There is no need to build up to this statement. Kendrick Lamar is one of the most celebrated hip-hop artists of his generation, and I share that general enthusiasm. That doesn’t necessarily mean I listen to him the most or devoutly await every release. It’s just, having lived through the 2010s, I saw the power of rap music to stand for something greater… and a large reason was him. The candid artistry was beautiful, and I think it only continues to grow in ways that propel the genre forward and promise something even more interesting on the horizon. In an era where music is at risk of disposability, picking up a Lamar album is being reminded of what a full front-to-back experience can give you.
The reason I am writing this stems from my own contradictions surrounding his music that, in fact, don’t have that much to do with him in the first place. To provide a parallel circumstance, people often resent Zack Snyder films because of the audience he attracts, who tend to target those who disagree with them. As someone who has faced trolls in this manner before, it’s easy to project your frustration at them onto an artist who is just telling a story. For as much as I haven’t liked a Snyder film in well over 15 years, there is a part of me that always respects the hustle of someone making art that is distinctive to their vision.
What does this have to do with Kendrick Lamar? I’m not wishing to suggest that he attracts the same ferocious mob as Snyder’s squad. However, I’m still questioning if I dislike “GNX” more because of the music itself, or if I have just come across the wrong people liking it way too much. I shouldn’t even say “come across,” because that would suggest a level of mobility that this story doesn’t have. No. I’m talking about the fall of 2024 when, on a Friday morning, I sat in my bathroom and heard those immortal lines for the first time. My neighbors and their newfangled sound system, pointing into our backyard, plays “TV Off,” and, as I’m relieving myself, I hear Mr. Lamar yelling, “Mustard!”
Is it amusing? Sure. Even looking at the songs on Spotify that I liked, I gravitated towards the hits right away. However, it’s important to note that I was involuntarily introduced to “Mustard!” from the privacy of my own home, where I largely either walk around with headphones, watch TV, or try to enjoy my silence. In short, I am particular, and having to deal with my neighbors and their 2024 newfangled sound system was a learning curve that took a lot out of me emotionally and physically… and a lot of it for a time had to do with the hits of that summer, which included “Not Like Us” and the majority of “GNX” played on repeat so that I heard “Mustard!” at least eight times a day for the first two weeks of its existence. Even in the time of conceiving this essay, they played it one random night.
Again, I know some of this is a personal ego thing and that, “Oh, you just don’t like fun,” but I also choose to argue that my neighbors don’t practice discretion with their sound system that points directly into our backyard. It can grow so loud that it rattles the window on the other side of the house. I can hear conversations at 11 PM through closed windows and marijuana smoke wafting through the bathroom. While a series of police calls and write-ups have slowed the problem down, it’s still one of adjustments, where I’ve had to accept that weekends aren’t for quiet time and that I need to adjust accordingly.
The thing about the “GNX” aesthetic, however, is less about anything that Lamar says or does. I’m not even sure that most of the instrumentation bothers me. What bothers me is how it’s mixed and, because it’s being amplified into my backyard, I am left hearing loud propulsive thuds for hours on end. I should note their music is not distinctly Lamar-based, but is indicative of their preference for loud, bombastic party music that shoots bass in every direction at the same frequency.
Listening to it in the immediate aftermath of fall 2024 was difficult. Songs like “Squabble Up” lost their appeal because I no longer heard the delightful riff of “walk out with the safe!” I heard nothing but bass blasting through my window, hitting my head like an unwelcome compression sleeve that would leave me with headaches some nights that made life unmanageable. Has it gotten better? Yes. However, it’s still unfortunate that I resented “GNX” for well over a year solely because I heard “Wacced Out Murals” and knew the neighbors were about to be loud and obnoxious. It was invasive, pushing their problems onto neighboring yards without concern of when social hours ended.
Basically, “GNX” came to symbolize my resentment for my neighbors. Even as I’ve tried to lighten my animosity, there are days where it becomes difficult to overcome everything I’ve felt because of their loud parties that fill the surrounding blocks with double-parked cars. However, it has left me sometimes with a sense of disappointment that, for all of their perceived affluence, they don’t have an intellectual personality. They listen to Lamar because it’s catchy and can be seen as dumb. Never have I heard them listen to a “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers” song. It’s always the excess numbers, and even so I don’t think they recognize the nuance of “Swimming Pools.” For better or worse, it’s made me think of “GNX” as Lamar’s dumbest album to date… which is unfortunate given that it’s supposed to be a love letter to my home region and, judged by entertainment value, continues to deliver almost 15 months later.
