Lamar can do it all, and does, across 16 dizzying tracks. On the cover (visually echoing Good Kid, Maad City, where he was the kid on a gang member’s lap), Lamar holds a child while a rabble of shirtless men takes over the White House lawn, a judge trampled underfoot.Īlthough Compton remains a frequent reference, Lamar has “Democrips” and “Rebloodicans” in his sights (specifically, on Hood Politics), as well as other pointlessly destructive binaries: the conscious rapper v the gang-banger, macho grandstanding v “survivor’s guilt”, white culpability and black-on-black violence. After decades of product placement and generalised “ballin’”, black anger has been increasingly enunciated in mainstream American urban music, spurred by Ferguson. The state of American apartheid, still heartbreakingly unresolved 150 years after emancipation, is Lamar’s subject throughout. “Oh America, you a bad bitch/ I picked the cotton that made you rich,” he snarls – probably the least nuanced rhyme here. “I need 40 acres and a mule/ Not a-40-ounce-and-a-pitbull bullshit,” Lamar bristles, and a breathtaking torrent of rhyme follows, taking in the size of his manhood and bank interest. At first, the interlude seems to riff on the anti-gold-digging sentiment familiar from umpteen hip-hop albums in which renown changes a rapper. For Free? – Interlude is one stunning, sax-led jazz scat in which Lamar enunciates “this dick ain’t free”. But Lamar is fearless in his scope here, both lyrically and sonically. Jazz is a brave place to go, even for a man from Compton. Months in the anticipating, its follow-up, To Pimp a Butterfly (the title improves after one play), finds Lamar eyeing up America, turning his back on the lure of easy stardom. His breakthrough album of 2012 cast this native of Compton, California as a “good kid” from a “maad city”, a poet promoted out of the war zone to tell his tale. A s angry as Kanye, as funky as D’Angelo, more self-flagellating than Drake and as righteously cosmic as Erykah Badu, Kendrick Lamar’s latest album does not disappoint.

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