Kendrick Lamar - DAMN.
Tiny Mix Tapes 100
Kendrick Lamar
DAMN.
[Top Dawg; 2017]
Rating: 5/5
For Jill, who would have hated this shit.
So I was taking a walk the other day…
Sometimes, when I’m taking walks by myself, I make lists in my head of what’s going to get me killed: CANCER. CARDIAC ARREST. PULMONARY EMBOLISM. The worst part about being a hypochondriac is that this shit isn’t just in my head (as if that would make it any less valid); it’s all corporeal, it’s all in my DNA. I’ve had a BLOOD clot, my grandfather died of a HEART ATTACK while shoveling snow when my dad was six years old, CANCER killed my sister. Some say that LOVE can get you killed, but it’s FEAR that’s going to be the death of me. It’s in my DNA. I’ll prolly die from anxiety.
What is Kendrick Lamar afraid of? On his latest release, Kendrick reveals that his greatest fear is loss, whether it be of money, creativity, LOVE, LOYALTY from PRIDE, GOD’s light, HUMBLEness. There’s a FEAR present here that no degree of straight fire will ever reverse GOD’s curse against all things black. Doubt and duplicity permeate Kendrick’s lines while he maps his way forward, but he delivers his thoughts with unmatched clarity. Kendrick knows even more now (or at least when he spits knowledge, it’s more succinct): murder, conviction, burners, boosters, burglars, ballers, dead, redemption, scholars, fathers dead with kids. When Kendrick takes a walk, he’s also making lists of how he’ll die, vivid in his imagery in a way that only somebody who’s almost died can be: “anonymous… with promises… walkin’ back home from the candy house… because these colors are standin’ out.” To Pimp a Butterfly saw Kendrick going home after making it out. This time, we hear him wrestling with whether making it out was enough.
DAMN.
Damn is a derivative of damnare, a rather mundane Latin word meaning loss or harm. John Ayto, author of The Dictionary of Word Origins, reveals that it didn’t become exclusively a theological term or an expletive until its original meaning was lost around 16c; its Biblical use is therefore contested, as its original connotation of mild condemnation does not fit what has eventually become synonymous with exemption from divine mercy. Its use on DAMN. encapsulates all of these historical permutations, as loss, harm, and exclusion (from both divine and mundane spaces) are all prominent themes. There’s a recurring motif, delivered at one point through a voicemail from Kendrick’s cousin Carl, of people of color being cursed by GOD for being inequitable and following other gods. Damn, as a verb here, is something that GOD does. It’s a top-down kind of smiting, but this kind of exchange is also present here between mortals. On opener “BLOOD.,” there’s a sample of FOX News reporters misquoting and deriding his song “Alright” after his 2015 BET Awards performance. “Oh please, ugh, I don’t like it,” one anchor says of its supposed anti-police message. It’s another, fleshier example of punching down, of condemning (or reinforcing condemnation of) a disenfranchised people.
On “ELEMENT.,” a song that mostly eschews religious imagery for pointed digs at fake rappers, Kendrick uses “damn” as a participle, adjective, verb, and an expletive in one line, highlighting how those most affected by violence are pushed out of those very positions of power that could protect them: “Damned if I do, if I don’t (yuhhh)/ Goddamn us all if you won’t (yuhhh)/ Damn, damn, damn, it’s a goddamn shame/ You ain’t frontline, get out the goddamn way.” It’s a biting twist on Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous line, delivered as a sparse bridge in between sexy James Blake-produced keyboard stabs and grimy snares. Kendrick is asserting through this track that nobody can take him out of his ELEMENT, which in this case is wherever he’s at.
While “damn” itself is used in a plethora of different ways throughout DAMN., it is “DNA.” that sets these permutations into motion through its sheer power, eliciting that initial reaction from its audience: “DAMN.(!)” Kendrick is cracking open his genes all over this thing with vigor, unravelling strands of his pedigree like a Pandora’s ladder, choking those who are offended by his inner duplicitousness: “I got millions, I got riches buildin’ in my DNA / I got dark, I got evil, that rot inside my DNA / I got off, I got troublesome, heart inside my DNA.” There are multitudes here, mutations, mutilations, meditations, millions. Packed so tight that it never stops popping. Unpacking it all is an impossible task. Luckily for us, trying is a Helluva time.