Which brings me back to the point of this exercise. I like Kendrick Lamar as much as the next person. Given that I grew up surrounded by his releases, there will always be affection for what he represented for west coast rap during that time. He was provocative and thoughtful, pushing the medium into a mode worthy of deconstruction. I wouldn’t say this meant I listened to him voraciously, but there was something fun about knowing he wasn’t disposable, that we’d always be talking about his work, even if it was in the form of goofy shitposts where his once gut-wrenching yell on “U” is now the setup for a punchline of him falling downstairs.
I think on some level, a revisit of “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City” spiraled into a curiosity to see how the rest of his work had stood up. It can be argued that this was his most accessible record before “GNX” solely because the story had the familiar trappings of the hood narrative. It was an origin story in which Lamar watches his friend get murdered and forms his own lesson from the experience. Not only that, but the production is aces and has some deceptively ambitious works that double as triumphant and melancholic. I wouldn’t call it his most successful, but as a work of storytelling, it streamlined his capabilities, building on “Section 80” and delivering the first evidence that he was bound to stick around.
It was around this time that I also realized that for all of the praise we could lob on him, his albums all share a very similar mode of storytelling. It might’ve made me resent him a bit in the process, but his work reflects a duality found in the title of the album. Everyone is a good kid in a mad city. We are all walking this life on Earth and must do our best to be pure. Along with spiritual undertones, he captures the struggle of identity and morality throughout these albums in fascinating ways, but I’ve found it easy to boil down to the exact same story each time out. Are they well done? Of course. Nobody’s arguing against “To Pimp A Butterfly” being a grand slam of a masterpiece. However, how are its conflicts with Lucy any different from Halle Berry? These allegories are the same, just with different packaging.
There’s a lot to love in what is commonly referred to as the “cinematic” elements of his production. The choice to have a jazz soundscape on “To Pimp A Butterfly” might be among the smartest things that he’s done, especially as it allows for a subtextual exploration of racial history through both lyrics and melodies. The profundity in every decision has rarely been as precise as it was there, where the extrapolation of a poem builds throughout the album until a conclusion that packs a punch, reflecting a larger narrative at play. It’s purposeful and not afraid to be confrontational. He is “the biggest hypocrite of 2015” after all, and that is one of his most persuasive arguments. He is both a soothsayer and a man flawed by his own demons.
I understand that’s resulted in some dicey discussions as of late, especially around his collaborations with Playboi Carti and Kodak Black. I’m not wishing to discuss any of that. However, what makes his work interesting is how, despite being very grandstanding about his beliefs and ideas, he will sometimes sandwich the most important themes into the party anthem. I think about how on “Damn” that “Humble” became a big sporting event song despite being a cry for Lamar to calm down and not give into ego. Of course, he designed “Damn” to be more experimental than any proper definition could suggest, but even so, the idea of needing to relax can’t stop a room from yelling, “My left stroke just went viral!” It’s fun, addictive, and, guess what, maybe the root of my issue.
As a storyteller, Lamar’s cribbing larger ideas in this way is fantastic. The fact that you can still listen to “Damn” and understand its place within the story makes it even more of a masterstroke that I don’t think many could pull off. However, he seems like a prophet who is too self-conscious to ever draw attention to himself. He believes that you can figure out the larger meaning, though, as my neighbor's situation will suggest, it’s often overlooked in favor of merriment. They’re not listening to his heartbreaking anthems of losing friends or wallowing in depression. They want to get up and act a fool without worrying about “Wesley’s Theory” or whatever.
That’s not a bad thing, and, for as much as I’ve heard from them in an average month, I am still talking about a microcosm of time spent hearing their audio system. However, it always annoys me how unengaged their music choices are, and I wonder if that makes me the annoying intellectual fan in this equation, where I want him to tell me a story that I’ll be unpacking for years. I get that parties are not where you sit around understanding “Swimming Pools” place in the “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City” chronology, but I like to think people are conscientiously playing music designed solely for fun.
