I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong. Despite my initial skepticism surrounding everything Baby Keem—the petulant squeaks, nasally voice, and cutesy raps—eventually, I relented. 

At their best, hip-hop sidekicks operate as foils. Part of their brilliance is illuminating everything their big homie is capable of but rarely has time to tap into. There’s a reason Watch the Throne features Kanye and not Memphis Bleek or that Drake gave Lil Wayne a decade of continued relevance instead of Gudda Gudda. Baby Keem operates on a similar wavelength. 

“range brothers” is a goofy record, the type of song it’s hard to see Kendrick releasing as part of his solo career. The five-minute track features seven credited producers, two melodramatic beat switches, and an unencumbered Kendrick. Instead of outshining his protégé, the Compton rapper decides to operate like he’s in a buddy comedy. The “top of the mornin’” refrain is so nonsensical. It’s the rare lyrical choice made by Kendrick that opts for fun over logic. Similarly, the Kendrick ad-libs that buoy the duo’s final verse—“Give me that bitch,” “We’re not the Wayans!”—proves the world’s most lauded lyricist can also be an adept comedian as long as he has hip-hop’s favorite class clown riding shotgun. —Charles Holmes

This is undoubtedly the kind of thing people say, but it really is a shame we never got that Black Hippy LP. Kendrick, Q, Soul, and Jay Rock are the ideal quartet—all orbiting a central ethos, but in different paths and at different speeds, with influences and sets of reference points that overlap but only so much. On “Zip That Chop That,” the four-bar bursts from each member clarify both these things—the superficial differences and the fundamental cohesion—over and over again, a never-ending loop that mirrors the getting-the-gang-together setup of the video. Speaking of that video, it seems impossible today to imagine Kendrick et al. strolling through downtown L.A. unbothered by fans; the truth is that it was odd even at the time, as the dead period between “virtual unknown” and “anointed one” had collapsed to be practically nonexistent. By the time Kendrick had released Overly Dedicated and Section.80 (to say nothing of “The Heart, Pt. 3,” on which he could credibly pin the hopes of an entire genre to his debut album), he was pinpointed as hip-hop’s next great auteur. Cuts like “Zip That Chop That” are potent reminders that he comes from not a vacuum but a rich ecosystem teeming with talent and idiosyncrasy. —Paul Thompson

More than eight years after its release on Danny Brown’s fourth studio album, “Really Doe” feels like a rap blogger’s wet dream. Two of TDE’s finest lyricists—Lamar and Ab-Soul—link up with the Odd Future darling Earl Sweatshirt and Danny Brown, the Midwest maven who’s beloved in underground circles. 

Truth be told, this could have just remained four fierce MCs going in on a Black Milk production, but this collab impacted the relationship between Brown and Ab-Soul. Nevertheless, big up to Danny Brown for figuring out a way to get K.Dot and Earl on the same track. We don’t want to condone burning bridges, but we respect navigating treacherous waters to make a banger bang. —khal

Like any good conspiracy, “6:16 in LA” only hints at the dark enterprise Drake sits atop. It’s in this Instagram-exclusive release that Kendrick began to litter our minds with head-scratching clues about Drake’s true nature—at least according to Kendrick—with every little detail imbued with ghastly subtext. The song has inspired dozens, probably hundreds, of YouTubers to make hours-long video breakdowns. This is the QAnon of rap songs, with fans and journalists combing through the lyrics in the way alt-right incels used to comb through 4chan posts. 

With “6:16 in LA,” Kendrick does what his detractors said he couldn’t. He enters the murky online world of disinformation and petty mud-slinging without stooping to a certain low. The song is as serious, intelligent, and polished as the rest of his music. What makes it great is that it’s not merely an indictment of Drake, but of contemporary hip-hop culture as a whole. It’s a song that makes you wonder how rap music and the culture surrounding it—the very culture that, in a way, saved Kendrick’s own life—ever became this lifeless in the first place. The losers, the self-aggrandizing vultures, and social media influencers have officially won, and everything sacred to someone like Kendrick is long gone. It’s not just hip-hop that’s been affected by this bad-faith clout-chasing, but nearly every facet of the art world, from musicians, to filmmakers, to novelists and visual artists. “6:16 in LA” brilliantly conveys what we’ve all felt for a long time, and hints at what could be restored if the clowns stopped running the circus. —Donald Morrison

The Dave Free–furnished beat for “Blessed” is unmistakably of its era: a palpably digital cocoon of reverb and repurposed wails, a bed of negative space for Q to exercise his newly refined, venomous staccato delivery. Kendrick, for his part, flexes the same muscles he would on songs like “Cartoon & Cereal,” locking into a tidy, tiny bounce and bursting out only at choice moments. Even though Kendrick raps last, this is a truly supporting turn, his verse underlining the harrowing story from Q’s second. While Kendrick’s Black Hippy compatriots have appeared on his albums far less frequently than one might expect, he has always exhibited remarkable chemistry with them, not least because he’s willing to let the others stay on the top of the marquee. —Thompson

It’s one of Kendrick’s simplest, warmest, yet most provocative choruses, and it begins with the words “I love myself.” “i” is powered by a monster Isley Brothers sample that I, personally, could listen to on a 24-hour loop for the rest of my life. It’s presented, on To Pimp A Butterfly, like a live performance in which Kendrick is trying his damndest to talk the crowd into it: “All y'all come to the front! Y'all come up to the front!” The first verse kicks off with a spectacular staccato bounce, a deluge of syllables and images and ugliness to overcome: “They wanna say it's a war outside / Bomb in the street / Gun in the hood / Mob of police / Rock on the corner with a line for the fiend / And a bottle full of lean and a model on the scheme.” But the song ends with defiance and joy: “Dreams of reality's peace / Blow steam in the face of the beast / Sky could fall down, wind could cry now / Look at me, motherfucker, I smile.” And then he says, “I love myself,” again. —Rob Harvilla

With “Ronald Reagan Era,” Kendrick connects the traumatic conditions of his upbringing to the era that directly preceded it, a decade that saw Ronald Reagan declare a war on drugs at the same time cheap crack cocaine flooded inner-city neighborhoods, changing the very fabric of these communities. It ultimately led to the explosive increase in incarceration rates for people of color that has been compared to modern-day slavery. These are the conditions Kendrick grew up in—seeing family members and friends disappear into institutions, suffer with addiction, or die in the streets. 

The song opens with early Kendrick collaborator Ash Riser singing about how the kids “just ain’t all right.” It sets Kendrick up to revel in his position within Compton, as a non-gang member who’s accepted by both Bloods and Crips. He shares chorus duty with Wu-Tang luminary RZA, and Ab-Soul-isms are sprinkled throughout the song, giving a strange collaborative cohesion that only Kendrick’s singular vision could have pulled off at the time. —Morrison

Kendrick linked up with his idol, Lil Wayne, for a track on Tha Carter V that has a legitimate chance to go down in the storytelling rap hall of fame. Over five and a half minutes, Wayne and Kendrick chronicle the workings of Liz, a guileful woman who aids Weezy with the robbery of her “boyfriend,” played by Kendrick. It’s honestly hard to determine which of the two rappers, lyrically, comes out on top—Wayne, as always, flourishes with inventive wordplay and clever double entendres; Kendrick utilizes tantalizing flows and his trademark vocal pitches to convey the anguish he’s suffering at the hands of his partner. This much is clear, though: Kendrick makes enough of an impression for the track to be considered a “Kendrick song” (while simultaneously existing as a definitive Wayne song, too). In any case, this one isn’t really a competition—Wayne and Kendrick work off each other symbiotically to enhance the overall narrative. The single was accompanied with a music video, but it’s not really necessary to watch, given the vivid imagery captured by the lyrics. Sit back, close your eyes, and let two masters paint a picture of “Mona Lisa.” —Aric Jenkins

A death rattle for an era? Maybe. A time capsule for a stretch when Kendrick wasn’t too big to rap alongside Yelawolf? Absolutely. A tribute to the famed posse cuts of yesteryear, “1Train” was catnip for anyone who used to frequent 2DopeBoyz or Nah Right. It arrived just months after good kid, m.A.A.d city changed the trajectory of Kendrick’s career, but not before it became silly to ask whether A$AP Rocky was in a similar class. (In hindsight, the fact that this song was sandwiched between a Skrillex feature and “Fashion Killa” should’ve been a dead giveaway that he was, in fact, not.) Listening now, it’s hard not to notice how many things are different years later—Kendrick’s star wattage, Danny Brown’s relationship with drugs, the idea that blog hype could catapult a rapper’s career. But then you hear Action Bronson rhyme “tablecloth” with “Chilean horse,” and you realize that some things never change. —Sayles

Quiet as kept, there’s a romantic buried in all of Big Stepper’s avowed penitence. You don’t spin a duet with the Patron Saint of Bad Gals if your heart’s two sizes too small. On “Loyalty,” Kenny’s not above getting geeked and fired up in front of company. That it’s Rihanna to whom he’s tossing oops off the backboard is both a flex and a listening delight. Creatively, they’re titans drawing from the same well: Marvin and Tammi, Meth and Mary, a certain Brooklyn peddler-turned-mogul and his more famous wife. The vibe is as much loving admonishment as it is full-blown passion. Vocoder nostalgia funk serves as sonic canvas, adding an atmosphere of pleading to a jam that’s most often devoted to prodding. “Loyalty” feels like Kendrick and Rihanna’s secret society—“All we ask is trust / All we got is us.” It ain’t exactly Bonnie and Clyde, but it's close enough. —Lex Pryor

Presumably Lin-Manuel Miranda’s favorite Kendrick track. Call it theater kid, a.C.t city. Call it a retread of an execution better explored by the Juggaknots a quarter century earlier. Call it an ugly listen that’s maybe a little too cute about what it’s trying to say about cancel culture. I won’t argue against any of those descriptions. But I will also counter that few rappers at this level would dare try to pull off this song—or its uncomfortable video—and even fewer would do it over an Alchemist beat. —Sayles

On Damn., “Yah.,” sandwiched between “DNA.” and “Element.,” functions as a palate cleanser of sorts. For a rapper who constantly has his foot heavy on the gas with so many exhausting flows and vocal performances, there’s a sneaky gravity that comes when Kendrick takes his foot off the pedal with a mellower delivery. On “Yah.,” it’s as if he just stumbled out of bed with crust still in his eyes while recording the song. The distorted Billy Paul sample even makes the beat sound like it took one too many bong rips. Every time I listen, the track’s haziness sedates me and makes me forget that Kendrick takes direct shots at Fox News and Geraldo Rivera while also calling himself a Black Israelite. And before I have time to unpack all these things in the second verse, I’m numb again singing “buuuuuzzzzin’” and “yah yah” with Kendrick on the hook. —Jonathan Kermah

If anyone other than Kendrick Lamar gets a guest verse on this song, maybe more people are talking about ScHoolboy Q’s provocative challenge to the bystanders who filmed the Baton Rouge police’s killing of Alton Sterling in 2016—and thus all of us who fail to intervene in deadly cop confrontations. “Two cowards in the car, they’re just there to film,” Q raps, “Sayin’ Black Lives Matter, should’ve died with him.” It’s truly not the kind of thing you hear much in hip-hop anymore: a call to arms against the police. 

But no, this was a Black Hippy family affair and Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, and Kendrick all get their turn for one-upsmanship. Kendrick, to put it bluntly, went the fuck off. 

His 45-second verse comes second and is art for art’s sake, employing multiple rhyme schemes that sometimes include rhymes in the middle of his bars. “Reminding me of the block I repped / the turf I stepped, the church and the earth I blessed / the first I guessed the alert was the murk I chef.” An online breakdown of the complexity of the verse went viral not long after the song dropped.

It was a delightful reminder of Kendrick’s mastery of words and verse, tightly packed in the middle of the homie’s pre-album release. —Joel Anderson

“good kid” is not the half of the two title tracks on GKMC that makes you gnarl your upper lip—though it is the one that ricochets in one ear and never quite out the other. Part of this owes to the painterly beatmaking. It’s one of those songs where you look at the credits retrospectively, nod your head, maybe stroke your chin, and wonder how we just let all that talent form like Voltron. It’s produced by the greatest. Vocals by the other greatest. Mixed by another greatest altogether. 

