It was obvious that rapper Kendrick Lamar was going to release an album even before his likely coronation in late January 2025 at the Grammy Awards, the American music awards where he has seven nominations, including five for a single song, Not Like Us, a piece designed to crush his rival, the Canadian Drakeconsidered too pop, too diluted. He couldn’t leave his fans hungry after that off track (attack song) which broke all online listening records in the world. We could also expect a new project for February 2025, before halftime of the Super Bowl, the final of the American football championship of the National Football League (NFL), where the kid from Compton has to put on a show. But no one expected a sixth album so soon.
Not content to defy all predictions by publishing, on the afternoon of Friday, November 22nd, GNXa true love letter to California, rap’s little genius, the only one to win the Pulitzer Prizein 2018, he added to everyone’s surprise twelve tracks, including eleven co-produced by his co-production Sounwave but especially by the very prominent pop producer, Jack Antonoff, to whom we owe the recent albums of Taylor SwiftLana Del Rey or Sabrina Carpenter.
But there’s very little talk of pop on this record that begins with the flights of Mexican singer Deyra Barrera, a mariachi Lamar had spotted during a game with the Dodgers, the Los Angeles baseball team. The one accompanying the guitarists and trumpeters was invited to play in the studio, not knowing that she would be found three times on this record: at the beginning of the album for the terrible Murals Wcced Outin the introduction to reincarnatea dedicated title Tupac ShakurKendrick Lamar’s idol who himself paid tribute to the Mexican community in his song To live and die in LA., and finally with the title glory.
Even the softest and loudest songs are real R’n’B bombs, destined for underground dance floors, like Luther, in tribute to the crooner Luther Vandross, died in 2005duet with singer SZA; Dodger Bluea funk ballad about the freeways of Los Angeles that gang members around town are sure to play on their car stereos; Or Peekaboowhich begins with a sample of soul from the 1970s, Give me a handby Little Beaver, one of those stories mumbled by the town’s pimps, playing with their words and sounds.
You still have 51.21% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
