Review
Music Features
Kendrick Lamar's rules for rap's new administration
Having already won the year, the rapper aims on the surprise-released 'GNX' to change the state of play for everyone else
Kendrick Lamar surprise-released the new album GNX on Nov. 22, capping off a year of wins. pgLang/Courtesy of the artist hide caption
Winning isn't enough to satisfy Kendrick Lamar, our new undisputed pound-for-pound rap king, who unseated the streaming despot, presided over a summer of roasts, made a diss track a chart-topper and song of the year contender at the Grammys, and scored the Super Bowl as a prize for his ascension. As he mounts the rap throne, the corpse of his rival in the succession contest strewn before him, there is still, apparently, unfinished business to settle. His official mandate is a cultural reset. But first: He's come for his credit.
His new album, surprise-released on Friday, establishes the conditions of a regime change. "Not Like Us" drew a line in the sand with Drake as a representation of everything the pgLang boss saw as rot in need of excising from rap. GNX lays out a Kendrick agenda aligned with that message: truth-telling and fraud-exposing, going scorched-earth, drawing out the fence-sitters in an ostensible culture war he is hell-bent on ending. As part of his efforts, he is claiming territory and redrawing maps with Compton as the center of the universe. He pledges death to your hip-hop — the one of an oppositional "they" that is not like the "us" of the Kendrick coalition, and he does so with the understanding that his word is now law. "It's a lot of opinions, but no power to carry it / 2025, they still movin' on some scary s***," he raps on the opener, "wacced out murals." "Tell 'em quit they job and pay the real n****s they severance / Don't insult my intelligence, I'm not just for the television." More than once, the TV is presented as a window into a phantom zone of misappropriated hip-hop influence, a deception at odds with on-the-ground reality. The music he makes in this mode is, fittingly, combative, not defensive — squabbling up, blacking out, taking G-passes, crashing out — drawing a meticulous professional into a thrillingly impulsive posture.
There's an urge to hear this record as less thematic than previous Kendrick statement pieces (the cinematic good kid, m.A.A.d city, the radical, jazz-immersed To Pimp a Butterfly, the puzzle-box Pulitzer winner DAMN.), primarily because it is less conceptually focused, but his desire to take back what is owed him for repeatedly shifting the culture amounts to a pretty clear directive. Though it is without grandiose airs, GNX is no less sonically audacious than those other albums, following his West Coast-unifying turn to its logical conclusion with a quintessential LA rap record, fine-tuned to evoke the post-Mustard New West of artists like the late Drakeo the Ruler, BlueBucksClan and RJmrLA. Kendrick has long prioritized execution, once saying he spends 80% of his creative process "figuring out how I'm going to convey these words to a person to connect to it. What is this word that means this, how did it get here and why did it go there and how can I bring it back there? Then, the lyrics are easy." That sense of precision will never be abandoned in his work, and GNX is almost as deliberately engineered as everything else he's done — but the album is imbued with a looseness that can only come with feeling untouchable. It is as if his execution ethic is now less about putting a plan into effect and more about simply taking action: His raps are snappy, to the point and on the front foot, instincts he followed in his recent dust-up and continues to implement to his strategic advantage. This is easily the most immediate and accessible album he's ever made, in a moment where he has more eyes and ears on him than ever before. If To Pimp a Butterfly was chiefly preoccupied with survivor's remorse and the temptations of celebrity, GNX is Kendrick's recompense moment, the sound of an artist knowing he's way too important to ever let you slide on him again.
That's a dramatic change of pace for Kendrick, who has always been unflappable but rarely demanding, happy to simply descend from the mountain every few years, confer his LPs like stone tablets and return to the quietude of his monastery. In 2022, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, perhaps the first of his albums that could be described as polarizing, attempted to withdraw his name from candidacy as our artist-emancipator. This summer changed all that: Becoming Drake's nemesis meant becoming the voice of the people, taking on a Skynet-like system and its ubiquitous, algorithm-fed dominance, its dilution of the culture into product, generating runoff that has trickled as far as K-pop and Afrobeats. Before, he was a loner trying to absolve himself of silence; now, he emerges a regional bellwether set on being the new arbiter of taste. Good news for listeners: His taste is impeccable. The songs on this album are among the most by-the-numbers in his catalog, but he is incapable of doing anything ordinary. The flows — which, he notes from the beginning, eschew double entendre — are strutting and slippery. The production skips purposefully from warped LA rider music to warm but muted R&B and soul, spelled by little interjections from mariachi performer Deyra Barrera, whom Kendrick discovered playing a tribute at a Dodgers World Series game. The album nods to the musical community he has built — Kamasi Washington, Terrace Martin, Dahi and Mustard — and the broader one he personifies, displaying a unified front from his position of strength. "Everybody must be judged," he sings in an unreleased song featured in a trailer dropped shortly before the album, "but this time God only favoring us."