But the other part of its charm, the part that’s no less apparent but definitely less instinctual, is that Kendrick’s compositions here are so technically flawless that they shouldn’t really even be possible to begin with. Lyrically, “good kid” is all patterns and loops, everything building and breathing all over everything else. You’ve got three acts of coherent narrative structure—a slow and steady alienation—which manage to weather a rhyme scheme so dizzyingly dense it’d make Dr. Seuss upchuck all over Horton. By the end of it all, what’s left is the deftly drawn picture of a good kid; a few 20s, Xanies, and shrooms in his pocket, a bloodied shirt on his back, and a riddled head on his shoulders. It’s not peak K.Dot, it’s not even the peak of the album, but it is the moment where everyone within earshot realized they’d never unhear him. —Pryor

You know what you need on your come-up? Enemies. 

Whether they’re real or imagined, ops provide fuel. It’s the formula that makes this blap from Section.80 a bona fide classic head knocker. 

When I listen to this song—usually with my eyes closed and the volume at an absurd level—I imagine ScHoolboy Q and Kendrick in the clouds taking down titans with pitchforks. Q-Wop’s got a pack of Backwoods in one pocket and a thunderstick in the other, while Dot, with a straight face, is staring through your soul as you meet your demise.

These two haven’t collaborated in nearly a decade, and that’s almost as big of a shame as the fact that this song is no longer on streaming services. But the real ones know what this song did for the homies with the backpacks in the early 2010s. Salute to this contribution to the cause. —Murdock

Elsewhere on Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Kendrick embraces modern self-help gurus, frets about the corrosive effect of social media, and taunts listeners with the heavy implication of his refusal to get vaccinated. While all of these threads could be seen as an exploration of his long-professed and mostly mainstream Christianity, “Auntie Diaries” is the one time Kendrick faces the church head-on. Reasonable people can critique the song’s social or educational utility—there’s the inversion of pronouns and the conflation of slurs toward the song’s end—but its form is the perfect vessel for the catharsis it documents, the exultant burst after a long whisper. On a strictly musical level, the constraints work wonders: Where Kendrick sometimes drifts (take “Backseat Freestyle,” “reincarnated,” “MUSTAAAAAAARD,” etc.) toward theater-kid exaggeration, “Auntie Diaries” sets the dial so low in its first two-thirds that the slight uptick during “Mr. Preacher man, should we love thy neighbor?” hits like an anvil. —Thompson

For a long time after Kendrick broke through nationally, the list of his major influences was pretty static: Kurupt, Lil Wayne, Eminem, Outkast. So imagine the surprise when he popped up, a few minutes into his knottiest, most musically varied LP, rapping like prime Aceyalone. “Worldwide Steppers” is a pulsing, pounding fever dream, the airport self-help books splayed out across Kendrick’s arm like currency. Finally channeling L.A.’s true eccentrics—not just the Project Blowed MCs’ affinity for jazz beats but their ability to bend barrages of syllables into slick, intuitive counter-rhythms—Kendrick raps about “past-life regressions” and the sodium in the catered food at the toy drive he sponsors all while fretting about the white women he sleeps with on tour, as symbols and otherwise. Mr. Morale inspired confused and confusing reactions: Many fans and critics seemed frustrated or let down by Kendrick invoking, as he does here, the likes of Eckhart Tolle and Dr. Sebi. But Kendrick is not your father, boyfriend, cousin (or, as he puts it elsewhere on the album, savior); a narrator who eschews the near-fundamentalist Christianity that steered him through his 20s for a series of guru hacks is the most interesting narrator one can reasonably imagine. —Thompson

This standout feature is a song that’s both firmly rooted in a time and tethered to nothing. “Never Catch Me” is many things—a tribute to DJ Rashad–style footwork and Roni Size–inspired drum ’n’ bass, a showcase for a wrist-cramping Thundercat bass line, an argument against the idea that jazz and electronic couldn’t coexist, or that electronic music isn’t Black music. But by the time Kendrick’s verse crescendos in an out-of-body experience, you realize that above all else, it’s proof that few rappers could ever catch him. —Sayles

Ignore the Kanye-lite musings about having sex with the flight attendant. “Hol’ Up” is the sound of an artist finding his voice amid the turbulence. You may bristle at the quaintness of something like “Wicked as 80 reverends” or the crudeness of Kendrick talking about, uh, his asparagus, but lines like “From a distance, don’t know which one is a Christian” are early signs of what the Kendrick Lamar experience would become. Also: The smooth Sounwave production—horns over a classic drum break—sounds like a relic of the dying days of the blog era, but conversely, it feels unbound by time or gravity. It’s a track that, as Kendrick claims, was made 30,000 feet in the air, and with the way it floats, you believe it. —Sayles

When people speak wistfully about the Blog Era, they’re usually remembering the macro: the storied careers that started during that period, the sense that this was a new avenue into an industry that had not yet fully collapsed. But one of the little joys it provided was an outlet for songs that otherwise could or would not be released due to clearance issues, A&R meddling, or label overthinking. “Rapper Shit”—that title alone!—is exactly this kind of dispatch, a no-stakes, all-virtuosity showcase from two MCs on the cusp of stardom. But to move from the digital, for a second, to the corporeal: Rap fans from outside of L.A. might not have understood how much the street-level reportage from Compton rappers and the heady, conspiracy-laden raps that Ab-Soul trafficks in have historically informed one another. The interplay between the two here was not a sign of scenes collapsing into one another but the long tail of one of the county’s most fruitful traditions. —Thompson

Looking back on it now, Kendrick effectively bookended his To Pimp a Butterfly era with live performances of two songs that didn’t make the final track list, but made an impression regardless. The first was performed at the end of The Colbert Report in December 2014, with Kendrick backed by the TPAB musical superteam of Bilal, Thundercat, Terrace Martin, and Anna Wise. In January 2016, he performed a song known at the time as “Blue Faces” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. And when he abruptly released untitled unmastered. two months later, the first portion of the latter song appeared as the album’s closer, “untitled 08.”

Money—the pursuit of it, the thrill of having it, the devastating loss of it—has people in a perpetual full nelson. It’s everything to those who don’t have it; it’s everything to those whose lives have been changed by it. Kendrick has spoken about how his rapid success led to culture shock, as well as the guilt he experienced over his newfound prosperity. This was one of the defining themes of TPAB. If untitled unmastered. is to be treated as an addendum, a series of extended thoughts, or straight-up bonus material, then “untitled 08” fits squarely within that area of concern.

The layers are right there in the hook. “Why so sad? Walking around with them blue faces,” references despair, but also the influx of hundred-dollar bills wrapped with the blue security band that denotes their authenticity. On a deeper level, being “new money” is Kendrick’s reality and it’s shaped how he’s engaged with the world since adding more zeroes to his net worth. There’s an uncomfortable truth at the core of each verse: Whether you have dire problems or champagne problems, money remains the driving factor in our ongoing rat race. The other reason “untitled 08” stands out is because the shit is groovy—a mellow blend of funk and jazz, with a dash of Thundercat’s soothing background vocals for good measure. 

In a review of the project for Pitchfork, Kris Ex points out that the lack of song titles and promotion around the release forces you to engage with the music and nothing else. “untitled 08” is a warm (albeit unfinished) parting thought on a collection of strong throwaway tracks that no one expected and no one was upset about receiving, either. —Julian Kimble

As the lead single put out a week before the release of his 2010 mixtape, Overly Dedicated, “Michael Jordan” functioned as a bit of a Trojan horse. In a tape that highlights Kendrick’s humanity and imperfections, “Michael Jordan” is the one outlier as Kendrick wears the typical mainstream hip-hop themes like a veil shrouding all the vulnerability shown in the rest of the project.

Kendrick’s music often feels timeless, but what I love about “Michael Jordan” is that it sounds undoubtedly of a certain era. Sounwave’s bustling beat fits in perfectly with contemporary bangers like Lil Wayne’s “John” and Meek Mill’s “I’m a Boss.” The hook is irresistible regardless of where your allegiance resides in the great basketball GOAT debate. I can’t say that this is Kendrick’s most thought-provoking song, but I sure can say that K.Dot and ScHoolboy Q sound like they had fun letting loose on this beat. —Kermah

Kendrick takes a page out of Ye’s book by enlisting Chicago legend GLC on an early career standout that’s both a reflection on the sacrifice of making art and a meditation on the things that inspired Kendrick to make this sacrifice. It’s a song filled with themes Kendrick would continually revisit in the years following: institutionalization, addiction, the prison of poverty, and never-ending check-cashing lines. In the chorus, Kendrick describes the poor man’s dreams as being to “smoke good, eat good, live good,” while the verses themselves elucidate how incredibly low the bar has been set for his family and neighborhood if this is all they desire out of life. It’s a Blog Era classic in the way that it sounds like Kendrick heard Ye’s “Spaceship” with GLC and decided he wanted to remake it into a Curren$y song. And as GLC says on the outro, Kendrick was operating under the “five p’s: Proper preparation prevents poor performance.” Sometimes the simplest shit really is the most pivotal. —Morrison

To Pimp a Butterfly was defined by the musicians from L.A.’s then-mutating jazz scene, who gave it its silky, ’70s-futurist texture. But it’s punctuated with a handful of spare, serrated beats designed to snap the listener upright. None of these is more arresting than TaeBeast, Sounwave, and Thundercat’s “Hood Politics,” which sounds like an intrusive thought echoing inside somebody’s skull. In the song’s third verse (after a lush interlude that is almost certainly the Thundercat contribution), the gang-skirmish vignettes give way to what can be read only as Kendrick marveling, in the wake of his “Control” verse and the aggrieved reactions it elicited, at his own power. It culminates in him revealing that he had a sit-down with Jay-Z to resolve any lingering coastal tensions—a funny bit of connective tissue given that Kendrick’s line here about Killer Mike deserving to go platinum mirrors Jay’s, from “Moment of Clarity,” about rapping like Talib Kweli. —Thompson

As a fan of electronic music who fell in love with the Honestly, Nevermind track “Sticky,” I knew something about this Baby Keem and Kendrick collab felt familiar. On first listen, I didn’t realize that it was basically a vibey Drake send-up, but in hindsight, Kendrick and Keem are actually quite petty! Using similar Jersey club vibes, Keem and Kenny flipped Drake's slinky “Sticky” flow, leaving many to wonder whether the song was something of a diss or perhaps an homage. My two cents: “The Hillbillies” is a perfectly executed use of a loosie track as a preemptive strike. Drake just wasn’t paying attention when it dropped back in 2023. Now he knows. —khal

“Wat’s Wrong” hurts me. The dreamy melancholy of the chorus—“feel like I'm runnin' in circles / oh and I'm just holdin’ onto my breath / I need smoke just to exhale”—hits that tender sweet spot that aches so good. Kendrick’s verse is as haunting as the wailing woman at the center of D. Sanders and Al B Smoov’s production. Kendrick will either heal or kill everyone around him, depending on which way the wind blows that day. “Wat’s Wrong” represents Kendrick beginning to wrestle with his precarious position as an artist whom people have grown to look up to;  he wonders whether he should be considered a role model given his predilection toward smoking weed and spray painting the walls of his Trump Tower penthouse. This early exploration of his uneasy relationship with being a moral voice lays the foundation for Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers years later. —Morrison

If these were visual artists, no one would bat an eye: Painters’ notebooks are littered with evidence that one artist will study another’s style, trying to re-create the mechanics, deciding what to lift and repurpose. When Kendrick arrived at the most fully realized version of his style, sometime between 2009’s Kendrick Lamar EP and the following year’s Overly Dedicated, he was rapping in such a way that even the obvious influences had been synthesized into something singular. But this is the man who made a Lil Wayne–inspired mixtape that was literally called C4; he’s never been afraid of tipping his hand. “Kurupted” is enrapturing precisely because the husky, percussive delivery of the Dogg Pound legend is far removed from the thinner, more conversational approach Kendrick would make his own on OD. Despite this song’s title, he blows immediately past pastiche to something reverent but still raw. —Thompson

Ahead of the release of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Damn., Lamar did what he does best when he wants to let you know that some SHIT is about to drop: he released another entry in the “Heart” series, in this case dismantling four instrumentals while expounding on everything from his place within the rap game to Trump’s first presidency. The most interesting part is that, roughly four years after his “Control” verse, many think the “daddy” flow Kendrick displays during the second verse could be yet another diss to Drake, which, if true, shows you how long K.Dot had been waiting to destroy Drake. —khal

When you think about how Lamar became a superstar rapper who ushered in a new era of Black aesthetics in popular music, consider the song “Jealous,” which surprisingly finds him as a useful collaborator in drill music, of all genres. Fredo Santana, who died in 2018, was in the midst of the drill wave—with the help of his cousin Chief Keef—when he featured Lamar on the second song on Trappin’ Ain’t Dead. The 808 Mafia beat allows Lamar to join on something more street than the atmospheric, Aquemini-like beats that populate good kid, m.A.A.d City. He doesn’t disappoint: While Lamar can be brooding and a keen moralist, “Jealous” allows for his underrated sense of humor to shine. He’s name-dropping Harold’s Fried Chicken; he’s rapping about performing cunnilingus when Santana calls him on the phone. Still, in typical Kendrick fashion, even if he is on a drill track, he can’t help but engage in some Black male conservatism. Give Lamar a chance to spout about his responsibilities to himself and his family, and he’ll happily oblige. “Get up off your ass, make yourself a hundred racks,” says Lamar. Fredo keeps up with him, but the Compton rapper’s verse is memorable for how it links a musical bridge. Both drill music and a revival of prestige Los Angeles rap can exist and thrive at the time; they can even unite to make off-kilter street music. —Jayson Buford

In April 2021, Kodak Black pleaded guilty to first-degree assault and battery to settle a case in which he was initially charged with criminal sexual conduct. Thirteen months after accepting that deal, he appeared on Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, a thorny album about therapy, empathy, and, at various points, cancel culture. The inclusion of Kodak—who’s been at the center of a number of other troubling incidents—was met with instant backlash: One sample Twitter thread attacked Kendrick for trying to extend “grace” to such a “trash ass” individual. 

