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Debates on which of Kendrick Lamar’s albums is the best clock in at thousands of forum thread pages, an untold number of tweets, and many many hours of reading time. Turns out it’s hard to choose when a discography is full of 10/10s. Regularly hailed as one of the greatest rappers of all time, K-Dot began honing his craft as a teenager in the 2000s, releasing mixtapes with Compton friends and family that opened him up to the conceptual, uncompromising themes he would truly begin crystallising on his 2011 debut album Section.80. What followed was a crucial three album run that would enshrine his artistry in university curriculums, the Pulitzer Prize’s ranks, and the language of the public around the world.
From Earthly trials to mortal reckonings, Kendrick has documented and mythologised his upbringing in the Compton projects, envisioning hip hop as a storytelling vessel for narratives on epic scales. His major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city is a semi-autobiographical piece that finds him elasticating his voice and constantly switching up his flow to examine from all angles the pressures of growing up in an environment shaped by gang culture, supported by the fusions of woozy psychedelia, slick funk, and hardcore hip hop rhythms.
It’s a vital piece of exposition (and the beginning of back to back #1s) leading up to the revelatory dialogues of To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick’s dual love letter to Black culture and no-holds-barred exposure of racism in America. Bringing jazz and soul to the forefront of his hyperconscious lyricism, Kendrick unravels the ills and idylls of modern society, spawning an unexpected protest anthem in the process as ‘Alright’ became the sound of the streets and beyond, organically recontextualised in Black Lives Matter marches and social justice movements forevermore.
And where Kendrick imagined a posthumous audience with his hero Tupac on TPAB, he explored his own mortality and stature on DAMN. A story of biblical proportions, DAMN. is perhaps Kendrick at his most experimental, weaving complex, dense plots and themes through otherworldly combinations of pop, rap, R&B, and deep semantic sampling. It comes as no surprise that this album, among others in his career, has found its way into high school literature textbooks; Kendrick Lamar is the 21st century’s most eloquent emissary of rap as rhythm and poetry.
