It’s Kendrick’s Party, You Can Cry If You Want To

Maybe this is my fault. For years I’ve been begging Kendrick Lamar to lighten up a little. To stop with the hip-hop savior complex and the often incoherent political grandstanding. To stop treating music like a college level African-American history course and just enjoy himself. Well, that more or less arrived in 2024: the year of Kendrick Lamar. We’ve seen him battle and ultimately defeat Drake, put on for the West Coast, and work his way into being this season’s Super Bowl halftime performer. To commemorate all this success, he has released a new album, GNX, in a surprise drop over the weekend that appropriately sent the internet into hysterics.

In a bit of irony that I’m sure is not lost on Kendrick, GNX is a party record full of earworms and radio-friendly pop records that, on the surface, more closely resembles something Drake would release than the sweeping artistic statements Kendrick has become known for. It is a victory lap in album form, ostensibly a showcase of Kendrick relaxing and having a good time. But there is something a little too empty about it for comfort. To paraphrase his words in “TV Off,” there’s a few solid jams on this record but it’s not enough.

Part of my indifference to the great Kendrick-Drake war is that I find both artists to be two sides of the same, flattened coin—Drake as the vacuous, artificial, emotionally cloying hitmaker who doesn’t take himself seriously, and Kendrick as his opposite, the over-intellectualized, stuffy, self-important hip-hop superego who takes himself too seriously. Both artists could’ve learned a thing or two from the other. In Kendrick’s case, his need to place himself on some imagined rap Mt. Rushmore has kept him from seeing the forest for the trees. He is forever technically proficient, witty, perceptive, lyrically dexterous and inventive. But that by itself doesn’t make you a great artist, and ever since “Not Like Us” it feels like Kendrick has been on a mission to prove he can be every bit the hitmaker that Drake is.

GNX is indebted to Bay Area Hyphy, G-Funk synthesizers, and West Coast gangster music by the likes of Drakeo the Ruler and the Westside Connection. It’s full of pristine production by his longtime collaborator Sounwave, DJ Mustard, and … Jack Antonoff? Sure, why not. Kendrick is the pop-star rapper of the moment. The presence of one of pop’s omnipresent producers is only appropriate on an album where Kendrick places himself in the role of the “black exec” throughout, grasping for something beyond traditional success in his genre. As he raps on “Man In The Garden”:

Keep my name by the world leaders
Keep my crowds loud inside Ibiza
I deserve it all
More money, more power, more freedom
Everything Heaven allowed us, bitch
I deserve it all

And that is what he is: a pop star. Despite the constant desire to position himself as the last hope for the traditionalist rap music he came up on, Kendrick’s biggest problem has always been his inability to square his desire for success with his mission statement of black artistic purity. He covets success’s trappings but knows they are traps. He wants to be as big as Dr. Dre and Jay-Z but to still be able to bare his soul and vulnerabilities and hypocrisies. It’s kept him a critical darling, and a Serious Music Artist, but those things don’t equal success in the industry’s own terms. But with the biggest rap hit of the year and a Super Bowl invitation, there is no more denying his pop stardom, his success. Now that he’s left TDE to start his own company, PGLang, it’s in his best business interests to embrace that superstardom.

In that shadow comes GNX. It’s a bit of a trifle of an album. When it hits, it hits very hard. When it doesn’t, it just kind of sputters into nothing. There’s plenty of his typical lyrical prowess and hypnotic madman bars on songs like “Wacced Out Murals” and the “One Mic” flip “Man In The Garden,” even if he wastes it talking about the success he deserves and chastising Lil Wayne for being upset he didn’t get to do the Super Bowl in his hometown. Songs like “Squabble Up,” “TV Off,” and “Hey Now” are genuinely anthemic records made for blaring out of big speakers. On “TV Off,” Kendrick seems to be having a ball, even before he gets to shouting out Mustard’s name like an angry kid who has just found the condiment on his sandwich after instructing his mom not to put any on there. Some of the best moments on the album come from the appearances from West Coast emcees like Dody6, Lefty Gunplay, Wallie the Sensei, Siete7x, Hitta J3, YoungThreat, Peysoh, and AzChike, who get a big platform to (somewhat) do their thing. But as Alphonse Pierre points out in his review of the album on Pitchfork, it would’ve been nice if some of the West’s best producers got that same shine, especially in light of the overly glossy production work on offer.

The album is rich with Black LA life, from shout-outs to local high schools on “Dodger Blue” to the nods to various West Coast legends throughout. On “The Heart pt. 6,” Kendrick waxes nostalgically about the early TDE days before his success rocketed him past the rest of his labelmates.

Top used to record me back when it was poor me
And now we at the round table for what assures me
I guess my motivation was the yearnin’ for independence
Poured everything I had left in the family business
Now it’s about Kendrick, I wanna evolve, place my skillset as a black exec
I jog my memory, knowin’ Black Hippy didn’t work ’cause of me
Creatively, I moved on with new concepts in reach

There’s plenty to love, but something about this album keeps me from totally embracing it. Maybe it’s the fact that it feels like posse album more than a Kendrick one. Maybe it’s the fact that, even with the album’s lighter and less grandiose sentiment, Kendrick messianic streak has only grown. Maybe it’s because this album contains my new least favorite Kendrick song ever, “Reincarnated,” where his ego goes fully off tilt as he raps as the reincarnation of 2Pac. And yes, I get that it’s likely a reference to Drake’s AI song where he teased Kendrick for his 2Pac obsession. I guess you can give him credit for doubling down on it with this, but the song is so devoid of self-awareness or playfulness that I cannot possibly hand it to him.

It’s frustrating because an album of this general outline is exactly what I’ve been asking for from Kendrick. One in which he releases his inhibitions and feels the rain on his face. The thing is, even if Kendrick has always been a little too serious and gloomy about everything, there’s always something intriguing, insightful, or unexpected to take from his albums. There is a part of me that listens to GNX and only thinks about how he plans to fit it into his halftime performance. It’s a bit of a Darth Vader moment, Kendrick embracing his pop ascendence fully. He killed Drake and now he must take his place, while Drake is stuck crying foul and ruining his credibility. It’s his year and he “deserves it,” I guess, but instead of clapping along and rejoicing, I’m left wondering how many more victory laps one man can take.