Ironically, the two songs from beef season that set the tone for GNX are the only ones that weren't released officially: the Instagram exclusives "6:16 in LA" and "Watch the Party Die." Both lament the state of the rap business ("The mannerisms of Raphael, I can heal or give you art / But the industry's cooked as I pick the carcass apart") and its culture ("Influencers talk down 'cause I'm not with the basic s*** / But they don't hate me, they hate the man that I represent"). Here, on songs like "wacced out murals" and "tv off," there is a similar concern for what is becoming of the music he reveres: His raps are agitated, as if he is being personally blasphemed against. "How annoying, does it angers me to know the lames can speak / On the origins of the game I breathe? That's insane to me," he howls on "man at the garden," his voice distorting into layers. In a year in which Kendrick has chosen violence, he is now seeing his holy crusade through, in search of a new vision of the future. In keeping with his Juneteenth event, The Pop Out, that vision includes a parade of young local rappers — Dody6, AzChike, Roddy Ricch, Hitta J3, among others — and the sounds they embody, executed with a distinctly K.Dot virtuosity and toeing the lines between force and finesse, rawness and refinement, hotheaded and enlightened.
Kendrick Lamar performs during "The Pop Out — Ken & Friends," his June 19 concert event at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif. Timothy Norris/Getty Images for pgLang, Amazon/Getty Images North America hide caption
Not coincidentally, the producers behind those two Insta songs, the TDE draftsman Sounwave and the pop whisperer Jack Antonoff, shape the way this album sounds. It often bears the black Air Force energy of that stark "Watch the Party Die" cover art, leading Kendrick and company into flexing positions: See the staggering, swaggering procession "gnx," or the whirring whack-a-mole exercise "peekaboo," each full of preening, self-assured verses. But just like his Gemini idol Tupac Shakur, his temperament is bipolar, and thinking about recognition leads the rapper to some reflective spaces. "heart pt. 6" opens a TDE time capsule, examining scenes from the Black Hippy come up to establish how the Kendrick Lamar we know was built — the lessons he collected as an apprentice on leadership and trusting the process, what was learned and what was lost. At the center of the album, literally and figuratively, is "reincarnated," Kendrick's shot-for-shot recreation of a 2Pac song (with nods to Eminem), which plays out a series of artistic rebirths across space and time leading to this one. It is here that he grapples with the responsibility of being anointed amid the pull of self-importance.
Duality and contradiction have been recurring concerns for the rapper. There are rarely easy answers in his music, which often petitions the listener to parse his complexity (and, occasionally, his hypocrisy). This time, he wrestles with dueling impulses to build and destroy, and the challenge of managing ego and ambition in the midst of a higher calling. "I do believe in love and war, and I believe they both need to exist," he told SZA in a conversation for Harper's Bazaar last month. "My awareness of that allows me to react to things but not identify with them as who I am." You can see that back-and-forth dichotomy, being a vessel for divergent drives, playing out across the album: On "squabble up," the punchy intro from the "Not Like Us" video, he bobs through manifesting the image of Tupac spitting at the camera, while on "luther," his hopeful, "If This World Were Mine"-sampling SZA duet, he is more subdued, set on being a healer. Sometimes, as he sees it, war is waged in the name of love. "If this world was mine, I'd take your dreams and make 'em multiply," he sings. "If this world was mine, I'd take your enemies in front of God / Introduce 'em to that light, hit them strictly with that fire." Listening to "man at the garden," a song that threatens to burn everything down and spill more blood if the integrity with which he has moved isn't acknowledged, you get the sense that he is caught somewhere between the artist who has realized his ambitions, the disciple who believes in his divine purpose and the sinner who has had to scrap for everything he has.
Throughout GNX, the Buick Grand National Regal comes to represent both aspiration and achievement, a talisman of wish fulfillment and a symbol of American muscle, marking how small Kendrick's initial dreams now seem compared to his immense influence. "All I ever wanted was a black Grand National / F*** being rational / Give 'em what they ask for," he exclaims on "tv off." "I deserve it all / VVSs, white diamonds / GNX with the seat back, reclinin'," he declares on "man at the garden." It isn't an accident that this is his first album full of trunk-rattling rap designed to bleed out of slow-rolling subs — the spaceships on Rosecrans bumping creaky, alien slappers. Giving 'em what they ask for is often the simplest way to receive your just due, and with GNX, Kendrick delivers the kind of undeniable record that solidifies a generational run.
Credit is the target of aspiration and the reward for achievement, so it's appropriate that GNX ends with the pseudo-ballad "gloria," revealed in its final act to be about his relationship with his pen, which is presented as the source of all that he has accomplished. His voice is hushed as he marks out their symbiotic connection. "I gave you life, I breathe the motherf***in' charisma in this b****. I bring the blessings, I gave you power. N****, I bring the rainfall, I gave you hustle," SZA says, performing as the voice of the implement. It's thought-provoking, and tone-shifting, that an album full of big talk about what Kendrick's done and what he deserves ends in an almost devotional place, imagining writing as a spiritual revelation, as much epiphany or divine intervention as talent or hard labor. "gloria" thinks of craft as a probing force, the process through which hard truths are revealed, even, or especially, in times of triumph. It becomes clear in that moment that winning is only a function of that process, of inspiration and evolution, and that it serves primarily to reinforce a certain artistic integrity. By the end of GNX, Kendrick has made a strong case: A win for credibility is a win for the culture.