Generally speaking, therapy works. Alas, the jury is still out on whether that truism extends to Kendrick Lamar.
Despite extolling the virtues of mental health on 2022’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, Cornrow Kenny’s behavior this year is far from the image of a centered man. You don’t devote this much of your calendar year to wishing death on your prime nemesis while finding increasingly catchy ways to call them a pedophile if you’re a well-adjusted individual. In retrospect, that’s what makes the loophole of his generational trauma anthem, “Father Time,” all the funnier. Kendrick knew himself and thus built an escape hatch into his newly enlightened persona, in case a certain colleague-turned-colonizer got too frisky.
“When Kanye got back with Drake, I was slightly confused,” Kendrick rapped on “Father Time,” a song otherwise uninterested in Aubrey Graham. “Guess I’m not mature as I think, got some healin’ to do.”
Nine hundred and twenty-four days later, it’s safe to say that very little healing occurred. In fact, the most dominant year of Kendrick’s life arrived at the peak of his toxicity. Eckhart Tolle must be beside himself.
On Friday, Kendrick dropped his sixth studio album, GNX, with little warning and less patience. The 12-song project is Lamar’s briefest and most infectious, capping off one of the greatest runs for a rapper since the days Future streamed codeine out of his peehole. GNX is a monument to ego, a 45-minute treatise on the power of rolling up to your biggest hater’s funeral to ensure they’ve departed this mortal coil. The project is as jubilant as it is paranoid—a global artist retreating into themselves and regionality, a nihilistic celebration and slight rebuke of everything “Not Like Us” wrought.
For the first time in Lamar’s career, he acquiesced to public demand, or as he says so spiritedly on “tv off”—“Fuck being rational, give ‘em what they ask for.” He did the thing and fought the fight; it got dark and messy quick. The beef is now an industry unto itself, spawning hits (“Like That,” “Not Like Us”), landing him a Super Bowl performance, and rejuvenating a coast (The Pop Out). Kendrick became a 24-hour news cycle, and despite the rapper trying to end the party, no one seems interested in leaving the Lamar household.
This gives GNX its propulsive edge. To outmaneuver one of the most popular celebrities of the 21st century, Kendrick became one—sacrificing the decade-long mystique and armor he built for himself in the process. If you’re a rapper this famous for this long it’s only a matter of time until you deliver your God-complex album, a type of project Drake turned into his bread and butter and one that Lamar often seemed above until now.
GNX is a needed pivot, a lonely, insular, and crabby record. It’s remarkable for its restraint and relatively modest scope—the first of Kendrick’s major-label albums not overburdened with a capital-C Concept. The project is so lean and straightforward, debate is raging over whether a more substantial album is on the horizon.
The title of the project is in reference to Kendrick’s dream car, a 1987 Buick Grand National GNX. Lamar’s father owned a Regal when he was a child, and the rapper recently celebrated buying the souped-up edition. Fans arguing over the symbolic weight of a Buick feels quaint considering the last two mystery box albums were about eternal damnation and 400 years of oppression.
Kendrick Lamar stories are written on a grand and suffocatingly mythic scale. The plot of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is staged like a John Singleton movie, Kendrick’s origin story encapsulating an entire era of 2000s Black life. Kendrick cast his net wider and wider on subsequent albums until it felt like he was boxed in by the glut of ambition. For all of Mr. Morale’s highs, it’s all right to admit that Kendrick’s post-pandemic, Kodak rehabilitation project was doing too much. The vibes grew so intense, Lamar had to hire his own cousin to open the blinds and lighten the mood.
It’s what makes the overreaction to a song like “wacced out murals” feel slightly justified.
The Whodini-sampling intro is sparse and petty, Kendrick sounding like an exhausted and disappointed father.
The stakes of the lead track are cartoonishly specific, an evil Charlie Brown joke where Lamar is bummed that a mural of his face was destroyed in the wake of his neverending feud with Drake. To add insult to injury, he sees his revered idols conduct themselves in sad and confounding ways—lightly scolding Lil Wayne for his antics surrounding the Super Bowl and worrying if Snoop let the edibles impair his decision-making when he co-signed Drake’s AI-assisted monstrosity. Snoop laughed it off, Wayne … did not.
If this all sounds ridiculous, Kendrick is aware but undeterred. The most clarifying lyric of “wacced out murals” arrives on the second verse when Kendrick raps: “This is not for lyricists, I swear it’s not the sentiments / Fuck a double entendre, I want y’all to feel this shit.” The line is as funny as it is accurate, the petulant raps of a vindicated man. For now, lyrical-miracle Lamar must stay in Cabo.
