Kendrick Lamar : GNX
A thing I see writers and laypeople alike struggling with in the wake of both the conclusion of the rap beef between Lamar and Drake, long simmering before the sudden boil, and the subsequent release of Kendrick’s new record GNX is a two-fold problem. First, that this material was produced by Kendrick Lamar, comfortably the greatest emcee going (or at least the best male emcee, without a doubt). Second, that, by a certain metric at least, it is his weakest material. The dialectical braiding of these two elements seems to drive people into a sort of psychosis, unable to make heads or tails of the two elements, feeling obligated to commit wholly to one by contradicting the other absolutely in some kind of petulant psychic collapse. Thankfully, not to toot my own horn, but this kind of dialectical exercise of a work not alone but embedded in the overall body of an artist is, well, kind of my bread and butter, being the fundament of two book-length projects here alone. Anyway, the throughline seems obvious: Kendrick made a rap record.
What does this mean? On the opening track, Kendrick drops the line “Fuck your hip-hop,” which in so many ways underscores the thesis both of the material from his beef, the ebullient sense of his one-off LA show and this subsequent record. Kendrick’s career has been built on hip-hop. Each record from Section.80 onward has been driven if not by an explicit narrative concept than by a poetic conceit, Lamar famously calling himself a writer rather than any of the other epithets a rapper may adorn themselves with, focusing on his penmanship first and foremost. To his credit, that singular focus was not only warranted but also what saw his meteoric rise of critical esteem. He was picked by most in the hip-hop intelligentsia as the next big thing with that debut record; by good kid, m.A.A.d. city, his second, everyone was agreeing. It has in many ways only been uphill for him since, dropping one of the greatest rap records of all time as a follow-up, winning a Pulitzer and delivering some jazz rap as a fun aside.
What this misses, however, is the sense of, well, rap. The split between rap and hip-hop is a nebulous one, but you can loosely define it as, to be frank, whether a white critic in corded sweater and headphones would bump your record or whether you’d hear people on the street bumping it in cars, in clubs, at parties. Rap is a music of the people as much as an art form, sharing that proletariat spirit with punk, a genre which was a sibling in New York in the mid-’70s, often sharing venues and splitting bills in those early days. Kendrick has been criticized elsewhere for seeming to favor critical esteem over the culture, which we can debate but has been present for a while. By pre-existing metrics Kendrick has more than willingly slotted himself into, of course GNX would be a disappointment. But this seems clearly to miss the point.
“Squabble Up” for instance, in a word, fucking bangs. Between the bounce of the beat and the snappiness of the hook, it’s immediately entered my lexicon. “Reincarnated,” the track closest to the vibe of To Pimp A Butterfly, sees Kendrick cast himself as Jimi Hendrix and others, greats of the art world, a position which he can more than comfortably claim, but does so with a bravado and beat that feels euphoric rather than meditative. Several tracks feature young and hungry rappers from the LA scene, which with his relaxed fit and the sick whip on the cover indicates the headspace of this record in a way other critical writing seems completely oblivious to or, worse, utterly uninterested in. GNX plays like a return to earth, taking his avant-rap rimmed DAMN. and bringing it even closer to the streets. He even decides to eat Drake’s pop lunch on “Luther,” a move that feels extra disrespectful in a deeply fun way.
GNX shows as well the faultiness of scores in art criticism. The venue that would rate Butterfly a perfect 10 probably won’t rate this well; this is rap in the way that Lil Jon was, that DMX was, that Cam’ron was, that G-Unit was. While some of those figures retroactively got a critical reevaluation, it was almost entirely in terms of acknowledging what a culture had been loudly saying for years anyway. “Man at the Garden” plays like a rejoinder to critical attempts to define Kendrick’s career while “The Heart pt. 6” validates their claims. But the aesthetic center of the record is likely “Hey Now,” a track that has a bass-heavy slimy groove, the kind of track to drive slow at night to, smoke in the front seat while looking for some action. This is the first record of its kind in Kendrick’s catalog, and the critical response tells us all we need to know about how that type of art is valued.
Label: pgLang
Year: 2024
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Kendrick Lamar : GNX
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