Kodak is an extremely popular rapper and the voice of some of the biggest hits of the 2010s. He’s appeared as a guest on all sorts of songs, none of which has led to this kind of moralistic finger-wagging. But Kendrick’s decision to feature him on not just “Silent Hill,” but also various Mr. Morale interludes, felt like a slap in the face to some. Kendrick is supposed to be above this, they thought. He isn’t like those other rappers.

And the truth is, Kendrick isn’t. Just not in the way people used to project oversimplified ideals on him. “Silent Hill” is a standout from Mr. Morale’s second disc, even if it’s been mostly swallowed by the narrative around it. Kendrick doesn’t appear to be interested in simply what Kodak brings as an artist. Rather—given the worldview he articulates elsewhere on the album—Kodak’s inclusion here seems designed to provoke listeners, as if to dare us to interrogate the idea of what makes Kendrick and Kodak similar rather than what makes them different. Kendrick’s thoughts here are not entirely clear, but others have hypothesized a number of reasons: their upbringings, their experiences with generational trauma, their religious beliefs, what they each mean to the Black American musical experience. On an album focused on redemption, Kendrick seems to be asking for it for his guest. Others have loudly disagreed with that proposition. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to as well. —Sayles

So much of what makes Kendrick’s music great is, well, greatness—the life-or-death stakes of it all. “luther,” which samples Cheryl Lynn and Luther Vandross’s 1982 cover of “If This World Were Mine,” isn’t unambitious, but it shrinks the universe down to the scale of a relationship—to wondrous effect. Kendrick is wise enough to understand that sometimes greatness is a little Spanish guitar and turning up with your girl on the weekends. Here we get Kendrick’s crusading spirit via pillow talk. “If this world was mine, I'd take your dreams and make ’em multiply / If this world was mine, I'd take your enemies in front of God,” he croons.

Kendrick and SZA expand on the R&B legends’ vision for a new world, one where flowers grow from the concrete and enemies are taken in front of God. But “luther” is a reversal of the usual Kendrick formula found on past singles like “Swimming Pools,” “ADHD,” or even “P&P,” which are disguised as turn-up songs while actually being cautionary tales. There’s a joy in seeing Kendrick give in and revel in the light-hearted, romantasy fun of “Luther.” Sometimes a man needs to talk to God; sometimes he needs to talk to his girl about what he’d do for her in front of God. The profound truth in the way he and SZA sing about wanting to give each other the world is that they already have, just by wanting it for each other. —Morrison

Nipsey Hussle and Kendrick Lamar weren’t just peers from the same era of West Coast hip-hop, they were two titans. Influential. Respected. Motivational. Lauded. But most of all: dedicated. Dedicated to their children, their people, their families, their missions. 

With what they both meant to their region, it was a must that Nip got the Dot feature for his debut album, Victory Lap. Nip initially thought “Keys 2 the City 2” was the one for Kendrick, but Nip’s brain trust had a change of heart and instead sent him an open verse for “Dedication.” Nip wasn’t aware his team sent “Dedication” until the two bumped into each other at the premiere for All Eyez on Me, the 2Pac biopic.

When Nip got the verse back from Dot, he reportedly felt inspired—and touched. The verse mentioned a pivotal conversation Nipsey, Kendrick, Top Dawg, and Snoop Dogg had at the 2Pac movie premiere: “I’m at the premiere politicking with Top, Nip and Snoop, damn Pac watchin’ the way we grew, from dedication.”

Sadly, Nipsey was murdered just a year after Victory Lap dropped, so we’ll never know what these two would have accomplished together. But we’re forever thankful we got this one final “Dedication.” —Andrew Barber

Kendrick Lamar doesn’t trust easily. He is suspicious of the savior title that has been given to him. Although he’s at times played into it himself, by making songs about the death of honesty in rap and his desire to be free of the shackles that come with superstardom, he does not consider himself a role model for kids. He’s as emotionally troubled as the rest of us. “Mortal Man” takes on a different context in the wake of Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, his anti-celebrity album. “Mortal” asks, If I were to do something bad, would you believers still be fans? Somewhat similarly to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, Lamar opened himself up for vigorous criticism. Could everyone still see him as complicated and human?

Kendrick has often referenced himself as Job, the guy God gave a wealth of money to only to strip it away, in a test of loyalty. In response to “Mortal Man,” observers wondered whether Lamar’s message was righteous or an infantile view of celebrity and moralism. Whatever it was, this is one of Lamar’s thornier songs, an example of the weight he carries every time he steps into the booth. —Buford

Blame the need to make “Alright” this millennium’s “Dancing in the Street,” “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” or “Stand!” Blame the misinterpretation of To Pimp a Butterfly. Blame the Pulitzer. Blame the opportunity to curate a soundtrack for a Marvel tent pole that’s made over $1 billion to date. Blame Taylor Swift perhaps reading the room and understanding what Kendrick had come to represent to the masses. But somewhere along the way, people got it fucked up as to who and what Kendrick Lamar is.

Kendrick certainly felt that way. Throughout Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, he goes out of his way to illustrate that he is not, in fact, whoever certain people thought he was when they placed him on a pedestal. The execution is clumsy at times, but it’s straightforward. “Savior”—where he proclaims “Like it when they pro-Black, but I’m more Kodak Black”—is as direct as it gets. Think of “Savior” as an aerial look at a world actively cannibalizing itself. Things were ablaze before the COVID-19 pandemic, but there was no such thing as a return to “normal” after it laid bare what society is at its core. “Savior” is Kendrick’s perspective on an empire in ruin and a reminder that, once and for all, he’s not your hero.

During Kendrick’s rise, he was built up as an idol. The “good” rapper; the place to heap whatever respectability people cling to. But there’s no way someone as religious as Kendrick could be comfortable with idolatry. So, with blood in his eyes from the crown of thorns resting atop his braids, he destroyed the facade that never should have existed in the first place, and did perhaps only because of a need to signal virtue that, even if well-intentioned, is lazy.

After the money, fame, and accolades, Kendrick remains what he always was: a truth-telling hypocrite, and forthright about that. Celebrities often want it both ways: They want the money, fame, and accolades without ever being held accountable for their missteps. Over a ghostly River Tiber sample, the dulcet voice of Sam Dew, and Baby Keem’s hook, Kendrick lets the cat out of the bag and offers even more reason to divest from celebrity while paying closer attention to what’s happening around us, if only for the sake of survival.

“Savior,” like the entirety of Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, is Kendrick being messy while wiping the slate clean. —Kimble

“These Walls” is just one of the many examples on this list of Kendrick’s masterful storytelling. It’s also a showcase of his ability to create and execute a concept that doesn’t just span a single song but forms bridges between his albums. Lamar raps about walls both literal and metaphorical, from sex to prison to the figurative walls of his mind, as he feels trapped by his growing fame and influence. By his final verse, the deeper meaning of “These Walls” begins to take shape, with Kendrick directly addressing the man who killed his friend Dave—as previously heard on good kid, m.A.A.d city’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.” Lamar is visiting him in prison, taunting the assassin for getting caught, and—more pointedly—boasting about sleeping with his baby mama while the killer faces a life sentence.

“These Walls” features Anna Wise, Thundercat, and Bilal and is one of the more vibey tracks from the most dense and meticulously crafted album in Kendrick’s career, To Pimp a Butterfly. You’d never be able to tell this song is ultimately about vengeance, and Kendrick confronting his abuse of power, if you weren’t listening too closely to the lyrics. But that’s part of the brilliance and beauty of Lamar’s music. —Daniel Chin

Barking like a rottweiler, and coming off the unconventional, jazzy approach of To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar’s “Black Friday” exists as a reminder that Dot is the best bar-for-bar rapper alive whenever he wants to be. Sometimes—and this has long been my issue with his music—he is so concerned with narrative that he can lack the fun, the charisma that you need to be the best working rapper. It’s not always the albums, but rather the verses, that stop time in its tracks and makes the entire rap world talk, debate, and wonder about you. “Black Friday” is one of the few moments of Kendrick’s career where he truly is free to just rap well. That’s a powerful space to be in. No amount of Grammys or prestige can upstage dynamic, traditional rapping.  

It would be harder to write about the lines that don’t hit like shots of tequila. It’s a masterpiece of braggadocio rap; he’s never been more like his hero Lil Wayne than he is on this song. —Buford

The seeds of who Kendrick is personally and artistically were planted early and publicly, but Overly Dedicated was his blog-era breakthrough, broadening his audience at the top of the decade just before his supernova ascent hit the next speed. “Ignorance Is Bliss” is evidence of his scalpel-like rigor as an MC and keen self-awareness, which are two hallmarks of his career.

With Willie B’s off-time production serving as his canvas, Kendrick gets straight to the point. The first verse is breathless wizardry punctuated by alliteration, carefully chosen syntax, and a grim sense of humor as he embodies a self-destructive mentality that manages to be ruthless, cynical, and myopic at the same time. It’s not just kill or be killed: It’s kill and be killed in retaliation, with cold indifference toward the value of life. Survival is the ultimate goal; survival is ultimately impossible along this path.

Technical skill aside, the brilliance of “Ignorance Is Bliss” lies in Kendrick’s understanding of how he’s perceived. Even at this point in his career, he heard the people talking and how wrong they were: “The critics are calling me ‘conscious’ / But truthfully, every shooter be calling me Compton / So truthfully, only calling me Kweli and Common? / Proves … that ignorance is bliss.”That he said this—so early on and so clearly—and that some people still misunderstand him proves they either don’t care to get it, or are content to bury their heads in the sand and be none the wiser. —Kimble

Kendrick’s first viral hit is essentially about how alcohol and a pretty woman can cure all your existential malaise. It also just so happens to open with a story about getting beaten up and nearly killed before Kendrick asks the audience why they use drugs and alcohol to cope in the first place. It’s a glimpse into an artist figuring out how to make the type of “cautionary tales bop” he’d become known for with “Swimming Pools” and “m.A.A.d city.” It’s also one of Kendrick’s best early collabs with Ab-Soul, who (Kendrick will be the first to tell you) was an early inspiration for him. And on “P&P 1.5,” Ab-Soul brilliantly offsets Kendrick’s double-time flows and weighty subject matter with the simplistically vulgar “Balls deep, ya dig? Retrieve relief, ya dig?” —Morrison

By now you’ve certainly heard the analogy comparing Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city and YG’s My Krazy Life. Both were ambitious and groundbreaking concept albums that showcased the Compton experience from the eyes of two different 20-somethings. It’s sort of like the inverse GKMC. YG was the kid active on the streets, while K.Dot observed and reported from the porch (but at times dabbled himself).

The albums absolutely share a kinship—all-star features, the showcasing of the next generation, live instrumentation, and production that helped shape the next decade of West Coast hip-hop. These types of albums are sadly a lost art nowadays, and both came at the tail end of the CD/digital download era. 

