There are, of course, counterarguments. This century alone, you have Future’s 2015 and Kanye’s 2010, 50’s ’03, and Eminem’s ’02; pick any Wayne year from Bush’s second term. But even if you reach further back—to DMX’s 1998, Snoop’s ’93, Rakim or Slick Rick’s ’88—Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 has to be on a very short list of the best calendar years a rapper’s ever had. This was true even before the surprise release last Friday morning of GNX, the lean, lively album that follows a string of acidic diss songs that argued that the biggest rapper on the planet is a pedophile who’s also bad at his job. GNX is at turns thoughtful and virtuosic; it’s an exclamation point at the end of a sentence lawyers hope to get stricken from court records. Pick another metaphor: ribbon tied, victory lap run.
In a vacuum, GNX scans as Kendrick’s loosest, most unencumbered LP. In context, though, it tests the thesis of his last release, 2022’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. While that album was widely taken as a rejection of so-called cancel culture, it was also about the ways your cellphone is tearing apart your brain by tying it, with a thousand tiny tethers, to the whims and judgments of enemies and strangers. GNX, by contrast, draws its power from existing in that incredibly fucked-up ecosystem that is lurking in our pockets. Its technical accomplishment becomes a moral argument, its formal clarity a rebuke of the context collapse that confuses—and therefore neutralizes—our better natures. It’s also kind of a lesser Nas album. So it goes.
Nas, in fact, is invoked on GNX’s first song, the gothic, foreboding “wacced out murals.” After venting his frustration with Snoop Dogg, who reposted “Taylor Made Freestyle,” Drake’s diss track featuring AI approximations of Snoop’s and 2Pac’s voices, Kendrick singles out Nas as the only rapper who congratulated him on booking the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show. (He also taunts Wayne, the New Orleans native who earlier this year expressed disappointment that he hadn’t been tapped for the Super Bowl in his hometown.) At first, these contortions toward underdog status seem ridiculous, like the psychodrama that Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant famously cooked up to keep themselves engaged after they’d become the most decorated players of their respective eras. But with just slightly more examination, they ring true: Rappers, from Los Angeles to Atlanta to New York, have been reluctant to side with Kendrick over Drake in public. And so the clear-cut critical darling of his generation—who is also one of its best-selling acts (and whose Drake disses have been among this year’s highest-charting songs)—can still wander into the front yard and find an ax unground.
When GNX tries to untangle the Drake beef—even when it does so in circumspect terms—it signals a sharp break from Mr. Morale, which at points plays like the notes from a therapy session set to drums. Kendrick’s competitiveness with his peers and fixation on the canon have always come through in his music, even when they aren’t its subject; now he has an excuse to find fault lines of artistic principle and even personal ethics in the world outside his skull. So songs like “reincarnated,” which places him in a lineage of Black geniuses beset by the forces of capital, are made more urgent than they would be if they scanned as mere self-reflection. In short, the feud with Drake has blurred the lines between neurosis and ethnography.
For the most part, this suits Kendrick. From the time he began to fully articulate his style, with 2010’s Overly Dedicated, he’s been at his best when pushing his limits as a writer and vocalist simultaneously. See 2012’s “m.A.A.d. city,” where he sounds at every second like he might come careening off the track and collapse in a heap—but where he also has perfectly succinct, perfectly horrifying lines like “You killed my cousin back in ’94, fuck your truce.” On Mr. Morale—and, in different ways, on 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly—Kendrick mined the gap between what he felt to be his personal mission and his role in a larger community and culture, the tension between what he wanted and what he felt was expected of him. Now, the pursuits have been unified.
That coalescence is captured in GNX’s narrowing of scope. At 44 minutes, not only is it shorter than his next-shortest album, 2017’s DAMN., by a full 20 percent, but it is also unambiguously a record made by and for Angelenos. The first voice to appear on GNX belongs to Deyra Barrera, a mariachi singer Kendrick discovered when she sang a tribute to one of her friends, the late Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, before Game 1 of the World Series in October. The rest of the featured guests, SZA aside, are also from the Southland; after Roddy Ricch—whose exuberance is welcome on the otherwise tranquil “dodger blue”—the most famous of these rappers and singers is AzChike. Sometimes these MCs are used merely for texture, like when Lefty Gunplay, one of the city’s recent breakout stars, appears at the tail end of “tv off” to evoke a hyphy hit from two decades ago. Elsewhere, as on the title track, even lesser-known rappers are given—through the text of the song’s hook—the same agency as Kendrick in carving out the future of California rap.
All of which makes it fitting that Kendrick’s style has become so influenced by the generation of L.A. rappers who came of age after him. For years, it seemed that he had four major influences: Kurupt, Wayne, André 3000, and Eminem. (In the cases of the first two, he made a song and a full mixtape, respectively, studying their styles, like an apprentice painter.) DAMN. marked the beginning of a symbiotic collaboration with the Las Vegas–bred Baby Keem, his younger cousin, that stretched Kendrick’s voice out like taffy, made him more pliable and more fun. GNX makes clear what was hinted at by Mr. Morale’s “Rich Spirit” and made unavoidable on “Not Like Us”: that he’s moved into a new phase, one where the late Drakeo the Ruler has taken over as a dominant influence. This is especially clear on “hey now” and “peekaboo,” each of which channels Drakeo to the point of distraction, the former delivered in a halting whisper and dotted with references to Buddah, the latter borrowing his syntax and cadences wholesale. Kendrick is no longer an upstart lobbing links to Nah Right and 2DopeBoyz; his endorsement (or non-endorsement) can shape the historical record. So it’s understandable that his reticence to mention Drakeo by name, whatever local politics animate it, rankles some observers, just as the lineup for his one-off concert at the Forum this June—hailed as a moment of “unity” by out-of-towners—underlined to many the intractability of neighborhood divides.
That hand-wringing aside, the stretches of GNX staked on technique are frequently, almost uniformly thrilling. Both “peekaboo” and “hey now” are smartly crafted and seemingly reduced to their essential form; “dodger blue” and “heart pt. 6” are genuinely irresistible riding music. (The “If This World Were Mine”–sampling, SZA-featuring “luther” aims for the same territory but stagnates halfway there.) The frenetic Debbie Deb flip, “squabble up,” is so athletic, so freewheeling that it makes its technically wondrous passages play like second nature. Even “tv off,” which prominently features Kendrick screaming DJ Mustard’s name like a carnival barker on amphetamines, is pulled off with a kind of ease.
What this means, however, is that GNX grinds to a stop when things get more evidently effortful. In high school, a friend and I had a joke that each Nas album had two songs that ended: And the surgeon was … his mother! This LP has, appropriately, two tracks that reminded me of this: “man at the garden,” an inferior retread of Stillmatic’s “one mic,” and the unfortunate closer “gloria,” where Kendrick personifies his pen as a lover. These songs, combined with “reincarnated”—admirable for its historical sweep and the audacity of its Pac impression, but ultimately overwrought and overdetermined—pull Kendrick too far from the kineticism and clarity of vision that make the rest of the album so compelling.
There are tea leaves to read: Songs in the “Heart” series have historically preceded Kendrick’s proper albums, not been included on them; he raps, on “squabble up,” that he might “double back like a deluxe”; and the Super Bowl gig is the ideal peg for a new album with more commercial trappings and a longer rollout than GNX. But this record, even with its false starts and I Am–ish pretensions, represents a complete thought—that, a decade and a half into his career, Kendrick no longer feels a conflict between his private desires and his public responsibilities, that he has the wind at his back. It’s a blockbuster defined not by its breadth, but by its specificity.