After having what many may consider to be the best 2024 of anyone in the rap game, Kendrick Lamar surprised the music world last Friday with the release of GNX, his 12-song, sub-45-minute sixth album. At times, the record is a West Coast–drenched victory lap for the future Super Bowl LIX halftime show performer (whose record company, Universal, is reportedly being sued over allegations that it falsely boosted the popularity of “Not Like Us,” the nail in the coffin for Drake in his battle with Lamar).
On this episode of Dissect, Cole Cuchna is joined by Season 5 coauthor Femi Olutade to discuss the parallels between the GNX automobile and Kendrick Lamar’s rap game, and how those resonances play into the themes and concept behind GNX.
Cole Cuchna: Let’s talk about the album title. Let’s talk about the car as a way to frame this project as its own kind of entity, and then we’ll get into the specific songs that we wanted to highlight today.
So I did a bunch of research on the GNX. Very interesting. You know, it’s not just a car. As much as maybe this is a looser project, I think the GNX is very symbolic of a few things. So let me just run down a few bullet points of what I found in my research, and we can kind of talk about perhaps what that means.
In a 2012 interview with Complex, Kendrick said this. “My pops put me on to rap. When I was born, I came home from the hospital in an ’87 Buick Regal while my pops was bumping Big Daddy Kane.” He goes on to say that he introduced him to Rakim, Biz Markie. And then he says, “Sometimes I sit back and listen to hip-hop with [my father] to see where my hip-hop roots come from.” So we have this history of an ’87 Buick Regal. The GNX comes from this lineage of Regals. I’m not a car guy, so hopefully my terminology is going to be sufficient here.
The GNX is a part of this Buick Regal line of cars. It stands for “Grand National Experimental.” Only 547 of them were made, and they were made in one year, and they were made in Kendrick’s birth year, 1987. So that feels like a significant, very obvious thread there. They are available in one color, black, and they got the nickname at the time because of the color and the shape of them and the angles of them. They were nicknamed “Darth Vader’s car” and “the dark side,” which feels very appropriate to Kendrick’s mentality at this moment. They were also a last of a dying breed.
So the Grand National, the GNX, was created to end all Grand Nationals. It was supposed to be the cream of the crop, the most that they could do with this line of cars. Because the next year, they were going to be converting the Regal line to front-wheel drive, and all past models were rear-wheel drives, which apparently is a more aggressive, a faster experience. Again, sorry, I’m not a car guy, but that was a significant change. Femi, are you into cars at all?
Femi Olutade: I’m not into cars, so anything that I know about it I read through, so I can’t help you there.
Cuchna: It feels like this was a significant shift into safer-driving vehicles that kind of then became very prevalent in the ’90s and 2000s, and there’s less emphasis on performance. So this idea of being the last of a dying breed seems to tie clearly into Kendrick being more of this traditional hip-hop artist. It was faster than the Corvette, the GNX. It was faster than most U.S.-market Ferraris, yet it cost $80,000 to a Ferrari costing over a million. So it was better than the rest, but it came from very humble roots, which of course feels like it ties perfectly into Kendrick’s identity. So from it being created in his birth year, being this rare breed, the black symbolism, the Darth Vader, it just feels all very, very symbolic. I don’t know if you have anything to add to that.
Olutade: Yeah, I 100 percent agree. I endorse everything you just said. All the connections to Kendrick, I know he must find that really uncanny whenever he thinks about himself, and he clearly thinks in a very symbolic and connected way. That’s just one of those things that I think Kendrick would definitely really gravitate towards. So you can definitely see how that can become a larger concept of the album. The car, of course, is mentioned several times throughout the album, so it’s definitely part of tying it together conceptually. And everything about the Darth Vader, dark side, villainous kind of approach, empire and the idea of empires—particularly when you get deeper into Vader being the head of the empire—there’s all this stuff about kings and empires and leaders and darkness and light that is one of the core themes of the album, particularly over the first six tracks. It’s so interwoven in there and really deeply into what he’s referencing. It’s all there from a historical and spiritual and conceptual thing in the songs themselves. So all of that ties in so perfectly with what you hear going on. And the power and the force, and all of that stuff, it makes so much sense when you listen to the album.
Cuchna: Right. And one thread that could be a thing, he’s talked a lot about generational ascension, generations improving upon each other. He’s talked specifically about his own father. I’m thinking of “Father Time” and just everything on Mr. Morale, and your successor being able to build upon the legacy that you leave, and Kendrick trying his hardest for his children, to place them in a better position so that then they can take it further than he has. He says that on this album, he says this on Mr. Morale. So there does seem to be this symbolic significance to me, where his dad drove an ’87 Buick Regal, which is the more standard, kind of everyday vehicle for an average person of not much means, and him now being able to afford this unique, rare luxury vehicle, so to speak, and him kind of [saying], “OK, my dad left me this, and now I’m building on this, and hopefully my children can symbolize something even grander than the GNX.”
This excerpt was edited for clarity. For more dissections—on K.Dot, Tyler, the Creator, or others—be sure to follow the light at @dissectpodcast on Twitter or Instagram, and subscribe to the podcast over on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