It was only right for YG to invite his fellow Compton native to the Krazy party on “Really Be,” where Kendrick delivers one of his best guest features to date. “Really Be” finds their two worlds colliding in clouds of smoke and bottles of liquor—but they stay clear-headed enough to understand their overall mission: “I swear this industry shit, to me, is one big ass lick.” And despite being the good kid in a m.A.A.d city, Kendrick was still fighting demons—from the loss of friends to the stress of the music industry. Sometimes you just need an escape via whatever vice you chose. —Barber

“untitled 07” has two and a half of the best minutes on untitled unmastered. Don’t believe me? Why else would the song, with the tacked-on title of “levitate” (due to the chant Kendrick repeatedly cries out), be the lone single for this compilation of Lamar loosies? It’s probably because “untitled 07” captures the euphoric rush of, well … whatever your vice of choice is. (A few examples mentioned: love, drugs, fame, Bentleys.) On the full eight-minute-plus track, we get a verse dedicated to the initial high (with a number of scattered flows over a slinky, hypnotic beat), a middle section of chill that features Kendrick rapping over a more mid-tempo offering, and finally, the comedown, which merely contains a gently strumming guitar and Kendrick and Taz Arnold singing over what they joke is a “15-minute song.” “untitled 07” as a whole is an intriguing glimpse into Kendrick’s creative process. (Over the course of a few years? This is the only track on the album that doesn’t list a precise date.) But it’s really all about that dynamic opening few minutes. —khal

Kung Fu Kenny knows how to make an entrance. On “Collard Greens,” his drawn-out “biatchhhhh” is the rap equivalent of the Ultimate Warrior’s full-on sprint into the Royal Rumble. The collab is the Wade alley-oop to LeBron meme, and Q throws the perfect lob. The hook is an earworm. I catch myself mumble-rapping the second half whenever an awkward silence lingers longer than five seconds. It's my go-to "wake the fuck up!" anthem.

Kendrick’s guest verse has it all: gloating in Spanish, comparisons to a deity, a wicked double-time flow, the word “toupee,” and infectious harmonizing. It’s impossible not to bob your head along to the entirety of his guest verse. Q’s verses bookend the song like an expertly crafted sandwich. They're on their Finn and Jake shit, and their adventure is to smoke sum, drink sum, and get money. Rinse, wash, repeat. —Keith Fujimoto

It’s clarifying that Damn. has another song called “Lust.” In lesser hands, the final passage in the second verse of “Love.”—the one where a pre-fame Kendrick borrows the communal TDE car to skip out of a studio session and race to a woman’s house—would seem to communicate the shallower emotion. But here, the irrepressibility of that impulse is rendered tender, pure: Even when he yelps about wanting her body, that (fittingly second-person) verse foregoes seduction for sincerity. Kendrick’s actual collaborations with Baby Keem tend to be raucous and a little bit coy, but here his younger cousin’s influence manifests in a sanded-down syntax and superglue adherence to an organizing cadence. And so a love so immense as to be nearly inarticulable is reimagined as something reliable, something constant—a heartbeat, a turn signal. I’m like an exit away. —Thompson

The trio of Mustard, Sounwave, and Jack Antonoff fed families with this beat. The bass hits, and it’s an instant adrenaline rush. But it’s the bridge of “Hey Now,” specifically, that made it a must-have on this list. It answers a question I never knew I needed answered: What would it sound like if a spaceship hovered over South Central? The synths of the beat pull you directly into the sky as Kendrick sings about seeing aliens holding hands on Rosecrans Avenue. And right as you’re about to be sucked into the UFO, Dody6 drags you back down to Earth with his verse. I need Kendrick to perform this song at the Super Bowl and turn the Superdome into a flying saucer. —Kermah

Is it weird that an all-star collab between Kendrick and Dr. Dre was relegated to the deluxe edition? If you’ve listened to Kendrick’s major label debut in full, then no. Still, this underheard remix is a jam—Scoop DeVille crafted a beat that feels like landing in LAX … and then you remember that Black Hippy, in all its lyrical mastery, is a thing.

If you aren’t up on the fact that TDE had K.Dot, Ab-Soul, ScHoolboy Q, and Jay Rock moving mob-like on this instrumental, among several other collaborations, maybe you need to do some research. Kendrick may have been inevitable, but he has always been around some bruisers. —khal

The third installment of the “Heart” series finds Kendrick on the cusp of the life he had been chasing for more than a decade: international hip-hop superstardom while carrying forward the legacy of all the West Coast greats who preceded him. “When the whole world see you as Pac reincarnated,” is a helluva opening line, but Kendrick knew he was built for the comparison. 

Kendrick is in a much different place on this song, recounting his improbable journey from needing a cosign from hip-hop media impresario Peter Rosenberg in order to get an audience with Dr. Dre to performing onstage with Snoop Dogg. “Gave me the torch and I ran with it high pursuit / Rapped with my forefathers, even wreck it with Gaga too.”

In a sort of “n----, we made it!” gesture, Kendrick invites on his longtime TDE collaborators Ab-Soul and Jay Rock—a first for the “Heart” series. And by now, Kendrick’s already tying his own fortunes to the future of hip-hop. Newly secure in his place in the culture, Kendrick issues a challenge to his fans: “Will you let hip-hop die on October 22?” 

Kendrick already knew the answer to his question. —Anderson

Kendrick Lamar’s cold war with Drake might have started in 2013, when he rapped for two minutes on a BET freestyle, essentially reminding Drake of his standing. “Nothing’s been the same since they dropped ‘Control’ and tucked a sensitive rapper back in his pajama clothes,” rapped Lamar. Ouch! I was in high school when this freestyle came out, and the many Lamar fans present in my junior class were ecstatic. It was the first display of Lamar’s ability to spank Drake whenever he needed to. It’s almost offensive that the subject of this verse was debated at the time. Not only is Kendrick obviously talking about Drake, but it almost seems like too easy of a shot.

In this era, we all believed that these two guys were merely friendly competitors, men who could sit at the same table but snipe at each other every now and then. King Kendrick was coming; Drake may have started to wonder whether Lamar could one day usurp the throne. Knowing what we know now, it’s funny that it took this long for it to happen. This was a warning shot that turned into a decree. —Buford

The opening track on Mr Morale & the Big Steppers, “United in Grief,” is one of Kendrick’s most musically experimental songs to date. After a reverberating a cappella introduction (“I hope you find some peace of mind”) and a theatrical exchange between Kendrick and his partner, Whitney (“Tell them the truth”), dissonant solo piano stabs score Kendrick’s rapid triplet flow (“What is a bitch in a miniskirt?”). 

Before long, the song explodes into a tempo-changing, hyperactive breakbeat paired with elegant, sonorous piano chords. These sudden shifts and unexpected musical pairings occur so frequently that it’s hard to ever feel grounded. And that’s absolutely the point. Because this is how Kendrick is feeling at the narrative’s start: disjointed (“Shaking and moving, like, what am I doing?”), paranoid (“The world that we in is just menacing”), and emotionally wounded (“I hope the psychologist listenin’”). 

The musical cinema of “United in Grief” is the product of an experienced storyteller who’s mastered the art of the album opener. The song sets Mr Morale’s theatrical tone. It establishes its central characters and major themes. It makes clear the protagonist’s goals (“peace of mind”) and the obstacles in his way (trauma, grief, addiction). And all of this is accomplished in just over four minutes. A master class in conceptual deftness. —Cole Cuchna

If you’ve ever listened to the leaked advance version of The College Dropout, you know that the Benz-and-a-backpack ethos Kanye West eventually arrived at was not the first draft of his public persona. The signature song on Overly Dedicated shows Kendrick at the end of a similar refining process—old photo shoots scrubbed from MySpace, affiliations grayed out like TV fuzz—a good kid in a mad city. This was back when the vocal fry threatened to dissolve every other line into that other kind of static, the vignettes about shootings after chemistry class and long rides in minivans with broken air conditioning all blurring into one fugue of an origin story. “Average Joe” features an array of complex, elastic flows that Kendrick tosses off one by one, nonchalantly, jokers from a deck of cards. The seesaw rattle of “Got jumped, got jacked / Shot at, shot back” makes him sound more weary than scared. Of course, that’s a pose, like everything else. —Thompson

By the time Mr. Morale dropped in 2022, Kendrick had achieved a disorienting level of success. He was headlining international festivals, winning Grammys every time he opened his mouth, and he became the first rapper to ever win the Pulitzer Prize. What he discovered at the top of the mountain was a modernized biblical parable. The industry was a Gomorrah of clout chasers, false saviors, and predatory con men. The once holy covenant between hip-hop, the artists, and its fans had been tainted and severed.

“Rich Spirit” documents the half decade after Damn., in which Kendrick embarked on a hero’s journey like something Joseph Campbell dreamed up on Rosecrans. He brands himself the “aloof Buddha" or “Christ with a shooter." He fasts "four days out the week,” a gnostic wanderer in a TikTok world. His mission is clear: He must stay balanced and attuned to street-level reality. There are plenty of other options. He had more than enough acclaim to coast forever with tasteful abstraction and inspirational platitudes. It wasn't a far stretch for him to become the rap game Bono. Or he could chase inspiration forever without a timetable, à la André 3000. Instead, the street transcendentalist threw away his phone, spit into the hollow void of digital life, and attempted to mend his wounds and sustain his soul. A move to Calabasas was not on the timeline.

On “Rich Spirit,” Kendrick turns his spiritual quest into its own enigmatic myth. With his hypnotic counterclockwise flow and “UGH” ad-libs, he reimagines Drakeo’s “Impatient Freestyle” by way of Siddhartha. This is a song about trying to catch inspiration from the ghosts of the ancestors while drowning out the babbling insanity of an infected world. Kendrick is mortified by the hypocrisy all around him: the “thoughts and prayer” clichés, the vapid influencers on Cabo trips, the false avatars of online life (“I would never live my life on a computer”). This is why he offers up a warning. There might be distractions attacking us from every angle and inside every app, but the road not taken still remains a timeless possibility. —Jeff Weiss

Following the funky, swaggering machismo of “King Kunta,” To Pimp a Butterfly immediately transitions into “Institutionalized,” a mellow, mournful tune about the corruptive properties of wealth and the sense of imprisonment that lingers over those who live through poverty and violence. At this point in his career, Kendrick had achieved more than he may have ever imagined—global celebrity, influence, riches—yet he freely admits he’s still “trapped inside the ghetto,” destined to keep returning to Compton and operating with the same mindset he had in his precarious youth. What separates Kendrick, though, is his awareness of this fraught position: The line “Master, take the chains off me!” suggests a plea to break out of the cycle, an urge perhaps buried within the sage wisdom his grandmother offered when he was a child—“Shit don’t change until you get up and wash yo’ ass, n----.” Featuring vocals from Anna Wise, Bilal, and a smooth as always Snoop Dogg, “Institutionalized” still sounds so fresh and soulful all these years later. —Jenkins

“Alright” serves as a reassuring palate cleanser in the context of To Pimp A Butterfly and grew into the most impactful rap song of the 2010s, but “Momma” is the most important song on the album and arguably the best lyrical performance of Kendrick’s career.

“Momma” feels like an unofficial installment in the “Heart” series, following a through line of paying homage to what music has afforded him: an escape from the bounds of South Los Angeles to international stages and a greater understanding of his place in the world. Each choppily delivered bar foreshadows how Lamar wants to take his newfound stardom after delivering a classic major-label debut album in good kid, m.A.A.d city and find a purpose in trying to save his family and inspire his friends left behind in Compton.

The third verse has lived with me since the first time I heard it, telling the story of Lamar’s trip to Africa, where he saw himself in the children around him. A new internal struggle about his pursuit of happiness begins in the final refrain of the song. Lamar has taken some big swings (and misses) in explaining his feelings about the Black experience in his lifetime, but “Momma” connects by striking a simple chord—doing whatever he can to make home proud, wherever that is. —Diante Lee

“I put my life in these sentences / Fucking right, it’s either that or life sentences.”

“Westside, Right on Time” is a banger of epic proportions that got (rightfully) overshadowed by an impending album drop. 

The stand-alone track came out back in August 2012 (just two months before good kid, m.A.A.d city turned the rap world upside down), and while it never officially hit streaming services, it became a cult classic for Kendrick stans everywhere. It currently sits at over 10 million views on YouTube, and more than a decade later it still receives dozens of comments pleading for a wide release. Put out as part of label Top Dawg Entertainment’s TDE Fam Appreciation Week, a long-running, now-defunct annual tradition in which TDE fed its fans loosies from some of their favorite in-house artists, “Westside, Right on Time” remains one of Kendrick’s most underrated songs.

