Kendrick Lamar - 2017 Album - DAMN

there's a lot of tradition of west coast lyrical/boho rap that kinda gets forgotten among the conventional telling of the west coast as the tale of gangsta rap and NWA

I don't really think tpab sounds *that* much like FF but this is otm

Odd Future draws (drew? no one talks about them anymore lol) from that well too

xpost - i was kinda exaggerating about the FF comparison but the whole loose neo soul vibe and messiness of it does remind me of FF

odd future iirc was more big eminem stans when they were kids

yeah there's that too. Was just thinking that something like the Pharcyde's "4 Better or 4 Worse" totally has that Odd Future vibe

yeah the fat lip versus on that song for sure

there's def a lineage to follow w FF yeah. was listening to Mikah Nine's album 'It's All Love' finding some connections in there
https://youtu.be/qIJxo9kIjBk

I get a little bit of phat lip on 4 Better Or 4 Worse in some of this.

― Aerosol, Saturday, October 23, 2010 10:51 PM (six years ago) Bookmark

from OF thread

great minds think alike

there's bits of FF stuff I like here and there but I feel like none of those guys ever made a 100% solid album, either solo or collectively

you could cobble together a fantastic mixtape from various releases tho

I really think that one i mentioned is fronttoback great.

But for the most part they were a mixed bag yeah

thread got good again

had hopes that AC would have put out at stellar solo after Innercity but All Balls fell kinda flat

title track from that is good tho

all balls is half classic

now you guys got me queuing up all this stuff I have listened to in a long time!

While I really love DNA, I can't get over how poorly the beat is mixed. The distortion on the beat, especially the 2nd part, really takes away some of the fire of the track for me. This is the only track on the album that does this to such a degree. Was it mixed on a pair of Beats or something? Wish I could get a hold of the stems and fix it argh

That aside, I feel this might be his strongest lyrical record to date - both in terms of sound and content. So many subtle tweaks to the vocal timbre, especially on PRIDE (is that Kendrick pitching shifting his voice subtly or software?). A number of songs reference themes from the rest of the album, making everything so interconnected that it almost feels more of a concept album than the last two.

oh and can we talk about how iconic the album art is?

While I really love DNA, I can't get over how poorly the beat is mixed. The distortion on the beat, especially the 2nd part, really takes away some of the fire of the track for me. This is the only track on the album that does this to such a degree. Was it mixed on a pair of Beats or something? Wish I could get a hold of the stems and fix it argh

I thought this at first but decided it was on purpose.

beat goes unhinged when he goes unhinged etc

all those west coast rap callouts up there are ON POINT. huge hieroglyphics and aceyalone fan. might throw blackalicious in that mix too

I thought this at first but decided it was on purpose.

beat goes unhinged when he goes unhinged etc

I can see that, but it's a shame. I feel the beat would have had more power and expressiveness if the bass was clean. I'm also mix and produce so this shit bothers me more than most people I'm sure

thx for the kind words above, guys. I was feeling kind of bummed out today and that helped :)

excellent review whiney

also, re what ppl were saying about FF/Blowed

Multiple songs on Damn have this lyrical style, where it it starts with a strict pattern ("I feel like...") and then explodes outward. Genius explains to me that this is called "anaphora."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd3r3R1ot0E

oh yeah good review cw

tfw when called a beta

http://t12.deviantart.net/71napWuGKHnkxHhvt-I3bte3yhk=/fit-in/150x150/filters:no_upscale():origin()/pre01/88ab/th/pre/f/2015/099/8/7/kendrick_pepe_by_h8nter-d8p29e7.jpg

refreshing after reading some negative responses to the album (don't know why, it's a good one obv.) respect to TSJ but i roll my eyes at their resident kendrick hater.

kinda dig the lo-fi moments on this album, they feel very very intentional and inform the songs' respective meaning imo

Yes grebt review, whiney. I like that you plucked out that bit on Lust where he gets mad about the election and then gets distracted by his daily life -- one of the most honest things I've heard anyone say about life under Trump.

