The twenty-five-year-old rapper Kendrick Lamar’s c.v. is a perfect combination of classic and trendy, which he makes clear on the cover of his major-label début, “Good Kid, M.a.a.d City.” It’s a Polaroid of Lamar at age five, on the lap of an uncle who is flashing a gang sign; two bottles, one of malt liquor and one of baby formula, sit on a table in front of them. Symbolic, and a little too pat, the photograph was taken in Lamar’s childhood home, in Compton, California, a place that rap made famous, in a way that wouldn’t have been possible for Miami or New York. In the late eighties and early nineties, groups like N.W.A. and solo artists like Snoop Dogg made Compton a kind of shorthand for both gangsta rap and violence. Compton’s favorite son, the producer and rapper Dr. Dre, has now closed the circle, signing Lamar to his Aftermath label. But Lamar’s story is not primarily about gangs or gangsta rap. Instead, it is about a generational shift that he and similar artists like Schoolboy Q and Danny Brown embody—their music is omnivorous. Unlike earlier hip-hop innovators, they haven’t killed their idols to move forward—they’ve eaten them. This hip-hop is full of all the other hip-hop, which makes it both satisfying and confusing. Lamar claims Compton, and uses its legacy, but that doesn’t tell you much about what his album sounds like.
Lamar has repeatedly cited California’s martyr, Tupac Shakur, as his favorite rapper, which seems perverse, considering how many m.c.s he can ably mimic. In fact, he never sounds like Shakur, who was agitated even when pausing, a breathless and fierce enunciator who piled up threats like kindling. Lamar sounds a great deal more like a calm, resonant m.c. whom he rarely mentions—Ishmael Butler, who was in the nineties trio Digable Planets, using the name Butterfly, and is now in Shabazz Palaces, as Palaceer Lazaro. Like Butler, Lamar has a low voice, which moves at an even trot. But Lamar also emphasizes his nasal high end, giving words a hint of sarcastic resignation, which is a very East Coast quality. (California drives with the top down; the East Coast shrugs its shoulders.)
By any measure, “Good Kid” is a triumph, which is no shock. Since “Overly Dedicated,” Lamar’s 2010 mixtape, which was a digital-only release, Lamar has sounded preternaturally well rounded and professional. His follow-up, “Section.80,” from 2011, was widely praised, and slightly easier to find than his previous records. (It did particularly well on iTunes.) “Good Kid” fulfills an implicit promise from his earlier work to revive Compton and to update its sound.
Lamar’s music is rarely as rough as his scenarios. This keeps him in the tradition of West Coast G-funk, as Dr. Dre helped establish it, in the early nineties—it was smooth music for listening to in cars about what happens when you get out of the car. The voices of singers like Nate Dogg and rappers like Warren G blended with each other to make even the harshest lines sound harmonious. While much of eighties hip-hop depended on a James Brown-style locomotive rattle, the mother lode for G-funk was plangent R. & B. by artists like Leon Haywood and William DeVaughn.
A song like “M.a.a.d City” is in that tradition, a diptych that begins with anxious synths and long-tailed kick-drum sounds before moving into a cracking drum sample that recalls the feel of “Lyrical Gangbang” from “The Chronic,” one of Dr. Dre’s—and Compton’s—foundational albums. To make his link to the past not just clear but precise, Lamar chose to feature MC Eiht of Compton’s Most Wanted—he’s not the best-known m.c. from the neighborhood, but he’s untainted by any mainstream associations. “ ‘Duck’—that’s what Mama said when we was eating that free lunch,” Lamar raps, describing gunfire and “bodies on top of bodies.” It’s one of several songs that make it clear that Lamar was a witness to gang violence, not a participant. “If Pirus and Crips all got along, they’d probably gun me down by the end of this song,” he sings, mildly, making explicit a lack of affiliation with any gang, which, in Compton, brings its own risk. However, as the song trails off, he raps about a kid “with a basketball and some Now and Laters to eat”—ostensibly Lamar himself, who may or may not have killed someone. Perhaps this is what Lamar was referring to when he called himself “evil and spiritual” on “Poe Mans Dreams (His Vice),” from “Section.80,” though interviews make it fairly clear that the rapper was more observant than delinquent.
History aside, “Good Kid” will resonate for younger generations, who have no idea what “The Chronic” is and have not been waiting for “Detox,” the phenomenally delayed Dr. Dre album on which Lamar apparently makes an appearance. It is noteworthy that, although Dr. Dre signed Lamar, he produces none of the tracks on his album, making way for more current names, such as Sounwave. There is something for everyone here—“Good Kid” is an omnidirectional scan of twenty years’ worth of rap. Lamar often sounds like Drake, who appears on the track “Poetic Justice,” and whose various dreamy styles have very little to do with the legacy of the West. “Backseat Freestyle” sounds something like Lil Wayne’s “A Milli,” and Lamar’s voice even shifts into a croak, mimicking the New Orleans rapper; later in the song, he sounds like a Kanye West imitator. The boom of the slow beat is accompanied by the sound of muffled explosions and clanking metal, while the lyrics circle around various crude desires, referencing an erection like the Eiffel Tower. Placed next to the rest of Lamar’s lyrics, the song could be an indication of his catholic range—why not put dumb club songs next to detailed narratives?—or a parody of club songs themselves. Either answer shows how carefully Lamar has thought through the tropes at hand: he’s practicing hip-hop in the same way he grew up—without affiliation.
Lamar is most interested in seeing how many styles he can amass at once, using technology to give him as many voices as he finds in his head. On an older song, “Average Joe,” Lamar sounded almost exactly like early Jay-Z; on the new song “Money Trees,” he and Jay Rock duplicate the wispy somnolence of OutKast’s “Aquemini.” And, on one of the two songs released as early singles from “Good Kid,” Lamar combines entire cohorts. In September, he made his television début, on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” performing “Swimming Pools (Drank),” another instance of reportage rather than confession. The track, rendered with some help from the show’s house band, the Roots, is a dark, disoriented clomp, drunk before the lyrics can even discuss drunkenness. The chorus goes: “I got a swimming pool full of liquor, and they dive in it.” It’s sort of sung, and plays with pronouns, but is Lamar himself ever diving into this pool? In the opening verse, he raps about growing up around people who drank because they liked it, wanted to “kill their sorrow,” or wanted to fit in. Almost two minutes in, Lamar’s voice rises, playing the role of his conscience: “Open your mind up and listen to me, Kendrick.”
The excessive hedonism and cynical droop of this song echoes tracks by both Drake and Odd Future, in which the use of recreational drugs is almost always presented as both pointless and inevitable. Lamar is one extra step removed from this scenario; he’s the rapper of the moment who, perhaps, will not simply reënact clichés of rap’s past but change them, take them apart, and turn them into something else. In this, “Good Kid” feels like Jay-Z’s début, “Reasonable Doubt”: it’s dense and almost too accomplished, packed with styles and words and images. Hits are usually simpler than the songs on Lamar’s album, but if he clarifies and reduces his vision, as Jay-Z did, his popularity will likely balloon. ♦