It’s a simple premise: a beat so hard it evokes the stankest of faces, a hook so infectious you’ll be singing it to yourself for the rest of the day, and a Jeezy assist so nice you’ll reminisce about the days when he still went by Young. —Grady

Drake can’t say Kendrick Lamar didn’t warn him. K.Dot was very clear about the consequences if there was an escalation in the allegations involving him and his longtime partner, Whitney. “Don't speak on the family, crodie,” Kendrick said in “euphoria.” He circled back near the end: “We ain't gotta get personal, this a friendly fade, you should keep it that way.”

Kendrick was more brief in his soulful follow-up “6:16 in LA,” but nonetheless touched on it again: “You playin' dirty with propaganda, it blow up on ya.”

Later that evening, Drake responded with “Family Matters,” a nearly eight-minute offensive that crossed every boundary Kendrick had cautioned him against violating. Not surprisingly, Kendrick was ready. Drake didn’t even get an hour to bask in the satisfaction of his response.

“meet the grahams” is one of the darkest, most damning songs ever directed at an adversary, which almost seems hyperbolic given how often hip-hop beefs have resulted in actual bloodshed and death. But Kendrick’s game-changing track is a scathing address to Drake; his son, Adonis; his parents, Dennis and Sandra; and a rumored daughter that echoed Pusha T’s “You are hiding a child” accusation from “The Story of Adidon” in 2018. 

Backed by the spooky, piano-tinged production of the Alchemist, “meet the grahams” is the closing argument that set the stage for the almost year-long victory lap of “Not Like Us.” 

Kendrick coldly lays out the case over six and a half minutes: that Drake is a deadbeat father like his; that he’s got addictions to gambling, drugs, and alcohol; that he’s lied about writing his own lyrics and taking the weight-loss drug Ozempic; that he’s a poseur with no real confidence or friends or cultural cache; and then, most seriously, that he harbors sex offenders on his record label and runs a sex trafficking ring out of his Toronto mansion. 

“Take that mask off, I wanna see what’s under them achievements,” Kendrick says in the final verse. “Why believe you? You never gave us nothin’ to believe in.”

“meet the grahams” is a masterful work from a professional, an artist who approached this beef as more of a character assassination than a merely entertaining feud over streams and credibility. And as Kendrick reminds, it didn’t have to be this way: “This supposed to be a good exhibition within the game / But you fucked up the moment you called out my family’s name.”

It’s almost unfair Kendrick had even more to say. —Anderson

July 4, 2024. For most, a day that is reserved for fireworks, cookouts, family, friends, libations, and soaking up the sun. But as the day turned to night and the bottle rockets began to pop, the world dropped their sparklers in unison to tune in to the highly anticipated video for Kendrick’s now-infamous “Not Like Us.” But before we collectively witnessed an owl being smashed to smithereens, we were treated to a snippet then dubbed “Broccoli.” It sounded like pure wizardry, but if you’re like me, you were immediately concerned it would be trapped in snippet purgatory forever, à la the Black Hippy snippet from the “Alright” video. 

Four months later, we got a surprise. 

The surprise came in the form of a new album, GNX, and upon first listen, I was hit with the same feeling I had the first time I pressed play on Kurupt’s 1999 release, Tha Streetz Iz a Mutha. It was a hyperlocal expression of West Coast hip-hop. It was raw, it was fierce, it was hardcore. The goal wasn’t to appeal to the outside world; the goal was to bring the world into Southern California. A blockbuster regional rap record, complete with features from rising local stars (some unknown to the rest of the world), production that sounds foreign to outsiders, local slang—and most importantly, a sense of camaraderie for the coast. It was no surprise that K-Dot listed Tha Streetz Iz a Mutha as one of his favorite 25 albums of all time. 

“Squabble up” was the lead single from Kendrick’s album, and it immediately reminded me of the bounce from Kurupt’s first single from Mutha—“Girls All Pause”—but the comparisons between the two songs stop there. The video (which still stands as the only one from the project) was a clever nod to the Roots’ “The Next Movement” and was littered with Easter eggs that are still being discovered today. 

We should all be grateful that “Broccoli” was liberated from snippet purgatory. —Barber

It’s been almost seven years, and I still can’t believe Ryan Coogler and Marvel Studios managed to convince Kendrick to produce an entire companion album for the release of Black Panther. While the Kendrick-SZA team-up, “All the Stars,” is the most radio-friendly track on the album, “King’s Dead” is its biggest standout.

Produced by Mike WiLL Made-It, Teddy Walton, and 30 Roc, among others, “King’s Dead” pairs K.Dot with Black Hippy teammate Jay Rock, Future, and James Blake in a song that went triple platinum and won a Grammy for Best Rap Performance. There’s so much about it that remains so iconic to this day: the accompanying music video, which opens with Kendrick sitting in a palm tree, eating elote; Jay Rock’s opening verse; Future’s ridiculous falsetto. 

Lamar’s verse comes in after a slick beat switch, bringing new energy to the bass-heavy second half of the song. It feels very much in line with some of the themes and sounds of Damn., save for all the direct references to Black Panther. The song’s title refers to the supposed death of King T’Challa in the film, and Kendrick’s verse finds him choosing sides with—and manifesting as—the new ruler who killed him. He embodies the righteous anger of Erik Killmonger and reserves his last words to say, “All hail King Killmonger.” Although most of Kendrick’s Black Panther: The Album (including “King’s Dead”) wasn’t included in the film itself, it served as the perfect companion piece and was one of the many reasons the blockbuster was such an instant classic. —Chin

Shout-out to the graffiti artists who take their time to immortalize important figures with a mural after they make a difference. Kendrick is one of those figures, yet a mural in Compton portraying his likeness was, well, “wacced out” last September. Kendrick dedicates the first track on GNX to that situation, as well as his larger legacy and the wider reaction to the news that he would headline Super Bowl LIX. As Kendrick tells it, he took Drake out for the culture and apparently only got love from a single musical peer—Nas—for his efforts. “wacced out murals” is an opportunity for Kendrick to delve into how he truly felt after destroying Drake. Over a haunting instrumental, Kendrick stays Kendrick, offering life lessons while infusing real talk and bravado into the ominous opener. —khal

The hardest song on Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers? Kendrick basically says so himself to open the music video. Over three blistering, bass-heavy minutes, Kendrick rips through a series of verses across multiple beat changes and rhyme schemes, culminating in him repeatedly shouting, “Bitch! You ugly as fuck!” On an album that ultimately feels rather understated and tinged in minimalist jazz and R&B production, “N95,” as the second track, is a thrilling introduction and a song worth returning to whenever you’re in need of something of a rallying cry. In “N95,” Kendrick takes aim at the many superficial facades people hide behind: designer clothing, luxury cars, inflated streaming numbers, social media clout chasing—you name it. Ironically, “N95” doesn’t appear to directly address the namesake masks that were used against COVID-19, but since it’s a pandemic-era album, we’d be remiss not to wonder whether the line “You’re back outside, but they still lied” is a thinly veiled shot at the U.S. government. —Jenkins

Kendrick Lamar made Damn. to air his grievances with hip-hop, and “Feel.” was as aggravated as we’d heard him in his career. From the opening bars, it’s clear that Lamar feels like we’ve done him a disservice by underestimating his greatness, rapping, “I feel like you’re miseducated / Feel like I don’t wanna be bothered / I feel like you may be the problem.” 

Lamar makes it clear that “Feel.” is a response to fans who panned To Pimp a Butterfly and questioned whether he could make hip-hop’s current sounds his own. He does some of his best rapping here, standing in the center of the ring and bouncing around the same cadences, pockets, and internal rhyme schemes—reminiscent of a young Nas or prime Royce da 5’9. “The feeling of an apocalypse happening / But nothing is awkward, the feeling won’t prosper / The feeling is toxic. I feel like I’m boxing demons / Monsters, false prophets, schemin’ sponsors, industry promises.” The lyrics build the momentum of the song to its crescendo, ending with Lamar’s possessed shouting and a promise of judgment for anyone who can’t get with his program. Rap loves a defiant star, and on “Feel.” Lamar sneers at anyone who can’t appreciate how hard it is to be him. —Lee

As is tradition ahead of one of his album drops, Kendrick released “The Heart Part 5” in the run-up to Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. It’s a promotional single superb enough to make you consider whether it would have been better served on the album itself. No matter, we were still treated to a powerful—if not a little unsettling—music video as part of the package, depicting Lamar morphing into several notable figures in the Black community with the aid of deepfake technology. Over the course of five minutes we witness an impassioned, rapping Kendrick transform into O.J. Simpson, Kanye West, Jussie Smollet, Will Smith, and, most movingly, the late Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle. Regardless of how you feel about the eerie visual effects, there’s no denying “The Heart Part 5” is a tour de force of a performance, with Kendrick weaving in and out of funky jazz-soul beats as part of a multilayered production. Amid a catalog that has no shortage of conscious lyricism, “The Heart Part 5” stands out as one of Kendrick’s most authentic and uplifting testaments to the Black American experience. —Jenkins

Is helping to facilitate the release of untitled unmastered. quietly the greatest GM move of LeBron James’s career? If so, “untitled 02” supplies the most unassailable evidence. The biggest hit from Kendrick’s unpromoted and overlooked collection of To Pimp a Butterfly castoffs cryogenically froze the moment when his Coltrane-in-Compton musicality fully caught up to his killer rap ability. 

The scenario is familiar: Kendrick embodies the righteous but flawed hero tempted by “pimping and posing.” He’s “sick and tired of being tired.” The world has gone crazy. The self-abasement and substance abuse disgust him. A classic two-sided Gemini, he’s smart enough to know the right answers but tempted by his newfound money and power. 

It’s the ostensibly minor moments that make the track so memorable: the plinked minor key piano that adds tension before the song starts; the moment the drums drop in and Kendrick offers the brimstone demand “Get God on the phone!”; the Greek-chorus-like bars around the minute-and-15-second mark with the thunderous repeated ad-libs (“Diamonds all appraised”); the end of the first verse, when, apropos of nothing, he sneers, “You was never the homie.” And right after that, when the vowels dissolve into a nervous breakdown of negative space. 
In a genre often plagued by the quest for dull perfection, “untitled 02” understood how to bring the listener into both the booth and Kendrick’s brain—right down to his question in the outro: “Who doing the drums?” This was an auditory smoke signal, a reminder that he was too focused on inventing new forms of levitation to even bother noticing who was handling air traffic control. —Weiss

Here it comes, Kendrick Lamar’s very first Top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and it is, ironically, quite sobering? Self-indicting? (The second verse is delivered by Kendrick’s conscience.) Anti-hedonist? Dour and not at all triumphant? (“All I have in life is my new appetite for failure,” the third verse begins.) “Swimming Pools” is a sleek, hooky, darkly alluring exemplar of pop-crossover excellence, and it slots perfectly into the exquisite downward spiral of good kid, m.A.A.d city. That said, it also sounds miraculous on the radio: The simplest lines (“All the girls wanna play Baywatch”) somehow hit the hardest. But this song—yes, this pop single—also made clear that Kendrick was a burgeoning superstar with a deeper, darker, knottier, more confrontational, and infinitely more rewarding agenda than your average up and comer. He wrote a drinking song about the unrelenting abyss of drinking and managed to make it reverberate through the zeitgeist. —Harvilla

Yes, the U2 song. Yes, one of the most important on Damn. The album is famously a story told backward. In that light, “XXX.” becomes its pivotal moment—the “m.A.A.d city” of this record, where the narrator loses his innocence and goes looking for revenge. It’s the inciting incident in this Shakespearean tragedy, one with Old Testament overtones. It’s also the story of America, marginalization, and what’s wrought by those two things. “You overnight the big rifles, then tell Fox to be scared of us,” he raps in the song’s somber second half. “Gang members or terrorists, et cetera, et cetera. America’s reflections of me, that’s what a mirror does.” —Sayles

Toxic masculinity, existential dread, daddy issues, and a Sampha feature? Most rappers could easily turn this into a jumbled mess. Not Kendrick. “Father Time” is a plea to prioritize our mental health, even if we’ve been conditioned to bottle up our emotions. Vulnerability equals weakness. Yet over the floating keys, Kendrick laments that the tough love that raised him has led him to a lack of empathy and to emotionally stonewall those he loves. Each verse feels like it could be a John Singleton–directed limited series. 