Beta male:2010s::f*g:1990s. Shorthand homophobic cipher for a male who doesn't live up to code, right? FFS.

utterly no. beta male = not your typical alpha male pop star. not always bragging. not constantly telling me how great your life is. not needing to be dominant at every turn. coming off like a real, vulnerable person. I think this is the reason I respond to Kendrick Lamar, so if you're trying to pin "homophobia" on me, FFS indeed, it's clear you have no idea where I'm coming from.

that reading elides the common uses of "beta male" on the internet

ie as a pejorative w homophobic overtones

kendrick is the omega

admittedly, I am not up to speed on many common uses of terms on the internet

While I really love DNA, I can't get over how poorly the beat is mixed. The distortion on the beat, especially the 2nd part, really takes away some of the fire of the track for me. This is the only track on the album that does this to such a degree. Was it mixed on a pair of Beats or something? Wish I could get a hold of the stems and fix it argh

same reason I always skip "Fly Shit Only" on Future's EVOL. Kendrick's performance more than redeems "DNA" but nothing on "Fly Shit Only" makes up for the fact that it sounds like pure butt.

whiney, your review is excellent. i was curious about this line in the first paragraph, though:

His last album, To Pimp a Butterfly, will likely go down as the defining reflection of the America that spawned #BlackLivesMatter, in the same way Pablo Picasso's Guernica stands as the defining reflection of the Spanish Civil War.

are you just trying to set a tone and get a super epic lead-in (nothing wrong with that), or do you actually believe this? (nothing wrong with that, either)

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

Same with Get Out, really

agree with that ^^

who uses alpha/beta to talk about humans in a way that isn't incoherent red pill types raging about their insecurity? even in studying animals there isn't one archetype for alpha behaviour

I totally lose track of the metre during the closing sections of DNA - just after Kendrick switches to triplet flow and there's a big clash with the vocal sample. I have enough faith to suspect this is deliberate but it throws me off every time.

have we determined if kendrick is a cuck tho

bitch don't email my wife

omega has actual anthropological meaning and I retract my previous comment

but yeah, at its core it's a metaphorical mapping of the studies of primate ethology to humans and isn't really relevant to humans -- the whole "alpha" thing has its connotations and people later attempted to pull "beta" in, but those doing it did so as a contrast to the "alpha" moniker. if you see "alpha male" as an unqualified good or desired state then "beta" is undesirable, and vice versa

I totally lose track of the metre during the closing sections of DNA - just after Kendrick switches to triplet flow and there's a big clash with the vocal sample. I have enough faith to suspect this is deliberate but it throws me off every time.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, April 19, 2017 1:21 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was kind of appreciating this on a long drive home last night. People will complain about him cramming his words in or it being messy, but it's more of an interplay with the beat - drifting on and off or seeming like it's slightly out of sync only to lock back in is purposeful and the vocal sample clash ramps it up

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/97/ff/9d/97ff9d8b10b96bf4c8d7cd6217ad9c2d.jpg

used to shop here as a kid

When I was a kid, I read an article in BMX Plus or something in which the author described riding his bike through the Alpha Beta doors. Until just a couple years ago, I didn't know that Alpha Beta was a supermarket chain. I had been running around calling all automatic doors "alpha beta doors".

xxxxpost

i wouldn't have minded so much a comparison to, say, "a change is gonna come"

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.)

anyway, super stoked on "humble" -- my fav track so far, and the video is insane. i especially like the part where he's in the back of his car spreading grey poupon onto a slice of untoasted white bread

which led me to this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rappers-grey-poupon-hip-hop-lyrics_us_5800f933e4b0162c043b8009

*not talking about your review

xpost to mh, i always thought the most immediate connotation of "omega" is theological. when i read your original post i assumed you were assigning kl messianic status