GNX operates like a checklist and acknowledgment. It’s an album artist ceding the floor to convention, proof that Kendrick is far more adept at making bangers and radio-friendly fare than the last five years of his career would imply. SZA appears twice, magnificently on the Cheryl Lynn and Vandross–sampling “luther,” quietly realigning Kendrick with the most successful of his former TDE labelmates. Jack Antonoff, pop music’s resident and maligned star whisperer, is credited on every track but one, making him likely the only person to have production credits for both Lana Del Rey and Lefty Gunplay. Even on Kendrick’s modern L.A. rap album, he can’t help but go pop.
Despite the absence of “Not Like Us,” the lessons gleaned from the career-defining song inform nearly every part of the album. GNX doubles down on West Coast regionalism and heritage. There’s subterranean hyphy, mariachi singers, Tupac flips, and Drakeo-indebted flows. This many up-and-coming West Coast rappers haven’t been featured on a Kendrick album since the Obama administration. Dody6 and AzChike almost get the better of the 37-year-old Lamar on “hey now” and “peekaboo.” For years, Drake used the under-30 crowd and the local scenes they inspired as a fountain of youth, which makes Kendrick’s gambit all the more ironic. In proximity to youthful ignorance, Kendrick too blooms.
The sheer brilliance of “tv off” almost makes the case for the entire project’s existence by itself. The spiritual successor to “Not Like Us” reunites Kendrick with a resurgent Mustard. On the song, Kendrick positions himself as rap’s “Alpha and Omega” at a time where “solid niggas” are at an all-time deficit. There’s a villainous glee to the nearly four-minute track as Kendrick revels in the spoils of felling your greatest enemy in the most embarrassing way possible. A line as juvenile as, “Bitch, I cut my granny off if she don’t see it how I see it” only underscores how unhinged the usually reserved rapper behaved over the past few months. (“meet the grahams” is one of the most cursed and wretched songs entered into hip-hop canon and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.) The world is so attuned to Kendrick’s wavelength that his empathic “Mustard” yelp is already a cooked meme less than 72 hours from release.
GNX isn’t without warts. Depending on your level of Kendrick standom, songs like “reincarnated” and “gloria” will feel transcendent or conceptually underbaked. Flipping Tupac’s “Made Niggaz” and then saddling it with a protracted reincarnation story that ends in Kendrick conversing with god isn’t my preferred auditory experience, but I’m already aware that’s an unpopular opinion. Similarly, closing your shit-talking opus with a love song devoted to your pen is several degrees too cute and earnest, especially when it follows a song as violently deranged as “gnx.” Even on his most low-stakes project, Kendrick can’t help but add a layer of gravitas.
In terms of the greater Kendrick Lamar project, GNX seems destined to be sidelined. It’s not hard to envision a future in which the album is minimized as a faux-mixtape meant to satiate the masses until the current best rapper alive is ready to tackle his next weighty subject. But for now, it’s enough to bask in the rare moment when Kendrick loosens the grip on the wheel.
To be clear, Kendrick and Drake’s forever war needs to be nuked out of existence. The minute Kendrick’s halftime show ends, society should collectively agree to never speak of this year in rap ever again. With that being said, this beef has had its positives. Both artists were in different stages of creative stagnation as their 40s loomed. Each side needed what the other had. Kendrick could stand to be outside more, using his star wattage to lift his coast and entire genre up. Drake needed to be embarrassed into retreating until he had something new to say.
GNX is a peculiar album to arrive this late in a rapper’s discography. It’s a self-conscious record, shameless in how far it goes to prove a point. The main argument in favor of Drake over Kendrick has always circled the former’s ability to churn out more. Drake had more albums, features, hits, and culture-defining moments, an excessive artist for a gluttonous age. Kendrick’s footprint was far wobblier, often nonexistent between albums.
The success of GNX not only extends Kendrick’s victory lap—a song called “squabble up” is likely to debut no. 1 over anything on the Wicked soundtrack—it underscores how this entire scuffle was won. GNX embodies doing more with less, a 12-song philosophy vs. 100 gigs. Kendrick’s hatred is consolidated in a taut, 45-minute package, while Drake’s ire is stretched across a string of passive-aggressive Instagrams and a stream that featured him calling out “fragile opp” Steve Lacy and the debut of a bald spot. The true death knell of this entire beef might not even need to come from Kendrick directly. On Monday, Billboard reported that Drake and his legal team accused UMG and Spotify (The Ringer’s parent company) of “artificially” inflating “Not Like Us.” The move reeks so thoroughly of desperation that it might be the first time a beef of this caliber ends with one side running to the authorities.
Inevitably, nature (and presumably these two men) will heal. Kendrick will make an album about metaphysics and fluoride, while The Boy trips into a “Suit & Tie”–level hit. Middle-aged rap careers can’t survive on beef alone. But that’s for after the Super Bowl. Until then, GNX is riveting television … its competition, less so.