Lauryn Hill said, “How you gonna win, when you ain’t right within?” That sentiment echoes throughout this song. Sampha’s haunting chorus serves as an alarm clock. Survival first, fuck your feelings. In the end, that math doesn’t add up because for the betterment of those we love, we gotta fix ourselves first. —Fujimoto

Despite what the Hollywood elite want you to believe—and no matter how much our lemming brains thirst for the dopamine rush of nostalgia—sequels suck. The chance that Kendrick and Mustard would release another song that could contend with the all-consuming force of “Not Like Us” was nigh impossible. After you kill the most successful rapper of the 21st century, it’s ill-advised to return to the scene of the crime. For that and many other reasons, “tv off” is an act of hubris that could’ve toppled 2024’s GNX the moment it was uploaded to DSPs. 

Now, this isn’t the blurb that’ll try to convince you that “tv off” accomplished what it set out to do, but then again …

From the moment Lamar yelps “MUSTARD” like an unhinged war general, it’s evident that this is a victory lap that was preordained. The brilliance of “tv off” is in its clarity of purpose. As Kendrick so eloquently puts it in the opening verse, “This is not a song / This a revеlation, how to get a n---a gone.” Over Mustard’s sparse, anthemic beat, Kendrick talks so much shit it's awe-inspiring. Without uttering his adversaries’ names once, Lamar summarizes the game plan that got him to the Super Bowl with equal parts aggression and hilarity. Kendrick’s grandma gets a warning; so, too, do “weird n----s” and a host of other financially strapped gentlemen. In any other hands, the beat switch would’ve been overkill (and maybe it still is), but who among us hasn’t wanted to piss on a grave or two? 

It’s a diabolical instruction manual and likely a warning that Toronto’s most famous hip-hop export might want to turn his dial to off come February 9. —Holmes

On every album in Lamar’s discography, he lets you know what’s really been bothering him for the past few years. The fatal karma of Compton’s street politics led him to seek contrition and salvation on good kid, m.A.A.d city; on To Pimp a Butterfly, survivor’s remorse and disillusionment from fame torture the artist and consumer; on Damn. and GNX, you can hear the fist shaking and grouchiness that’ve come from seclusion and the chase for all-time greatness.

“Count Me Out” and Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers take a different turn in his career, with Lamar acknowledging that his real enemy is himself. His infidelities are a central theme on the song and the album, but those really serve as a jumping-off point for a more important subtext: a man perpetuating destructive habits, rationalizing it by laying out all the ways he was made a victim before, and patting himself on the back for past good deeds. “You said I’d feel better if I just worked hard without lifting my head up,” he says, speaking frankly to himself about the ways he gave in to his insecurities and failed to live up to his own idea of being a decent man. The production is as good as he’s ever had, toggling between synths, 808s, vocal arrangements, and guitar licks that swell and contract with the weight of the lyrics.

On each of Lamar’s other albums, his finger is understandably pointed at extenuating circumstances around him; he wants you to know he didn’t ask for the bullshit that came with being around his homies, becoming a star, or kicking up beefs with other rappers—but he’ll nevertheless rise to the occasion and come out better by the end. This time there’s no hero, just a man coming to terms with the mess he made. —Lee

K.Dot has made some phenomenal music videos to complement his album work over the years, and “Element.” may be one of his finest. Directed by Jonas Lindstroem and the little homies, the video features stunning imagery, much of which pays tribute to the work of photojournalist Gordon Parks, who captured the civil rights movement with his images in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Just as Parks used his camera to chronicle the racial divide in America back then, Lamar uses his music to convey what he sees and feels living in America today. The video evokes Parks’s famous images to highlight how relevant his work remains decades later, as they’re given new life and meaning in a modern setting and visual medium. It depicts the cycle of violence in the Black community, the perpetual threat of police brutality, and how violence is taught to young men and glorified by society at large. And with Kendrick majestically slapping the hell out of someone in slow motion, the Compton rapper draws attention to his own complicity in this cycle as he raps about stomping out his competition. (One need not look any further than what happened to Drake last year to see that Lamar is a man of his word.) 

Video aside, “Element.” is a prime example of how Kung Fu Kenny can pack a punch with his lyrics while still making a catchy song to dominate radio airwaves. —Chin

In the immortal words of Jay-Z: “It’s funny how one verse can fuck up the game.” 

For the past decade, fans, critics, and even artists had stoked the flames for a Drake vs. Kendrick battle. Their relationship was always foggy and unclear: Were they friends, enemies, or just fierce competitors? We always felt the tension. 

Both dominated the blog era and went on to become chart-topping, award-winning global superstars. They were placed in the pantheon, alongside J. Cole, as the big three—the defining superstars of an entire generation. As the years went by, Cole and Drizzy stayed close, but Kendrick drifted. It was pretty clear that Kendrick had no interest in being placed in the same category or even remaining friends with the other two, but he largely stayed quiet in the shadows. But after Drake and J. Cole’s 2023 collaboration, “First Person Shooter,” dropped, something changed. The cold war was over. Frenemies no more. 

When the clock struck midnight on March 21, 2024, the world stopped as Future & Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You hit streaming services. Before the track dropped, rumors had swirled that Kendrick had some things to get off his chest, but it’s unlikely that anyone could’ve predicted the events K.Dot’s guest verse would set in motion. 

Thinly veiled shots had popped back and forth for years, but no one ever called out names. Rappers didn’t do that much anymore. It was bad for business, and nothing comes before the bag. Kendrick was clearly fed up, so he took two of the big three to task over a neatly flipped sample of Rodney O and Joe Cooley’s 1986 hit “Everlasting Bass.” The gloves were off with lines like “Mother fuck the big three, n----, it’s just big me.” Kendrick didn’t beat around the bush and was very clear about who he was talking to. The song immediately set the internet on fire, but it wasn’t just a flash in the pan—it had legs. It debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the Billboard Global 200—and immediately topped the Spotify charts, amassing more than 6.5 million plays in 24 hours. Clearly, the fans were eager for the beef and helped pressure both Cole and Drake to respond in the coming weeks. This verse kicked off the biggest rap battle of modern times—and arguably the greatest battle of all time—which still dominates headlines almost a full year later. —Barber

If Kendrick seems gun-shy, eager to sternly lecture, or generally cautious, it’s because he knows all about the youthful urge to behave badly. Warm climates in Compton would have K.Dot acting a cruel hoodlum, engaging in petty crime with the homies for no reason other than opportunistic boredom. The fourth song on good kid, m.A.A.d City, “The Art of Peer Pressure,” details this behavior; in a compact and precise flow, Dot name-drops Young Jeezy’s “Trap or Die,” “hotboxing like George Foreman” grills, and Boost Mobile SIM cards. To call it cinematic would be to forget how everyday it feels. It’s a documentary about nihilism.

Where this song differs from other songs about crime, however, is how attentive it is to just how dangerous it can be. Mr. Lamar isn’t necessarily bragging; he uses memory to remind the adolescent he once was that there’s a better way to live. good kid, m.A.A.d city earns its classic label by becoming an album about Christianity, sin, and how shockingly easy it is to partake in the latter. Dot doesn’t necessarily want you to revel in the fun. —Buford

The verdict is still out on whether I’ll ever see God—as in, like, face to corporeal face. I come closest to picturing the Big Fella if you put “How Much a Dollar Cost” on in the background. All its brooding, melodious glory sweeps me up and pulls me closer to the pulpit. It’s a track about real and imagined slights and repercussions and the unseen forces that guide them. It also has the distinction of being a tale that so excels as a labor of fiction that it bleeds into the realm of gospel. That’s the gall in it, as well as the gold. 

So when “How Much a Dollar Cost” stirs strings and horns that rival a Spike Lee flick, it’s done neither lightly nor by accident. It’s meant to stop you where you are. Transgressions (“Crumbs and pennies, I need all of mines”) colliding with anguish (“Your potential is bittersweet”) until the destitute cloak is flung loose, unveiling the divine. Let Ronnie sing it, better think—and listen—twice. —Pryor

Kobe in the 1997 dunk contest. Ken Griffey Jr. crushing a baseball off a building in the 1993 Home Run Derby. That’s what I see whenever I listen to the Cole-on-the-boards Section.80 closer. The album is an introduction to a generational talent; the song outlines what would become a core tenet of Kendrick’s storytelling—introspection. 

There’s an inescapable My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy influence in Kendrick’s flow and cadence (I mean, the hook is an interpolation of “So Appalled”), but the substance itself is all homegrown. A man’s gotta have a code, and on “HiiiPower,” it’s figuring out solutions to stop the cycle of generational trauma within Kendrick’s community. This was not a fully formed version of a young visionary powerfully narrating his struggle, but it was a preview of the authenticity with which he’s since become synonymous. —Fujimoto

I think it’s the interjections. The moments when Mike Dean’s simple piano lick stops and Kendrick fills the vacuum. I’m so fucking sick and tired of the photoshop. This that Grey Poupon, that Evian, that TED Talk. MY LEFT STROKE JUST WENT VIRAL. “Humble.,” the first single from 2017’s Damn., dropped at a time when Kendrick was dangerously close to becoming boxed in by the public as a conscious rapper. “Humble.” was a corrective—a declaration: “Don’t think I can’t also do this.” And while there are certainly better songs on Damn., you can’t underrate the moment when this dropped and everyone realized that Kendrick was going there. You also can’t disrespect this song since it’s the reason we have video of Kendrick swinging a golf club on the roof of a Buick. —Andrew Gruttadaro

With the 2014 death of Michael Brown resonating within the Black community, folks needed a voice, and whatever you think of Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly, it’s undeniable that he writes the right raps at the right time. Police brutality was a regular headline in the news, and Lamar stepped up as a prominent voice who could craft music that spoke to those most affected by the violence. Kendrick is truly one of the realest voices in the modern era when it comes to the everyday struggle Black folks face; “The Blacker the Berry” highlights that.  —khal

Those three synth notes—crunchy, blown-out, insistent—trigger something like a Pavlovian response. (Tire marks, tire marks …) It was originally the beat for “You Know Me,” a 2010 Childish Gambino song engineered by the future Simba himself, and the man who would go on to build the soundscapes of Black Panther and Oppenheimer. Mere months later, the beat was commandeered. Subsumed. Given a proper lease on life as a conduit for the venom Kendrick has always had in him. Kendrick was no stranger to repurposing beats: he had an entire mixtape of freestyles over Tha Carter III tracks, released in an era when an “A Milli” freestyle practically served as a rapper’s license and registration. But “Look Out for Detox” was something different, akin to an early signature. 

It’s not on Spotify, mainly because it’s not really a song as much as it is a channel of momentum. It occupies a liminal space in Kendrick’s timeline—after his first act as K.Dot and the mixtape runs, but before any of his studio albums. It's a monument firmly at ground zero of his breakthrough as L.A.’s latest Chosen One. It’s a ghost ship, itself a promotional vehicle for a mythological entity that will never see the light of day. It’s a proof of concept, highlighting how fluidly Kendrick can render scenes of childhood trauma within a breathless sprint of braggadocio, teeming with the most Napoleonic energy imaginable. It’s an act of play: about two and a half minutes in, you hear the glass piece clinking in the background as Kendrick’s voice begins to falter on the inhale. His words lurch offbeat, and you realize this astonishing feat of rage-fueled jet propulsion is more or less just a stoned 23-year-old fucking around at the driving range. 

“Look Out for Detox” came with its own iconography. The accompanying music video tinted Kendrick in anaglyph red-and-cyan; the disparate colors swerve and crash, never quite in focus, with or without 3D glasses. It was Kendrick’s greatness as a rough draft—not yet celestially aligned, but undeniably there. —Danny Chau

In a rare IG Story after the release of Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Kendrick wrote “it took [me] 20 years to find ‘Mother I Sober.’” When accepting a Grammy for the album, he thanked the culture for “allowing me to evolve and be able to make a song like ‘Mother I Sober.’”

Clearly, Kendrick feels the song is a significant artistic milestone. Why? Because “Mother I Sober” is his most vulnerable song to date. It’s also the song that saved his family.

Scored by a softly probing piano, Kendrick’s three poetic verses are written in short fragments that reflect his fragmented sense of self (“Pacify, broken pieces of me, it was all a blur”). Struggling with unworthiness and sobriety from sex addiction, the song feels like eavesdropping on a breakthrough therapy session in which Kendrick attempts to put those pieces of himself back together. 

