When blues titan John Lee Hooker got his first guitar, his father, a farmer and part-time reverend, wouldn’t let him bring it through the front door. “My daddy called it the Devil,” Hooker recounted in Charles Schaar Murray’s 2002 biography Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century. “He said, ‘You can’t bring the Devil in this house.’” (This is a common plot point: In Arkansas, a young Al Green was kicked out after his father discovered a Jackie Wilson record in his possession.) Hooker seems to come up in Kendrick Lamar’s “reincarnated,” a time-traveling remake of 2pac’s “Made Niggaz” and a centerpiece for Lamar’s jittery surprise-released new album, GNX. The cut visits three distinct stories of musicians potentially misusing their influence: a Detroit blues icon progressing from clashing with his father to dying in wealth and leaving a prickly reputation behind; a Chitlin’ Circuit singer like Billie Holiday or Dinah Washington succumbing to the ravages of addiction; and Lamar himself, a certified bogeyman claiming peace who recently finished waging a generation-defining rap war. Couched on either side by Cali fight anthems, “reincarnated” recasts this spring’s commotion with Drake and everything since as a dialogue about stewardship. Hooker adapted his sound to suit white folk and blues enthusiasts in the ’60s and voiced frustration about reception in his own community. While blues legends sold authenticity and jazz greats fell under the spell of hard drugs, “reincarnated” frames a taste for violence as our generation’s manifestation of the fleshly urges church leaders denounce whenever secular music is deemed demonic.
Like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, GNX is a work that understands the value of a villain as a catalyst for heroes’ victories. You could tell Lamar was pining for a change of pace on Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, a Christ-refusing-the-throne-in-the-Gospel-of-John play that left the audience with a shrugging “I choose me, I’m sorry.” It was his stuffiest work; reform was in order. Beef offered the perfect vehicle for speeding off into a new method of operating. The challenge from the Toronto rap juggernaut and crossover king forced his Compton counterpart to restate values and burrow into geographical specificity. GNX documents a colder, more local turn, solving some of the previous album’s problems. In isolating what he hated about modern mainstream rap in “Not Like Us” and its ilk, he crafted a playbook and a national thirst for another platter of hometown pride and righteous ire. Zooming in on a vandalized mural of himself to start the album, Lamar offers the icy, regal victory lap fans crave and reaffirms a place in the pecking order of West Coast rap giants by gesturing to the past and future of the field. You wanted the beast; you got the beast.
Lamar’s coarse, quick-hit releases dominated earlier this year, and GNX rolls with the momentum. It ruffles feathers with short, aggressively regional and commercial songs building on the ethos and contradictions of “The Pop Out,” a peace event for everyone except a few guys. Longtime collaborator Sounwave’s productions are fleshed out by a team at various points including Taylor Swift regular Jack Antonoff, “Not Like Us” maestro Mustard, and sax visionary Kamasi Washington. The sound runs as claustrophobic as you could possibly imagine this crew getting. Brash hi-hats taking after Drakeo the Ruler’s “Flu Flamming” and keyboards leaning into the squiggly synth work in Mac Dre classics displace Morale’s tap-dance confessionals. You could slip GNX’s title track into Xzibit’s Restless without anyone noticing. Alternately beefy and chilly sonics deliver Cali rap history lessons that fit the tone of an album chock-full of threats — “I’m doing what COVID did,” opener “wacced out murals” promises, “they’ll never get over it” — but also pointers on conflict resolution. Though communication is key, certain doors open exclusively through combativeness; it’s thanks in part to the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden that life can be a climb. Dualities and imperfections rule the day. Dot plays both the disgraced Luciferian musician in “reincarnated” and the goat-slaughtering prophet in “hey now.” He’s not just the avenging rap regent responding to gripes about his Super Bowl halftime show; he’s also the curator spotlighting artists downstream. The same advocate who featured Mozzy and SOB x RBE songs on the Black Panther soundtrack packs GNX with verses from Los Angeles–area rappers AzChike, Hitta J3, and Roddy Ricch.
