Kendrick Lamar - 2017 Album - DAMN

who uses alpha/beta to talk about humans in a way that isn't incoherent red pill types raging about their insecurity?

tbf I think this is a bit of harsh judgment on Dominique, who is def not an incoherent red pill type raging about his masculinity (also he is hottt iirc)

Total babe yeah

but i feel like having kendrick lamar and pablo picasso in the same sentence sort of smacks of that peculiar need critics or intellectuals sometimes have to contextualize/legitimize hip hop. but always sort of doing the opposite and reaffirming the institutions / critical discourses that grant legitimacy, rather than highlighting asymmetrical configurations through which new music is distributed, consumed, evaluated.

you are clearly not suggesting that kendrick lamar needs to be compared to picasso in order to be considered seriously as an artist. but i do feel like there is a kind of weird undertone of "this record belongs in a museum" to that sentence. part of me thinks it's a very minor thing, but on the other hand i feel compelled to bring it up because i'm just really fucking tired of heavy-handed, euro-centric attempts to explain why hip hop is "important." (i'm not your review, to be clear.)

Don Cheadle time

http://pitchfork.com/news/73004-don-cheadle-talks-kendrick-lamars-dna-video-being-the-original-kung-fu-kenny/

I completely see what you mean and I argued this point many times, though TPAB is kind of already archived at Harvard and the man himself is being compared to Gandhi. The problem I have is I feel like Lamar's greatness and virtuosity got shoved down everybody's throat to the point that sometimes it's hard to enjoy as a piece of music. Even very positive opinions somehow feel like this kind of huge relief that it didn't turn out to be a huge letdown and track with U2 didn't turn out to be complete piece of shit. Honestly, it's hard to be surprised about all those dumbass theories with second album, people simply needed more than music to satisfy their expectations, kind of same thing happened to Life of Pablo or Blonde
― piramjida, Wednesday, April 19, 2017 7:37 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This

After three listens, I'm starting to think this won't match the impossibly high standard that GKMC and TPAB set for me. It's a slight dip from perfect to very good. I get a different song stuck in my head every day - today is "Fear", which is such a perfect pairing of beat and lyrics

i didn't know about the harvard thing, it's kind of interesting:

http://hiphoparchive.org/blog/3513-harvard-recognizes-hiphop-classics

NB: Life of Pablo and Blonde are not good albums tho

Made at best above average artists too

I don't think there is another album/movie/TV show/play/book that addresses these concerns with that level of artistry and popularity. Like maybe the only competition is Lemonade, and a lot of that was subtext and readings as opposed to the more explicit politics of TPAB

― SSN Lucci (Whiney G. Weingarten), 19. april 2017 20:05 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think perhaps Ta-nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me will be a contender. No, not as many has read that as has heard King Kunta, but Guernica wasn't the smash hit poster of 37 either.

I phrased it as a question bc you gotta respect DL and wondered if I was missing something.

obv this is full of bars but it's the hooks I'm struck by on this, the soft subtle inflections to kendrick's voice, the measured woozy slowness. he has a good ear for voices; love the sample of RAT BOY on lust. the relative downbeatness of this suits me just fine

Picasso was kind of a rock star in his day.

He had a life

"Lamar's greatness and virtuosity got shoved down everybody's throat to the point that sometimes it's hard to enjoy as a piece of music"

you just have to ignore everything that people write about him. it's the worst. just listen to him instead.

i liked this. just listening this morning while playing resogun. it's not my favorite paranoid jesus album but it has a lot of competition for that title. some really good songs though. more good ones than bad ones. and the good ones definitely invigorating/exciting in that way that he has of invigorating/exciting.

(and the bad not really bad just not as good as the good...)

sure, but can you really do that? let's say you've never heard anything about Kendrick and you listen to DAMN - there's still a lot to enjoy musically but I feel like you'd have trouble interpreting stuff on this album if you weren't aware of the status he's gotten after To Pimp a Butterfly. it just often feels like he actually embraces what people say about him and says things that only make sense or feel important when spoken from a man in his position (i.e. who actually would give a shit about this Pride/Humble juxtaposition if it wasn't image of a man being called the best rapper alive fighting his sins). and it's obviously true and I am not going to argue otherwise - K. Dot at this point is more than a rapper but it's really suffocating when a record is being considered important more than enjoyable

Why?

By which I mean, even granting the fact that it is nigh impossible to enjoy something in a vacuum divorced from other people's opinions, particularly when it comes to one of the most popular artists currently on the scene, why should other people's opinions on a particular album's position in the Official Canon of Music(TM) inhibit you from interacting with the album on your own terms?

tbf, this is probably Kendrick's least "important" record since 2011 AND his most "enjoyable" probably ever

something about this album is making certain people think in thoughtpieces
it's just a really really good album

i kept reading too much about Get Out and then i never went and saw it. i got sick of it a little. and everyone's "take". that was my fault though. i was gonna go see it the first day and didn't. kendrick the get out of rappers! so i didn't read about the new one. just fired up the spotify on the PS4 and enjoyed the experience. and almost beat my record on resongun: demolition mode too. (21st in the world, by the way...)

yeah, it is definitely an album for simpletons like me.

though there is still a lot going on.

love that rihanna one by the way.