He soberly confronts the generational trauma he inherited from his parents, making connections between painful childhood experiences and his behavior as an adult. He admits to the guilt he still feels having witnessed his mother being abused when he was five (“Mother cried, put they hands on her, it was family ties”). He admits that recurring questions about being touched as a child complicated his relationship with sex (“Now I'm affected, 20 years later trauma has resurfaced”). He admits he has devastated his longtime partner, Whitney Alford, by habitually cheating on her (“Insecurities that I project, sleepin' with other women”). 

It’s an absolutely ruthless examination of self. No wonder it took him 20 years to write.

Kendrick is ultimately rewarded for his vulnerability at the song’s end. Whitney and their daughter Uzi appear on the track to congratulate Kendrick for breaking a generational curse. It’s an endearing moment—the glimmer of dawn after Kendrick’s dark night of the soul.
The emotional totality of “Mother I Sober” is nearly unbearable. For this reason, it’s the least streamed song on Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. But it’s also among Kendrick’s most important, and its lack of streams is merely a testament to its emotional power. —Cuchna

The bass line. Good god almighty, the bass line. The rubberiness, the filthiness, the fury, the Olympian swagger, all before Kendrick declares, “I’m mad, but I ain’t stressin’!” He seethes at all his enemies past, present, and future, neatly encapsulated in the line, “A rapper with a ghostwriter? What the hell happened?” To Pimp a Butterfly is a dense, chaotic, aesthetically and intellectually overwhelming album, yet “King Kunta” stands as one of its simpler pleasures. Still, from the Roots shout-out of its title on down, it’s a brash and dazzling lyrical barrage that spans from Richard Pryor to Bill Clinton; from a broadside against “monkey-mouthed motherfuckers” to a threatened Compton mayoral campaign. Also, the bass line is excellent. —Harvilla

“You wanna see a dead body?”

I could start this entry by highlighting how these two rap heavyweights share a hatred of Drake. More specifically, I could discuss how they both handed Drake the biggest Ls of his career. Or I could even point out the exact embarrassing moments for Drake in his losing battles against Kendrick and Pusha, like Pusha utilizing the photo of Drake in blackface as the cover art for “The Story of Adidon,” or the fact that “Not Like Us” beat Drizzy down so bad that he called his lawyer. But why would I do that?

On “Nosetalgia,” Kendrick enters Pusha T’s world and flourishes in doing so. Instead of Kendrick using his pen to brag (and pretend) that he moves pounds like King Push, Kendrick paints the picture of his youth around crack in his household. The verse is anchored by impeccable wordplay and striking images, like of his drug-addicted auntie stealing Kendrick’s Sega Genesis. By the time we reach the conclusion, where Kendrick is confronting his strung-out father and promising that his rapping will one day make the whole family rich, you can’t help but feel something. —Kermah

“The Heart Pt. 2” is Kendrick’s mission statement: a song that establishes the stakes for his career, and a deeply moving homage to his predecessors, the ones who kept him alive while growing up in gang-infested Compton. It opens with a recording of New York artist Dash Snow describing what keeps him alive: four big bottles of water a day, two packs of Marlboro Reds, and music. “I have to listen to music all day long,” Snow explains. He would end up dying of a heroin overdose in 2009. These are the stakes: life or death. Kendrick accepts that responsibility with grace—“thank you” are his first words on the track—and he honors it not just by sharing his own grief, but in the idea that his life is less important to him than his music: “Fuck a funeral, just make sure you pay my music respect.” The only salvation left for him is the immortality of his art; by saving himself through the expression of his talent, he makes the struggle a little lighter for all of us. 

It’s a tall order, and over the course of the song you hear the cost of his ambition. From the beginning, confidence in his genius triggers fear of death. In the space of three lines he goes from “you should either hear me now or go deaf” to “might end up dead, swallow blood, swallow my own breath.” In vocalizing his desire to escape, he opens a Pandora’s box of horrors to escape from. Memories and images of violence trigger the conviction to survive in tight cycles of despair, resilience, and pride, which leaves our noble hero exhausted, frantic, and breathless by the end of the song. It’s a lyrical and stylistic showcase of everything Kendrick would come to master in the years that followed: a never-ending assemblage of inventive flows, wiley intonations, and waggish voices. —Morrison

Kendrick doused the “Party Rock Anthem” era in cold water. If 2011 feels practically utopian in light of what followed, the lived reality was more unnerving. If you paid attention to the Hot 100, it felt like the 11th annus horribilis of George W. Bush’s reign. Stepping outside risked bombardment from EDM-pop-rap of hedonistic excess. For many millennials, there was a certain cognitive dissonance. Post-recession economic distress remained rampant. Anxiety and trauma caused paralysis. And self-medication came in myriad forms: weed, opiates, self-help songs about owning the night like a firework. 

While Jeremih racked up one of the year’s biggest hits in the sleazy classic “Down on Me,” Kendrick incarnated Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet lamenting civilization’s impending ruin, who preached of sins with a “pen of iron and the point of a diamond.” On “A.D.H.D.,” Kendrick established the template that would define his later young-man-yelling-at-cloud hits: the anti-drinking “Swimming Pools (Drank),” the anti-ego “Humble,” and the anti-materialistic “N95.”

This coming-of-age confession was a partial rejection of his birthright. No chronic or “Gin and Juice” endorsements could be found. Kendrick instead indicted painkillers, Adderall, cough syrup, taking “eight doobies to the face” and drinking all “12 bottles in the case.” He traced the systemic rupture to the lack of guidance offered to his wayward generation, raised amid the crack epidemic. 

Flipping an astral modern-funk track created by a duo of producers who had split off from Odd Future, the producer Sounwave discovered the nebular haze that characterized the sonics of the following year’s good kid, m.A.A.d city—somewhere between the Soulquarians and Stankonia. And Kendrick exhibited a messianic talent for writing catchy sing-along hymns that upended conventional orthodoxies of American overconsumption. Yet he avoided sanctimony because he cast himself as a victim, too—as if we were all in this together, and he was only trying to help us remember that old-time religion. It may be the best song ever made by someone trying to ruin the party. —Weiss

Here it is: The song that announced to the world that Kendrick was not a rapper you should attempt to compete with (especially as it pertains to, uh, a certain Canadian artist). It also made the world collectively neglect the normally exciting news that Jay Electronica actually managed to put out new music. But how could that be the main takeaway here, really? Did you not hear Kendrick call himself the King of New York and tell Big Sean on his own song that he was trying to murder him (along with 10 other industry heavyweights)? On the cusp of K.Dot’s Super Bowl halftime performance, the legacy of “Control” looms larger than ever. Kendrick did exactly what he said he would do and rose to the top, becoming the first solo rapper to get booked for the biggest concert of the year. In retrospect, his one verse alone is so clearly a milestone in hip-hop history. The landscape in rap was forever shifted, giving rise to a new era of competitors and rivalries, while cementing Kendrick as the most gifted young MC on the planet. August 12, 2013—remember the date, folks. What I wouldn’t give to re-live that night on Twitter all over again … —Jenkins

“Not Like Us” is obviously the zenith of Kendrick Lamar’s evisceration of Aubrey Graham, the moment when the beef went from being a rap moment to a pop culture moment. But the zenith of Kendrick’s hate—of his sheer disgust—came four days earlier with the release of “euphoria.” It’s a beautiful thing: this tome of pure, unabashed resentment; the way Kendrick’s words traverse matters serious and unserious, deep and petty, capturing the all-too-relatable feeling of hating someone, whether that someone is Drake or not (and for many, it was). After some truly cutting shots regarding Drake’s standing as a hip-hop imposter, Kendrick stops like, Actually we don’t even need to get that deep, and comes back with something that might be even more hurtful: “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress.” Nothing you can do will change this fact: I hate you, and everything about you. And all of this happens before Kendrick Lamar says to himself, “Matter fact, I ain’t even bleed him yet. Can I bleed him?”

There’s no coming back from this song (particularly the very end, when Kendrick repeatedly sings, “We don’t wanna hear you say n—- no more”). There’s no coming back from such an expert, multi-leveled distillation of dislike. And there’s no coming back from the fact that when “euphoria” was released, most everyone besides Drake stans were like, “Ya know what? Kendrick pretty much nailed it.” —Gruttadaro

Kendrick declared himself an album artist with his major-label debut through a refreshing appreciation for sequencing under the big umbrella of storytelling. He treats good kid, m.A.A.d city as a short film made up of coming-of-age vignettes, telling a story rooted in fate, family, and faith. But because it’s relayed through the eyes of a teenager, it’s only fitting that there be moments of pure youthful exhilaration. 

Grabbing the baton from the outro of “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” (where a friend tells him he has a pack of Black & Milds and a beat CD), “Backseat Freestyle” is Kendrick in full sprint, showing what’s in his repertoire and having fun while showing off. This is a high-intensity lyrical exercise exhibiting that he can go bar-for-bar with anyone, rattle off metaphors of which his own Rap Gods would approve, and rap double- and triple-time—just to show that he can. Some people conflate rapping fast with rapping exceptionally, but I personally can’t fault Kendrick for treating his flow like he’s trying to find out what a new Porsche 911 can do on an open road because he isn’t reckless with it.

Beyond that, there was a purpose behind the stylistic choice. Within the album’s broader narrative, you get to experience Kendrick being loose, carefree, and in his element. It adds depth to someone who you already know to be pensive. And if you take a step back, you see that he understands the importance of narrative structure and details as they pertain to storytelling. If you’ve been in the same scenario, then you already know. If you haven’t, it’s rich enough to feel on a visceral level. “Backseat Freestyle” is fun; it’s also smart in a way that’s accessible. If Kendrick had a dream to show the world how skillfully he could rap at varying paces with a jolt of theater-kid flourish, then he succeeded three songs into good kid, m.A.A.d city. —Kimble

“Rigamortus” initially scans as a straightforward update of one of rap’s oldest tropes: the next great aspirant putting on armor and turning into a lyrical dragon slayer. It’s a proud tradition that can be traced back to the Cold Crush Brothers cracking skulls during South Bronx rap battles. But Section.80’s finale isn’t ordinary chest-thumping braggadocio: It’s a medieval bloodbath where the heads of heretics are staked outside the city walls. It’s the equivalent of walking into prison, stabbing the hardest inmate in the yard, and screaming to every stunned onlooker, “Who wants next?”

Claiming the throne from his most formative influences—Kurupt, Eminem, and Lil Wayne—K.Dot unleashes a fusillade of internal rhymes, assonance, and lethal death letters. As the carnage ensues, the fluttering loop of jazz trumpets furnished by producers Sounwave and Willie B call back to the avant-garde modalities of Freestyle Fellowship and their backing band, the Underground Railroad (and Central Avenue before that). It foreshadows the West Coast Get Down swing that Kendrick deployed on To Pimp a Butterfly.

But back in 2011, Kendrick was clearly offering advance warning to all of “your favorite rappers.” If Drake had been wise, he would have just relistened to “Rigamortus” and realized that only disaster could have come from tempting Kendrick to start naming names. —Weiss

With Kendrick Lamar, there’s often a temptation to focus more on the lyrics than the music, considering how rich and rewarding the deciphering can be. And likewise, it’s tempting to rank his songs by their messages—but “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” is just a really, really good song. Regardless of what it means—Kendrick battling his humanity, his morality, his fallibility—sonically it’s just one of the best songs he’s ever made. The chill, smoke-in-the-air beat, the way Kendrick skates over it; the ornate violin solo that comes out of nowhere at the end. I’m not going to overintellectualize this because there are at least a dozen other Kendrick songs that call for that more. I’m just gonna keep playing this on repeat like I have been since 2012. (Also, the Jay-Z remix is undefeated. “Empty my memory bank / It’s a million dollars in it, baby, Hilary Swank / Sittin’ next to Hillary smellin’ like dank” is kind of exactly what you want from Jay-Z.) —Gruttadaro

You don’t make a song like this unless you’re trying to be the best ever. That’s clear from the jump on “Wesley’s Theory,” the all-time opener to an all-time album—and the track that Kendrick fashioned to condense the many galaxies from which he draws his own light. Nobody throws George Clinton and Dr. Dre in a funky-ass bag with delta blues devils, Chappelle’s Show hooks, and Civil War field orders by accident. Static and a certain cheeky sample loop herald a squelching, wobbly Thundercat bass, and a five-line Josef Leimberg stanza unlocks the whole joint and is generally ill as hell.   