Surveying the misgivings of music-business predecessors, peers, and would-be protégés, Kendrick signs up for a season of being light on his feet and straight to the point. His eventful year suggested that greatness is a game of maintaining a nagging nearness, that GOAT is a teacher’s position, and that your legacy is best measured by your impact on the lives of others — by your children’s wellness and your hometown’s growth and your culture’s sustainability. GNX’s delighted villainy comes from the same place as the bittersweet aching to leave Top Dawg Entertainment to rocket to “new concepts in reach,” which he details in “heart pt. 6,” a tale of striving to build something you don’t feel as attached to anymore. Change will present as a brushfire; be water. The most devilish inclinations here are thematic inversions of the Chick-tract faithfulness of “Mortal Man” and “How Much a Dollar Cost.” (The Isaiah 14 mention in “reincarnated” calls back to the odd biblical fixations of DAMN. The chapter houses frothy verses about the son of the dawn cast from the heavens; it also, as is Isaiah’s tendency, promises the destruction of Israel’s neighboring enemies.) The choppiest lyrical turns arrive at the same ideological destinations as songs about civic duties, driving home through a weedier part of town. “gloria” likens the pen to a mistress; GNX just as often wields it like a morning star.
This is Kendrick’s most pointedly millennial work. It’s fixated on the trappings of a bygone luxury, flexing ownership of one of just 547 ’87 Buick Grand National GNXs in existence on the cover and brimming with nods to ’80s R&B and freestyle music like “luther” with SZA and “squabble up.” With a foot planted firmly in past traditions, Lamar also wants it understood that he can keep pace with the next crop of rappers, dabbling as much in the tricky timing of modern Vallejo and South Central rhymers as he does in tributes to Pac and Nas. (The latter’s spirit is felt in the “One Mic” drums appearing in “man at the garden” as well as in the “If I Ruled the World” conceit of “luther” and the “I Gave You Power” and “I Used to Love H.E.R.” airs peppering “gloria.”) Being born into hip-hop’s middle-child generation means grumbling about old codes dying but also adapting yours to meet shifting mores. The screaming optimism of To Pimp a Butterfly’s “Alright” fermented in the heat of rising tensions and global temperatures, and everyone is accounting for this in some way. Drill rap glares unrelentingly into grim fantasies of aggrievement and reprisal; the podcast circuit coddles offended hypermasculine sensibilities. (Drake has cast his lot with the deeply online. His new racketeering complaint against Universal Music Group, a stunning turn for a rapper who wore a “Stop RICO” tee last year, carries a whiff of the logic of rap-media conspiracy theorists and gambling streamers in orbit. But it would make an incredible war epilogue if the OVO claim managed to catch a major cooking its books.) Shepherding 20th-century morality in a 21st century putting old norms to pasture, Kendrick feels charged to be both incendiary and inspiring. “I do believe in love and war,” he told SZA in Harper’s Bazaar last month, “and I believe they both need to exist. And my awareness of that allows me to react to things but not identify with them as who I am.”
The album jostles between love and war too intensely, though. It’s a bit of a bumpy listen, if less so than the meandering Morale. The clash between the conventional and the confrontational is pronounced as the clanking title track and the post-Drakeo “peekaboo” jut out notably in a back half that otherwise seems to want to be sedate. Heavier songs — like “reincarnated” in its Ken Burns’ Jazz–meets–Tales From the Hood glory — cast a shadow over quicker, punchier work. The slighter stuff sometimes makes the gooier tunes feel like obligations to a sound the audience loves. The overarching point that the guy faithfully claiming ownership of blessings he feels he deserves in “man at the garden” can also be the one yelling “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, that’s my bitch!” in “peekaboo” is compelling. And the slipperiness of these performances is astounding. Like the video for “squabble up” — a nod to the 1999 clip for the Roots’ “The Next Movement” and a live museum exhibit of Cali culture suggesting we hold Nate Dogg hooks in a greater esteem than we do as a nation — GNX’s aqueous, catch-as-catch-can selfhood says, “We’re all of this and more.”