I got so many theories and suspicions…
As both a religious person and a scholar of religion, I’ve always been fascinated by religious rhetoric and imagery, especially in non-worship music. Biblical imagery is abundant on DAMN., but its intentional juxtaposition with profanity is what makes it stand out. Deuteronomy 28:28 is referenced multiple times and presents us with DAMN.’s central dilemma: “The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind.” This is essentially a curse, one that Kendrick’s cousin Carl uses as an etiology for black suffering. This divine curse leaves Kendrick wrestling with two options throughout DAMN: keep defying it by succeeding against all odds, or guarantee everlasting life by repenting and coming clean. “YAH.” exemplifies Kendrick’s quandary:
“I’m not a politician, I’m not ‘bout a religion
I’m a Israelite, don’t call me Black no mo’
That word is only a color, it ain’t facts no mo’
My cousin called, my cousin Carl Duckworth
Said know my worth
And Deuteronomy say that we all been cursed
I know he walks the Earth
But it’s money to get, bitches to hit, yah
Zeroes to flip, temptation is, yah
First on my list, I can’t resist, yah
Everyone together now, know that we forever”
In one verse, there is both a rejection of religion and a reclamation of an ancient religious lineage. Kendrick respects his cousin Carl’s faith amidst adversity, yet offers that temptation is often stronger. Ultimately, Kendrick professes a message of togetherness, locating eternity in fraternal bonds. Attaining redemption, however, rides on making it out in America, a land plagued by its own inequities divorced from those that drove Kendrick’s people out of the Promised Land, America itself a land that promised radical equality for those who have been oppressed and suppressed. As Bono sings in “XXX.,” “It’s not a place/ This country is to be a sound of drum and bass.” U2’s chorus reminds us that America is still at war with itself and is so by its own cruel design.
Three months in, DAMN. feels like our first Trump-era classic. It’s as bold and as hard and as hopeful as it is bursting with vitriol. It’s as distracting as it is inciting. It’s as cohesive as it is dense. It’s a volatile, unpredictable chapter in a legacy that’s followed Kendrick from Compton to Congress and now to the Cosmos, as we all struggle for meaning together in a Universe that’s on fire and covered in BLOOD. DAMN. is an expletive shouted into infinity, a judgment of our own judgments, a wrestling with GOD, a letting go of loss and harm, something that we could all give a little more of. It’s a DAMN masterpiece in a world that too often feels like a DAMN shame.
FEEL (alternate version)
I FEEL like my only accomplishments are reflections
I FEEL like my privilege only silences my message
I FEEL like I’m losing my GOD DAMN edge if I had one
I FEEL like I never had much to say in the first place
FEEL like, I FEEL like we’re on two different planets
FEEL like I am part of a problem that I can’t fix
I FEEL like too many people out prayin’ for themselves
I FEEL like violence is a function of FEAR and that’s BULLSHIT
GOD. DAMN. you
GOD. DAMN. me
GOD. DAMN. us
GOD. DAMN. we
GOD. DAMN. US. ALL.
GOD bless every DAMN one of US ALL.
Are we gonna live? Or die?
“It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but that by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer.”
— Philippians 1:20-22
“Pay attention, that one decision changed both of they lives
One curse at a time
Reverse the manifest and good karma, and I’ll tell you why
You take two strangers, and put ‘em in random predicaments; give ‘em a soul
So they can make their own choices and live with it”
— “DUCKWORTH.”
Two Christmases ago, my sister died of cancer. Around that time, I started experiencing stomach pains and frequent dizziness for no discernible physiological reason; part of me convinced myself that I had somehow contracted cancer from her ghost and that ghost cancer just wasn’t detectable. We weren’t that close, but as those holes have closed up tightly in her absence and my other sister and brother and stepmother and I have grown closer, I’ve realized more and more just how intimately people can be connected. Loss can be physically devastating. On hard days, I’m reminded more than ever before how violent disconnection can be. For a lot of people, life isn’t a choice; it’s a sentence. It’s hard finding lessons in what so often feels like a cavalcade of creative and destructive accidents. But here’s where hope enters: we have some control of that speeding, blistering motorcade. We can listen while others mourn, we can hold each other up when foundations bottom out, we can rebuild this house together, and we can forgive when listening and holding and rebuilding and forgiving seem impossible. Life is DAMN. hard, but it’s shit like DAMN. that make it a bit easier. It’s fresh air over a gravestone. Sunshine on an epitaph. GOD BLESS these molecules, bent on decay.
