indictment of Drake as a culture vulture. Besides the rapping, which you always expect to get from Kendrick, the structure and vibe of the record are about showcasing what’s possible when you are of a place, people, and culture.

Not Like Us seems destined to be a national hit but it sits perfectly in a mix with Kalan.FrFr, Blxst, 03 Greedo, JasonMartin, Lil Vada, and BlueBucksClan. There’s a California timelessness to it as well. Check out these mashups with Hit ‘Em Up and No Vaseline (shout out to DJ Fred Litt).

It even reminds me of We’re All in the Same Gang.

We back outside!

Before Not Like Us came out, I saw parallels between Lamar’s strident stand for morality and authenticity and his strong beliefs about racial identity, manhood, and parenthood with those of August Wilson. I’d been reading Patti Hartigan’s biography—August Wilson: A Life—while this back-and-forth between the two rappers has been going on.

Wilson had his diss battle of sorts in the 1990s. The playwright gave an influential and controversial speech called “The Ground on Which I Stand” in 1996, hitting some third rails in the theatre community and the country. Robert Brustein, a theater critic who was rarely a fan of Wilson’s, took the opportunity to challenge his positions.

They went at each other in the press, on TV, and in speaking engagements until culminating in the equivalent of a rap battle called The Big Event. Wilson’s battle with Brustein was fairer than Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake. The playwright and critic were both about something. They cared passionately about their craft while coming from two very opposed points of view. They were both well-read, adept with words, and had real animus.

In 2024, Drake doesn’t measure up, so he lost before it began.

August Wilson, who was biracial and fair-skinned, always identified as a black man. His white father was absent and abusive, and thus, perhaps it is no surprise that much of his work centers around what it means to be Black, a man, and a father in America throughout the 20th century.

Wilson never understood hip-hop. The blues was the music that moved him. He’d have found a kindred spirit in Kendrick Lamar, though.

While a conversation between the two is not in the cards, I’ll twist my fingers into Ws and dance it out to these K.Dot hits while interrogating the lyrics like I might a signature speech in one of the plays in Wilson’s cycle.

December 15, 2018 / 0 Comments

2018 in Music

“Miss me with that bullshit. You ain’t really wild, you a tourist. I be blackin’ out with the purest.”

— Kendrick Lamar

Unapologetically black. That’s how I liked my music this year. Not just black, per se, (though that was where my head was tbh) but unapologetically whatever it was trying to be. That could be unapologetically pop. Unapologetically fun. Unapologetically woke. Whatever. Just make me feel like it’s real, that I’m real, that who I am and what I am is not only okay but brilliant.

King’s Dead did that for me from its very first notes. Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, James Blake, and Future with my favorite of all the songs on the epic Black Panther Album (Music from and Inspired by the Movie) is ultimately a villain’s anthem but one that reeks of authenticity. It sounds like California. Black California from the bay to the South of LA. When Jay Rock says, “My name gon’ hold up. My team gon’ hold up,” I feel that shit.

My last.fm charts will say that All the Starz from the same album is my top track, but it’s treating King’s Dead from the Black Panther album and Jay Rock’s Redemption as two separate tracks. Combined, it’s close to 100 spins.

The 2018 Mixtape

My methodology this year for figuring out my faves was to look at each month separately rather than focus on my listens in aggregate though those numbers were a secondary factor. My mixtape reflects my favorite song of each month from January through November as well as my favorite discovery.

I like this approach better because it acknowledges the rhythms of time more than the inertia of routine and the impact of the Spotify algorithms on my listening behavior. So instead of seeing a playlist dominated by a few albums and artists, you’ll hear some tracks that I forgot I loved right next to the records that I played the hell out of for a few weeks at a time. There’s a little symmetry here as well with a song featuring Sza—artist of my favorite track of 2017—and ends with a song by Janet Jackson who I have admired since I was knee-high and who just got nominated for the Rock & Roll hall of fame. She’s still got it.

The Albums

I haven’t looked at many of the end-of-year lists yet, so I don’t know what the consensus is around the top releases though I’m guessing some of my faves like Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy are on them. I know they are both GRAMMY nominated for Album of the Year. They weren’t my very top albums this year despite trying hard to convince myself otherwise.