If the album is as timeless as everyone will claim there's nothing wrong with waiting out the avalanche of discussion & going back to it when the air has cleared

something about this album is making certain people think in thoughtpieces

lol that something is "released by Kendrick Lamar"

the new Actress album is really not good for playing Resogun though. so boring. i quickly found a Perlon mix to listen to and everything was okay again.

swerve swerve swerve swerve deeper now

"Feel"'s production, the kinda watery synth pad and the ghostly processed voice almost reminds me of a hip hop version of early Burial

If the album is as timeless as everyone will claim there's nothing wrong with waiting out the avalanche of discussion & going back to it when the air has cleared

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Thursday, April 20, 2017 12:50 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

obv nothing wrong w/ doing this even for albums that aren't "timeless"

hot take: albums can't be "timeless"

agree

except for Goldie

Harvard archive curated by 9th Wonder, everybody in my town pretty proud about that

minidiscs can be timeless

some records exist mainly as an expression of a buzz cycle at the time & others will sustain past it

i think its fair to say that fewer ppl care about i.e. shamir now than did when he first arrived and got fucking new yorker features written about him, for example.

obviously nothing is timeless—as we all die & memory of minor cultural contributions will be eventually wiped from history

your keef tweets excepted obv

keef is not timeless, he is the very essence of time

i was reading an old interview with jim from jesus & mary chain after psychocandy came out and he actually talked about how after they made the album they thought it would be one of those timeless records that people would listen to for years. and he didn't say it in a smug way. he seemed surprised that they had done that. he also couldn't imagine the band existing for another five years. that felt like an endless amount of time to him. he had no idea that his band would also be forever.

Why?

By which I mean, even granting the fact that it is nigh impossible to enjoy something in a vacuum divorced from other people's opinions, particularly when it comes to one of the most popular artists currently on the scene, why should other people's opinions on a particular album's position in the Official Canon of Music(TM) inhibit you from interacting with the album on your own terms?

a lot of stuff has this "this is Kendrick Lamar speaking" vibe attached to it

not trying to troll just trying to understand what you mean, because p much every rap album ever has a "this is XX speaking" vibe? (to me at least?)

also off-topic

On "Pride" his flow is so obviously influenced by a lot of Q-Tip's verses on the latest Tribe album

i dont see timeless as some kind of metric by which to measure the worthiness of an album or something, but obv some stuff gets slept on & some stuff gets overhyped & some stuff gets the right amt of attention

as determined by whom, kemosabe

xxxp:

I think people in general are granting special status to Kendrick almost solely because he is Kendrick. Any artist is going to have context behind their work, whether they are being held up as the top of the current field or a niche artist with a self-limiting, insular fanbase unlikely to expand into mainstream success. There's just as much context/baggage going into an ANHONI or Bjork or Justin Bieber or Miranda Lambert or Amanda Forsyth or Future Islands or anyone you can think of recording as there is going into a Kendrick recording; the main difference is that everyone has decided that that context/baggage is a major conversation point and worth engaging with and dissecting. Very few people are going to spend a ton of time going into the context behind the music of The Chainsmokers, and those who do are going to be accused of overthinking things because The Chainsmokers haven't fallen into a box where they're tagged as Important Music. People are interested in the motivations behind Important music; the million-dollar question is "what makes this music Important?" and for Kendrick, it's mostly because a lot of people said "because it is" (partially because there's no universal definition of "Important Music" and everyone is bringing slightly different criteria to the table when evaluating it; part of what's happening here IMO is that Kendrick is doing so many things that he's ticking off a lot of boxes that appear on people's personal "Important Music" checklists, giving him in aggregate the categorization).

for everyone who complains about a lot kendrick's content only being relevant if you care about kendrick or it being about his ego, i mean i find that he uses a lot of his "personal issues" content as a way to speak to wider issues that are actually relevant and important, and some critics i've read who complain about him sound a lot like people who don't want to hear about the problems of certain other people.

however i'm not necessarily saying that about anyone here.

what I'm saying is you could take Section.80 or probably also GKMC, listen to it front to back and just enjoy it as it is without needing any outside explanation of who is the guy delivering the message. I feel like same thing can't necessarily be said about Damn, here you have this image of Kendrick as some kind of messiah or martyr reaching out to human beings, you have HUMBLE, you have this thing where he responds to Geraldo Rivera and in my opinion to understand those things and why he portrays himself this way requires you to understand the context of what happened after TPAB.

Rachel Luther Queen, yeah, fully agreed

DJP otm

what I'm saying is you could take Section.80 or probably also GKMC, listen to it front to back and just enjoy it as it is without needing any outside explanation of who is the guy delivering the message. I feel like same thing can't necessarily be said about Damn, here you have this image of Kendrick as some kind of messiah or martyr reaching out to human beings, you have HUMBLE, you have this thing where he responds to Geraldo Rivera and in my opinion to understand those things and why he portrays himself this way requires you to understand the context of what happened after TPAB.

― piramjida, Thursday, April 20, 2017 2:29 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe you did enjoy GKMC or Section.80 w/out context but context helps understanding both of those projects a lot.