So I was taking a walk the other day…
Pitchfork 92
Life is one funny motherfucker, it’s true. “DUCKWORTH.,” the last song on Kendrick Lamar's fourth studio album DAMN., tells a winding story about Anthony from Compton and Ducky from Chicago, whose paths cross first over KFC biscuits, and again, 20 years later, when Ducky’s son records a song about the encounter for Anthony’s record label. It’s a precious origin story, the stuff of rock docs and hood DVDs, and it’s delivered with such precision, vivid detail, and masterful pacing that it can’t possibly be true. But it’s a tale too strange to be fiction, and too powerful not to believe in—just like its author. Kendrick Lamar has proven he’s a master storyteller, but he’s been saving his best plot twist this whole time, waiting until he was ready, or able, to pull it off.
Storytelling has been Lamar’s greatest skill and most primary mission, to put into (lots of) words what it's like to grow up as he did—to articulate, in human terms, the intimate specifics of daily self-defense from your surroundings. Somehow, he’s gotten better. The raps on his fourth studio album DAMN. jab mercilessly like a sewing machine. His boyish nasal instrument is distinct and inimitable as it slithers up and down in pitch on “PRIDE.” Even when Lamar sounds like Eminem, or Drake, or OutKast, he sounds like himself, and he arguably outpaces them all as a writer. On “FEAR.,” he relays daily threats from his mom (“I’ll beat your ass, keep talking back/I’ll beat your ass, who bought you that? You stole it”) and from his neighbors (“I’ll probably die because I ain’t know Demarcus was snitching/I’ll probably die at these house parties fucking with bitches”) over low-slung blues stirred by The Alchemist. Lamar’s recitation is so effortless you wonder where he breathes, or if he does at all.
Kendrick is a relic of the mid-aughts rap blog era, where bedroom WordPress pages would post .zips of albums by amateurs. After years of such releases, Kendrick dropped a self-titled EP in 2009 that featured Big Pooh from Little Brother and elicited such Nah Right comments as “I like the beats on this” and “who da fuk?” Accolades swelled with each project; by 2011, he was considering signing with Dr. Dre; by 2013, he was playing “SNL” and touring with Kanye West. He came of age with his fans, and by 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, he put to music their chest-clenched frustrations. Ever the curtain-puller, he released an album of untitled and unmastered drafts and grew his hair out. His short absence, even after lending Taylor Swift a verse, has been made to feel longer by his media shyness and a surging tide of new rappers shuttled out daily.
Throughout it all, he’s avoided the boxed-in fates of predecessors like Nas and peers like J. Cole through an electric originality and curiosity. He mastered rap not for mastery’s sake, but to use it as a form, undeterred by slow-eared fans who’ll only highlight his “simplest lines.” His best new trick is repetition; it offsets his density and drills his ideas, as enthralling as a Sunday sermon or pre-fight chirp session. There have been few threats committed to record as sincere as, “Let somebody touch my mama, touch my sister, touch my woman/Touch my daddy, touch my niece, touch my nephew, touch my brother”—you tick down the list along with him, slot in your own lifelong bonds with loved ones. Such internal processing plays out through the album’s Greek chorus, via the singer Bēkon, who speaks in riddles of balance throughout: “Is it wickedness, is it weakness;” “Love’s gonna get you killed, but pride’s gonna be the death of you;” “It was always me versus the world/Until I found it’s me versus me.”
DAMN. is best in these philosophical spaces. It lags slightly around the center, where the concept loosens: “LOYALTY.,” with Rihanna, has all the makings of a radio mainstay this summer, and is as low-stakes as the platform demands; it’s always fun to hear Rih rap, and her presence is its most interesting aspect. “LUST.” would sound better if it weren’t next to an ear-worm as tender as “LOVE.,” which slow-dances between Zacari falsettos and Lamar’s sheepish read of the girl who fills him up. Between the two tracks, it’s easy to tell which force is tugging at him harder.
The record’s few lulls succumb to what surrounds them. The springboard bounce of “HUMBLE.,” the war chant of “DNA.,” and hot steel of “XXX.” show Kendrick in his element, fast and lucid, like Eazy-E with college credits and Mike WiLL beats. The production is taut and clean, but schizophrenic, often splicing two or three loops into a track and swaying between tempos, closer in kin to good kid, m.A.A.d city’s siren-synths than Butterfly’s brass solos. If he was “black as the moon” on his last album, he’s an “Israelite” here, refusing to identify himself by the shade of his skin but fluent in the contents of his D.N.A. Butterfly floated along to soften its scathing stance—“We hate po-po” sounds better over a smooth saxophone—but with so many “wack artists” in play, what’s the reward for upliftment? Kendrick is so alone at his altitude that when he acknowledges Fox News, let alone Donald Trump, it feels like a favor to them both.
