Kendrick Lamar Makes His Point Clearer
5 min read
Mid is a perfect bit of new slang for a culture in which quantity is crushing quality, in which you can stream endlessly and feel nothing. What’s also fitting is that the word has become a favorite diss in the rap world, the musical genre that has helped pioneer what mediocrity means today. To be clear: Hip-hop is our era’s most dynamic art form. But it’s also a content template, an expressive mode, that invites anyone with a mic and some talent to spam the internet with raw thoughts set to beats. According to some accounts, the term mid jumped from weed slang to the mainstream in 2021, in reaction to one of the many overlong and underdeveloped albums that Drake—the Spotify era’s defining rapper—has released like so many tadpoles into a lake.
Kendrick Lamar has long styled himself as an enemy of midness. The 37-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner makes statement albums thick with meaning and detail. He tells cohesive stories by unpredictably varying his flow, voice, and production ideas; he challenges audiences with noise-jazz interludes and intricate wordplay. This musical ambition matches his persona: that of a disciplined justice seeker taking on the wickedness within himself and in the world around him. When he missteps—as he did in parts of 2022’s sprawling Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers—it’s from caring too much, trying too hard, and losing the listener while chasing difficult truths.
The expectations he’s set for himself make his new, sixth album a bit surprising. Released without any warning on Friday, the 12-track GNX is terse, punchy, and, to an almost disconcerting degree, easy to digest. It polishes familiar Lamarisms and West Coast hip-hop touchstones—wheezing keyboards, drawling flows, the brittle bounce of Bay Area hyphy. The results come off as populism with a point: Lamar slightly compromising his standards in an attempt to raise everyone else’s.
The album can’t be understood without revisiting his battle with Drake, which unfolded earlier this year. The two rappers volleyed unverifiable allegations of pedophilia and domestic abuse in scathing diss tracks, but beneath that was a war about aesthetics. Lamar portrayed Drake as a vapid, exploitative pop star. Drake labeled Lamar as an egghead: “You better have a motherfuckin’ quintuple entendre on that shit,” he taunted. Lamar answered with “Not Like Us,” a witty and wild takedown that became a radio smash and arguably the song of the summer. Its killer ingredient was its catchiness, proving Lamar’s skills not just as an egghead but also as an entertainer.
GNX’s opening track, “Wacced Out Murals,” surveys the aftermath of that episode in a tone of despair, accompanied by baleful mariachi singing and strings. Lamar was widely celebrated as the victor over Drake, but he feels that the compliments he received were “back-handed,” and that the lessons of his victory—basically, be better, morally and artistically—went unheeded. “All of y’all is on trial,” he says, clocking hip-hop’s present surplus of artists with private-life skeletons and “old-ass flows.” The most surprising line: “Fuck a double entendre, I want y’all to feel this shit.” Clearly, he doesn’t want his message to be lost this time.
To that end, he styles himself as a sage, “writin’ words, tryna elevate these children”—meaning both his fading peers and the younger generation who might build on his legacy. The chorus of “Murals” preaches hard work and self-determination to an imagined striver who wants to achieve Lamar’s success. Later on the album, he advises listeners to turn Madden off, not get lost to social media, and handle disagreements in private. The final song, “Gloria,” scans as a love song about a relationship’s ups and downs—but he’s actually rapping about his own romance with his pen. At a time when literacy rates are falling and mumble-rap reigns, Lamar wants to make writing sexy again.
The album’s straightforward sound serves that mission. Adopting an amusing variety of delivery techniques—rasping staccato on “Peekaboo,” Snoop-like butteriness on “Man at the Garden”—Lamar blasts through verses and hooks that will sound great at the Super Bowl halftime show next year. He alternates among jittery bangers, swaying R&B anthems, and big-important-message songs with cinematic orchestration. On “Squabble Up,” the beat bubbles like a witch’s cauldron as Lamar reworks a classic call-and-response refrain. “Heart Pt. 6” glides through Lamar’s early-career memories over a shimmering neo-soul sample. In the instant classic “TV Off,” Lamar shouts out Mustard in the manner of a soccer announcer bellowing “gooooaaaal.”
Some of the music, however, comes off like a diet version of Lamar’s best work. Many of the beats have a pillowy, thudding quality that might be attributed to the involvement of pop’s vibes mastermind, Jack Antonoff. Certain lines rely on overly clunky allusions, half-baked metaphors, or both. “I put a square on his back like I’m Jack Dorsey,” he raps, a lyric that wouldn’t be out of place on one of those Drake albums that Lamar disdains.
The tensions of the album’s approach are exemplified by “Reincarnated,” on which Lamar imagines himself having lived a series of past lives as brilliant but doomed musicians. As Lamar raps in furious counterpoint with a sizzling Tupac sample, the music telegraphs big drama ahead. But ultimately, the track feels minor in the larger context of his career. The concept he’s using—staging an intense inner dialogue about the state of his soul—has previously pushed him to heights of extreme emotion and thematic knottiness. Here, the payoff is oddly tidy: “I rewrote the Devil’s story,” Lamar concludes, summarizing what he just said for anyone who didn’t get it.
Still, if the album’s goal is to fortify Lamar’s standing and evangelize his values, then it’s mostly a success. He’s still an agile, characterful rapper who’s able to dart among styles and land punch lines. Most hearteningly, some of the album’s best moments belong to relatively obscure L.A. rappers given a moment to flex. Each of them has a distinctive sound—Peysoh murmurs murderously; YoungThreat whispers off the beat—and delivers bars that hit as hard as any of Lamar’s. Their presence makes the case that his ethos can be passed on, and that we are not doomed to a future of pure mid.