Because of scheduling, I didn’t actually play “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers” this time around. Then again, it was the one album of his that I’ve actually regularly revisited and probably speaks most to where my mind is as a fan. Whereas most would consider it his least accessible record, I find it to be the record where he finally escapes the social commentaries of his prior work and finally addresses himself as a person. He’s a complicated mess internally, but his journey reveals something beautiful waiting to break free. It’s the story of stopping generational trauma and starting to make a more idealized world. It’s a powerful statement about engaging with your feelings and understanding every complicated (possibly problematic) idea you’ve ever had. I appreciate Lamar’s vulnerability, and the fact that he does that without losing his buzzword-ready structure reflects his musical prowess yet again.
With all this said, another conflict emerged when I considered these records as a collective. They were all high concept, requiring some effort to listen to and have a genuine experience. I’m still not sure that I appreciate “Damn,” but I also think it’s possible that “Damn” is unable to be that way until you’ve heard it a dozen times. It’s intentionally beguiling and quixotic. It’s maybe the artist most concerned with needing to make art. I’m neither here nor there with that statement, but it made me realize how draining it must be, especially because I’d argue every single one of these records has been of similar struggles, detailing misery that only ever rarely shines with happiness. He may be one of the most celebrated rappers of his generation, but he also seems pigeonholed as needing to overdo everything.
For the first time since December 2024, I listened to “GNX.” Enough time had passed that I wasn’t hearing “Wacced Out Murals” every few nights. While the songs were on the radio, I had control of how often I left them on. Even so, it’s not a record I’ve thought of for long periods in a fond way. It still seems like a dumb record, though one that also sounded intriguing in light of four exhaustively conceptual tales. Maybe this was the necessary reset that Lamar needed, even if I wouldn’t love it.
In short, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. When I put on my headphones, I still hear the overwhelming bass competing with the rest of the music. It knows its place and does a very good job of agitating the body to move, but it’s still the sound that was giving me a headache for several months. It was the same, mundane propulsion that isn’t doing anything interesting. It’s the sound that drove me to get into 60s jazz music, just because I needed to remember that the bass could be a lively instrument. It’s maybe why I was simultaneously going down A Tribe Called Quest rabbit hole and loving their organic sound. I needed more stimulation than the simple time signatures undercutting his playful rapping.
I think the record is a lot more nuanced than people give it credit for. It’s less a morality play about good and evil and more a study of himself as a creative. It’s about influence and impulse, the need to create out of urgency but also playfulness. It’s not as obvious in the structure department, but I think the choice to highlight smaller artists shows how he’s trying to get back to that spark he had decades ago. I’d even argue the use of SZA on here is more novel than it lets on, making “Luther” a more effective love song.
I should suggest that, as a work of art, it’s still very enjoyable and doesn’t have a lot of duds to count. What it lacks in more essential elements, it more than makes up for with a sense of discovery, where it feels like Lamar is alive and challenging himself. It may not be in the way most intellectuals would like, but he’s doing the buzzwords better than anyone else. The choruses are anthemic. Everything is coming together for a good time, and I’m loving it (sorry). I understand why people like “GNX” more than I did over a year ago.
However, it’s still the record that reminds me of 2024 in a bad way. Given that we haven’t collectively gotten over “Not Like Us” yet, it may be time before I can assess this record on its own merits, but for now, I’m able to see past the limitations and find an artist who is doing what he can to stay passionate about his art form. This may be closer to the “dumb” stuff that people I resent will like, but it’s not lazy by any stretch. The structure keeps you guessing, and there’s enough humor in the delivery to fill in the rest.
I should say that it’s still probably my least favorite record by Lamar and one I’m probably not going to revisit. Part of it is just I’ve gotten into headier works and mostly only ever revisit “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers” when I think of him specifically. It’s also that he’s not my favorite performer just on an instinctive level. I much prefer Danny Brown and his style of experimentation, which has taken him to some weird yet cathartic corners. Much like Lamar's, Brown’s work is admirable for reflecting growth and change over the years. He’s more than someone making music for a quick buck. They’re real artists. Maybe Brown’s “Old” might be close to a sell-out record, but even that has its moments.
So yeah. My lukewarm take is that Kendrick Lamar is a good musician, actually. It’s one of those things where I wish annoying people didn’t like him, but that’s how life goes. Then again, his music caters to both the thinkers and drinkers, and while that may be a bit too much fence-sitting sometimes, it still delivers a unique experience that few have captured, but many are encouraged to reach for. As a result, I’ll probably have to put up with hearing “Mustard!” a few more times before this month is out, but thankfully, it hasn’t soured me on the rest of his career. If nothing else, it’s there for people who care about living a full and examined life. That sounds like a pretty good compromise.
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