![]() ![]() As long as I keep knowing how much to give, giving just enough, and being able to pull back and leave the audience to interpret it, I think will stay intact.” “It’s all healthy because it’s talking about the music. “I think the more people talk about it, the more it becomes fascinating, and you can have a debate about it,” he says. But then when they came in and played the album from beginning to end, hearing the whole body of work, the way the album ends … it was spectacular.”Ī subindustry of Internet exegetes has been digging deep into the album’s every line for half a year now, but Lamar isn’t particularly interested in explaining “Damn’s” many mysteries and riddles. “I had heard a handful of tracks early on - I heard ‘Humble,’ ‘DNA,’ ‘Love,’ just those songs on their own. “I was blown away,” remembers Interscope head John Janick of his first listen through the complete “Damn” album. Recurring references include both the Book of Deuteronomy and “Rush Hour 2.” ![]() He unabashedly declared himself “the greatest rapper alive” on March’s scorched-earth promo single “The Heart Part 4,” yet spends the entire last verse of album track “Fear” laying out his insecurities and frailties in unsparing detail. It contains a radio-friendly Rihanna collaboration, and also a heady three-part mini-suite with an unexpected U2 cameo. “Damn” begins with Lamar relating a spoken-word parable as an intro and ends by circling back to the first sentence of that intro, like “Finnegans Wake” laid over beats. “Love,” the most tender song in his canon, is presumably about his fiancée, Whitney Alford, whom he’s known since high school.Īnd not for the first time, this year he’s made a blockbuster album out of songs that would, in other hands, represent a daringly experimental series of left turns. Lamar’s the oldest of five children his parents moved out West from Chicago shortly before he was born. As a Christian, heavy religious themes recur throughout his work, as do references to his family. He’s a spiritual seeker and an intellectual with a monastic demeanor, whose perspective nonetheless never strays too far from that of the quiet kid born Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, who grew up in Section 8 housing in Compton, where he witnessed his first murder at age 5.Īs little as he discusses his personal life in interviews, it isn’t hard to piece together a loose biography from his music. 1 with “To Pimp a Butterfly,” an intentionally alienating, jazz-infused concept album about racism and isolation in Obama-era America. He’s an intensely relatable artist who makes scant use of social media and reveals little about his personal life. City” via Interscope in 2012, consummate Gemini Lamar has been building a résumé as the defining hip-hop artist of his generation while also challenging conventional ideas about what the greatest rapper on Earth ought to look like today. Ever since he released his major label debut, “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. “You might not have heard it on the radio all day, but you’re seeing it in the streets, you’re seeing it on the news, and you’re seeing it in communities, and people felt it.”įor now, those distinctions seem happily irrelevant for the 30-year-old artist, who is inhabiting the kind of rarefied sphere where the various standards of success - pop chart dominance and cultural relevance, street-level authenticity and worldwide stardom - all seem to align. ![]() The rapper argues that “Alright” was probably “the biggest record in the world” because of the sheer number of people it touched. “Because it has some kind of numbers behind it? Is it the amount of streams or the amount of sales or the amount of spins on the radio? Nobody can really justify which one it is, because I’ve heard hundreds of records from inside the neighborhood that were quote-unquote ‘hit records’ and never stood a day outside the community.” “What makes a hit record?” Lamar continues. While “Humble” surely has the raw data to prove its success, what’s harder to measure is the cultural impact of the song, or that of 2015’s “Alright” as the unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement, or the way his 2012 non-single album track “Money Trees” seemed to be blasting from every slow-moving car in Los Angeles for the better part of a year. ![]()
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