Black Panther—both the compilation mentioned above and the Ludwig Göransson score—set the tone for everything I would listen to for the rest of the year. It primed me for Jay Rock’s full length, an artist I wasn’t checking for before King’s Dead and his instant anthem WIN which was the theme for the LA Sparks season well before it was played at nearly every sporting event the rest of the year. The score re-ignited my interest in film compositions which led to an April filled with the soundtracks to Arrival and Annihilation and Westworld and many a Black Mirror episode. Combined, Kendrick Lamar’s curated playlist for the best black popcorn movie ever released and that score was the best thing going all year. Full stop.

Beyond that, I enjoyed grown folks hip hop from Beyoncé and her husband and Phonte. I liked expansive sounds from The Midnight Hour and Abstract Orchestra, clever reworks from Kelela, and a pretty perfect pop album from Ariana Grande who is, perhaps, an even more interesting artist than she is a celebrity. She, too, is figuring out how to be unapologetically herself with each release.

My Fave Albums of 2018

Black Panther Album & Black Panther Soundtrack
Redemption – Jay Rock
Dirty Computer – Janelle Monae
Everything is Love – The Carters
Invasion of Privacy – Cardi B
No News is Good News – Phonte
The Midnight Hour – The Midnight Hour
Sweetener – Ariana Grande
TAKE ME A_PART, THE REMIXES – Kelela
Dilla – Abstract Orchestra

Other Notes

Shout-out to Drake for great singles and better videos. Jordan Rakei, Nightmares on Wax, and Little Dragon for great live shows. Rapsody, Gifted Gab, Noname and Princess Nokia for providing excellent counter-programming to the overwhelming masculinity and aggression still dominating popular hip-hop. And Aretha Franklin and Mac Miller for having existed.

Thank u, next.

The Raw Data

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July 15, 2018 / 0 Comments

Vulgar Favors

“You ain’t really wild, you a tourist.”

— Kendrick Lamar, King’s Dead

Gianni Versace was murdered by Andrew Cunanan 21 years ago this morning. I finished reading Maureen Orth’s exhaustive accounting of how that tragedy came to pass just last night. An impulse pickup at the library a week ago, I had no idea how gripping the story would be even though I knew the now Emmy-nominated season of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace had used it as it’s source material.

The 90s were wild.

Cunanan’s spree-killing over two months across four states occurred just after the OJ Simpson trial and the death of JonBenet Ramsay. Princess Diana—a friend of Gianni Versace’s—would die being chased by paparazzi just a few weeks later. Tabloid television and the 24-hour news cycle are coming into their own. Gay/Queer culture is alien to the mainstream media, treating just the mere mention of the word homosexual as scandal.

What is made even more evident in the book is how all of this led to Cunanan not being found after his first three murders—which would have been difficult to prevent—and allowed for two others to fall in the days and weeks after them.

The police and investigative bureaus didn’t find much compassion for gay victims and seemed unwilling to delve deeper into a community foreign to them to understand their killer. Fear of being embarrassed like the police and district attorneys in Los Angeles after OJ made their choices both overly cautious and bumbling and likely got at least one person not initially in Cunanan’s cross-hairs killed as a result.

Even Orth’s own words show how uncomfortable much of America was with discussing the hidden world of gay men. While her compassion for Cunanan’s victims comes through, her portrayal of his life and the people in it before he becomes a serial killer seeks to shock and titillate. The whole world of male homosexuality is all sex, drugs, pornography, bondage, perversion, vanity, and excess. All of that even though she’s talking continuously to people who seem to have strong ties to each other with love, friendship, affection, and care for each other hiding in plain sight behind their explanations of club culture and how one must live when society taxes you significantly for coming out.

This is what Ryan Murphy’s retelling of this story gets so well. The tragedy of Andrew Cunanan’s story is not just in the lives he snatched but also in the way they were forced to live before he took them. Only Versace was out to everyone who knew him. Three of Cunanan’s other victims (two of whom were gay and another seems likely) lived double lives tortured by the choices they had to make long before Andrew did so physically.

The show conveys the complexities of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” decade in a way that a book published in the year after the murders probably can’t. We didn’t have the language or the hindsight for it.

Vulgar Favors, though, is still a compelling read. It is a grand reminder of how far we’ve come and how far, still, we have to go.