Still, the album exists for “DUCKWORTH.” It’s the final piece of the TDE puzzle, a homegrown label of Compton natives that happened to deliver the best rapper of his generation. If we’re to believe the song’s last gunshot—and its seamless loop back to track one—much of DAMN. is written from the perspective of a Kendrick Lamar who grew up without a father to guide him away from the sinful temptations outside his home. He bobs in and out of this perspective, but the repeated pledges to loyalty and martyrdom evoke the life and mind of a young gang member who carries his neighborhood flag because no one’s proved to him that he shouldn’t. These choices, Lamar suggests, aren’t pre-determined or innate, but in constant dialogue with and in reaction to their surrounding circumstances. They aren’t above or beneath anyone who can hear his voice. Success and failure choose their subjects at their whim; we’re as grateful as Kendrick for his fate.
Tue Apr 18 05:00:00 GMT 2017Drowned In Sound 90
So how does the hottest, most talented hip hop artist of his generation follow up his era-defining, genre-redefining third album? Expectations were undoubtedly, and wholly justifiably, running at the highest level imaginable for Kendrick Lamar’s latest release, after 2015’s startling masterwork To Pimp a Butterfly.
So does DAMN. meet those expectations? Well yes – but by taking a surprising side-step rather than a pace forward in its artistic development.
What we have here are 14 songs – all one word CAPS LOCK titled – that are far less overtly ‘themed’ than Kendrick’s two previous albums (although some overall thematic strands do emerge), that stand alone as distinct tracks in and of themselves and that are far plainer and more pared-down in their execution.
So it’s goodbye to Kamasi Washington jazz flourishes and hello to sparse backing, beats and basslines and the rapper’s voice – mostly laconic on the likes of ‘YAH.’ and ‘PRIDE.’, masterfully switching pace and tone on ‘HUMBLE.’, and astonishing us with its flow on ‘DNA.’, ‘ELEMENT.’ and ‘FEEL.’ – very much to the fore.
Although the album is bookended by the same phrase – ‘BLOOD.’ begins, and ‘DUCKWORTH.’ ends with Kendrick recounting “So I was taking a walk the other day” – what is homed in-between is diverse and wide-ranging.
Many tracks have a distinctly downbeat feel – Kendrick just seems pretty sad on ‘FEEL.’: “I feel like I’m losing my focus (…) the feeling of no hope” or pleading plaintively “Just love me” on ‘LOVE.’, while ’PRIDE.’ suggests a jaded/bitter worldview: “I don’t love people enough to put my faith in man.” He also repeatedly returns to the fact that there “Ain’t nobody praying for me” (on ‘ELEMENT.’, ‘FEEL.’, ‘XXX.’, and ‘FEAR.’) If this is fame, acclaim and success, then it frequently sounds dissociated and melancholy.
Elsewhere, though, we see the rapper take comfort in his family (“My latest muse my niece, she worth living”, on the lovely, chilled-out ‘YAH.’) and – yes – get fired up by righteous ire, his flow noticeably and deliberately picking up the pace to match the lyrical intensity on the likes of the (incredible) ‘DNA.’ when he spits “I know murder, conviction, burners, boosters, burglars, ballers…” and ebbing and flowing as the words demand on ‘ELEMENT.’ and ‘FEEL.’.
And it’s this pacing, flow and lyricism that makes DAMN. such an engrossing listen. Where previously, some of TPAB’s more experimental and florid elements – dazzling as they were – and overarching themes were the focus of attention, here we simply have Kendrick (or occasional alter-ego Kung-Fun Kenny), plus superb collaborators Rihanna, Zacari and (yes, it’s OK folks, it actually works) U2, talking at us, singing at us, rapping at us: his voice now gentle, now turbo-animated, his words sometimes oblique but always on point.
It’s not what you might have expected or even – on one or two initial listens – have been hoping for from Kendrick Lamar. But this is an artist in his absolute prime: artistically, lyrically and musically. Why would he just deliver the expected?
Tue Apr 25 10:49:53 GMT 2017