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“GOD.” repeats the mantra of “this is what God feels like.” “FEEL.” has Kendrick repeating several lines about, well, how he feels. “LOVE.” ft Zacari is a beautiful and frank love song. “BLOOD.” opens with Kendrick telling a short story of his death, murdered by an old blind woman. The track list consists of one-word, all-caps song titles that seem to detail the topic of the song. DAMN., in some respect, meets us halfway with many of the songs here being open to interpretation, which is somewhat a blessing and a curse. Given Kendrick’s previous two releases between the straightforward storytelling of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and the cryptic poeticism of To Pimp a Butterfly, it was difficult to tell where Kenny was going to head next. Now it’s 2017 and we have DAMN., Kendrick Lamar’s fourth studio album, yet another testament to the unbridled power of rap music.
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Mixing that in with God tier production, carefully chosen features, and a unique, yet ever shifting eclectic style unmatched in modern hip hop, and Kendrick has rightfully earned his early spot in the G.O.A.T. This is a true artist, a hip hop virtuoso able to blend heady poetry and conceptuality with sincere unambiguity. If you’re unfamiliar with Kendrick Lamar, I really hope it’s not cold beneath that rock you live under because the universal acclaim and appeal to his music thankfully isn’t the product of overhype.
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Broadening his horizons further, Kendrick went on to craft an album that is absolutely a modern day classic with the poetic, spiritual, genre bending masterpiece called To Pimp a Butterfly, an album so soaked with genius that even it’s B-Sides culminated into the fantastic Untitled Unmastered released last year. Following up Section.80 with the exhilarating, conceptual rap opera Good Kid, M.A.A.D City Kendrick Lamar became a household name and crafted what some consider to be a modern classic.
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Since his impressive debut album Section.80, Kendrick Lamar has been setting not only the hip hop world ablaze, but the entire musical spectrum as well. Kendrick Lamar is a 29 year old Compton, California native and unstoppable musical force. I wonder if it’s among the reasons that he didn’t include the blistering untitled rap he performed on one of the final episodes of The Colbert Report in December. That refusal may be part of the politic here. And those who are upset that Lamar won’t stay in his lane as a great technical rapper are in a sense doing the same thing. Yet when Obama does invite Common to the White House, or perhaps when I label Kendrick Lamar as a poet, that is also an act of containment, of domestication, of pimping the butterfly. Because, the subtext clearly went, only a black president would debase poetry (which Fox News of course holds so sacred) by including rap in it. And while the other radical poets tied themselves in knots over whether that made Goldsmith a political sellout, the real action was over on Fox News, where they were raising hell because Common was also on the bill. Kenneth Goldsmith himself was invited by President Obama to the White House a couple of years ago, for a day of poetry appreciation.