An ordained P-Funk parishioner, Kenny pens a hook equally horny and allusory, while Flying Lotus and Co. handle the nonverbal bits of the affair. The “theory” of the song is for the newly-famous and Black not to sleep on the IRS (peace be unto brother Snipes). It’s Kenny, so he’s got a whole cast of characters involved: himself portrayed as a freshly-signed MC; the personage of Uncle Sam; and then possibly, maybe, Satan in human form. 

There’s a cautionary voicemail from Dre (“Anybody can get it / The hard part is keeping it motherfucker”), a wispy message of warning from the same godfather of funk who was evicted from his house over back taxes (“Looking good when you’re on top”), and probably the best rapping of K.Dot’s career, channeling the federal government (“My name is Uncle Sam—I’m your dawg”). It’s all audacious and all auspicious. He even caught on before 35. —Pryor

“Fear.” is at the heart of the story that Kendrick Lamar tells over Damn.’s 14 tracks, and it remains one of the best songs that he’s ever written. When Lamar was asked whether he had ever penned the perfect rhyme during an interview with i-D in 2017, Lamar spoke about “Fear.” “It’s completely honest,” he said. “The first verse is everything that I feared from the time that I was seven years old. The second verse I was 17, in the third it’s everything I feared when I was 27. These verses are completely honest.”

Over an inspired Alchemist beat that samples 24-Carat Black’s “Poverty’s Paradise,” Kendrick raps about all the fear he’s experienced throughout his life, with each verse isolating how he felt at a different age, spaced a decade apart each time. The first verse is told from the perspective of Kendrick’s mother as she tries to instill fear in her 7-year-old son; the second finds 17-year-old Kendrick fearing death at a young age, with him considering all the ways that society could kill him; and the third covers his fear of losing everything he had built in his life by the time he turned 27, after all his success made him rich and famous.

It’s such a simple yet clever way to structure a song that provides an intimate look into Kendrick’s life, and how his anxieties have evolved and compounded as he’s grown older. And beyond all of its powerful, introspective lyricism, “Fear.” is really just a showcase of a rapper at the top of his game linking up with a super-producer in the Alchemist for the perfect collaboration. —Chin

You understand the allure of “Money Trees” best when you’re sitting in the back of a car, preferably with three or four of the homies on a trip to nowhere, with nostalgic thoughts in your rearview. 

At least that’s what comes to mind when I hear this six-minute masterpiece, which chronicles all parts of Kendrick Lamar’s life. The smell of Louis Burgers while Earl Stevens plays in the Regal on the way home from school. The memory of Uncle Tony, who took a bullet after proclaiming you’d be on tour one day. And how you hope one of the homies receives divine forgiveness after taking another life. 

This track marks a seminal moment for Lamar, who at 25 had everything riding on his first major release, good kid, m.A.A.d city. By 2012, after a handful of independent projects, he’d been anointed the savior of a coast thanks to a coveted cosign from Dr. Dre and a record deal with Aftermath. On this track, Dot and Jay Rock reveal all the untold truths of the come-up when you’re from an underserved community like Compton. The scars that come from surviving the inequities placed onto children who didn’t ask to be born into this world. The grit required to overcome the perils of poverty, and the remorse that comes from the fact that you can’t bring everyone with you on the road to success. 

But they can be immortalized forever in your art. —Murdock

There’s baggage here that’ll have it parsed on Fox News and in the remains of Black Twitter, barbershops, beauty salons, incense-hazed living rooms, and sometime sites of civil disobedience. I don’t think that’s what Kendrick was going for, but it’s certainly what he got and almost just as certainly what solidified his placement as the poet laureate of 21st century rap. “Alright” is not proscriptive. It ain’t exactly about what’s ailing you or how to get out from under it—just that it’s been done before and that somebody’s gonna make it happen again, so long as the beat goes on. 

It’s a track about a certain version of Kenny, though not exactly this version of Kenny. Is he a good guy here? Is that the point? Those are highly flammable queries. Earthshaking, maybe. The beat is, too. The percussives feel like they bounced right out of Congo Square. (The bones of the track owe to one Pharrell Williams, but the drums are all Sounwave.) Production maven and Wayne Shorter disciple Terrace Martin intersperses sax croons that would not be out of place soundtracking Do the Right Thing’s heatwaves and thunderstorms. It’s all exquisitely mixed and deftly cut. 

As is his way, Kendrick doesn’t slide through the song without a little soul-searching. (“Reaping everything I sow / So my karma comin’ heavy.”) The syllable-weaving flurry he unfurls from bars four through 12 in verse two may be the best rapping he’s ever done. Technically, as a rhymer and a writer, he’s never been better—The Color Purple references and Cerberus allusions in all. ’Buked, scorned, overplayed, and misunderstood: “Alright” is an all-American anthem for the Great American Rapper.  —Pryor

It shows remarkable confidence that on two of the most storied songs from the good kid, m.A.A.d city era, Kendrick sets up a guest MC to have a showstopping verse. As with Jay Rock on “Money Trees,” Kendrick here makes room for Gunplay—an irrepressible ball of energy and angst who in 2012 seemed capable of bending any song into his orbit—to steal the song from under him. And on one level, Gunplay does, genuflecting to the friends and enemies who are “all the same.” (Then there’s the line “Every day feel like the one before,” which sounds simultaneously like a threat and the most dispirited complaint you’ve ever heard.) Yet as bombastic as Gunplay is, “Cartoon & Cereal” comes from somewhere deep in Kendrick’s psyche, the consequence of being witness to violent acts so frequent they started to seem like Saturday-morning reruns. The restraint and metronomic precision Kendrick adheres to for much of his performance is positively arresting. (“Alllll them days at the county building / Iiiiiii’m ’bout to make my mama rich.”) While good kid is rightly seen as an era-defining classic, it would be markedly improved by the inclusion of this as an intro or outro, sample-clearance issues be damned. The hook, which features Kendrick’s voice layered with a disembodied woman’s, is sort of like the radically improved reflection of his alien shtick from Take Care’s “Buried Alive Interlude,” a deeply unnerving lens on a vulnerable moment. —Thompson

The cinematic 12-minute centerpiece of good kid, m.A.A.d city takes place just after a 17-year-old Kendrick witnesses his friend Dave’s death in a gunfight with a rival gang. The first verse is rapped from the perspective of Dave’s brother, who plans to avenge Dave’s death (“A demon glued to my back, whispering, ‘Get ’em!’”) despite knowing the futility of street life (“In actuality it's a trip how we trip off of colors”). This is the mad city at work, and Kendrick’s despondent delivery captures the hopelessness that results from this overpowering environmental influence.

The verse’s final line, “And if I die before your album drop, I hope—,” is abruptly cut off by three gunshots, implying Dave’s brother was also killed (a true story, according to Kendrick). The final bar and a half of the verse is tragically left empty, filled only by the plaintive guitar-sampling instrumental. It’s a moment of musical cinema that cuts deep knowing Kendrick isn’t scoring a film. “Sing About Me” is a documentary.

When Kendrick reenters, singing the refrain, “Promise that you will sing about me,” we understand it’s sung not just for Dave’s brother, not just for Keisha’s sister in verse two, but for all the good kids who have succumbed to the mad cities created by America’s legacy of white supremacy.

The song’s second half, “I’m Dying of Thirst,” scored by a pensive choir sample and propulsive drum loop, finds Kendrick attempting to make sense of the trauma he’s experienced (“What are we doing? Who are we fooling?”) and reiterating the collective exhaustion of his community (“Tired of running, tired of hunting my own kind”). The final moments of the song present a moment of divine intervention. As Kendrick and his friends conspire to retaliate in a parking lot, they are saved by an old woman (played by Maya Angelou) who leads them in the Sinner’s Prayer. It’s another true story, one Kendrick credited as the moment his life changed (“The start of a new life, your real life”).

The promise to “sing about me” and Kendrick’s feeling of being divinely chosen would ultimately shape his artistic output for the next decade. His subsequent three albums all contend with how exactly Kendrick should give voice to his community and whether he could handle the responsibility. But despite his ongoing internal struggle, Kendrick’s greatest contribution as an artist has been his ability to cultivate empathy through humanizing true stories like “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”—a song that quite literally gives voice to the voiceless. —Cuchna

Thirteen years ago, Kendrick admitted for the first and (likely) last time that he was jealous of Mr. OVOXO. Long before the rise of AI Snoop Dogg and J. Cole’s many apologies, Drake was a record-shattering star. Meanwhile, Kendrick’s “debut” struggled to sell 5,000 copies in its first week. On an interlude for Drake’s Take Care, Kendrick revealed that his proximity to the Toronto rapper’s success made him so “rude and impatient” that he might as well bury himself alive with the perceived power, money, and coochie that awaited him if he should ever get over the blog-era hump. 

Last year, the real Kendrick rose again. In the process, he became the petty, vindictive scourge he was always meant to be. “Not Like Us” is the sound of a false saint finally taking his rightful place in the mud. For Kendrick to become his most commercially successful self, he played the beef game better than any rapper since 50 Cent. When it was time to destroy his most loathed adversary, he did so again (“Like That”) and again (“euphoria”) and again (“meet the grahams”). 

But it wasn’t until May’s “Not Like Us” that the war was finally won. The Mustard-produced smash turned Kendrick from eternal no. 2 into a Super Bowl–headlining star. It’s a four-minute stand-up routine masquerading as a diss record that reinvigorated a coast, two labels, and the back half of Kendrick’s career. Nearly every line of “Not Like Us” was thrown into the content meat grinder—from the elongated “A minor” to “Baka got a weird case”—and each has become just as iconic as the namesake of the song. Pusha T revealed that Drake was “hiding a child,” and still a line like “you not a colleague, you a fucking colonizer” somehow hits harder. 

Kendrick and Drake were always prisoners of the lazy dichotomies thrust upon them: Conscious vs. Pop, Black vs. Light, Revolutionary vs. … Not Revolutionary. These labels did nothing but mask the reality that these two need each other more than the other would like to admit. Sometimes one does need to pop out and show n-----, and Drake was likely the only artist alive who could force Kendrick to do so (sorry, Joey Badass).
There are no ethical kings in hip-hop. The genre moves too fast and makes too many stakeholders too much money for pleasantries. Artistic “purity” can get you Grammys, Pulitzers, and Best Album blurbs. Kendrick has made deeper songs and at least one better song, but only “Not Like Us” gave the Compton rapper the thing he likely coveted most … the no. 1 spot. —Holmes

It’s not just that good kid, m.A.A.d city connects back to the great Los Angeles rap albums. It’s that it also evokes—and at points, surpasses—the great movies made about the South L.A. and Compton streets that raised him. And this song, the back half of the album’s title-track diptych, is where the vision all comes together.

“m.A.A.d city” is really two songs in one, and each would be in the top 10 of this list if they sat on their own. But stitched together, they become one of the most formally inventive rap songs ever committed to a major-label album, let alone a major-label debut. Delivering his verses in a feverish timbre, Kendrick unspools a story that’s equal parts Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society over the opening section’s paranoid strings and booming 808s. It’s fitting, then, that the second section pays direct homage to Boyz star Ice Cube’s “A Bird in the Hand” and features MC Eiht, the legendary Compton rapper who also played A-Wax in Menace. 

You can poke holes in this as our no. 1: Maybe the first half sounds dated to you, or maybe the second half is too traditionalist. Maybe you need it to have a stronger hook, or maybe you find the Pirus and Crips intro a little too Pollyannaish. But “m.A.A.d city” is a song that not only ties together the defining rap album of the 21st century but is also arguably the moment that set the stage for the rest of his career. And it’s the point when Kendrick began to enter the pantheon—when it became clear that he was a generational rapper concerned with bigger things than hit records or even the music itself. It’s a declaration of artistic intent that crescendos in a series of harrowing, possibly autobiographical rhetorical questions. 

It’s all there, even before accounting for ScHoolboy Q’s Yawk! Yawk! Yawk! war cry or the shape-shifting, stereo-panning effects on the final verse. “m.A.A.d city” is five minutes and 50 seconds of an auteur in control of a masterwork. And even though more masterworks would come—and even as he ages well past the days of being a good kid riding down Rosecrans—it’s the song that continues to define him. It’s cinematic, not just in the way that it paints a vivid story, but in how it creates a whole world for you to take in. It is, simply put, one of the best rap songs of the past quarter century and our pick for Kendrick Lamar’s best song. —Sayles