Every line, melody, and scene of his “short film” is a seance, Kendrick summoning local spirits and contorting his elastic voice to transmit their tales alongside his own. Kendrick was far from the first rapper to spotlight the casualties and bystanders of LA’s gangland conflicts - laments for the fallen are a staple of West Coast rap - but he was the first rapper to completely fold such hauntings into his style. city,” the line capturing both the blunt force of this ambient pressure and its concussive recoil. “Seem like the whole city go against me,” he murmurs on “m.A.A.d.
Voicemails about missing dominos and realness accumulate in his inbox. Ghosts of homies and relatives speak to and through him as he hits laced blunts and licks. Like Professor X patched into Cerebro, Kendrick projects his antsy mind into the heads of his neighbors, kin, and rap influences and harnesses the psychic feedback. His songs don’t just represent or reintroduce his mythologized hometown they conduct it. Kendrick’s Hub City overflows with echoes and ricochets. Inspired by Los Angeles’ linked canons of gangster rap and hood movies, and eager to complicate that history, Kendrick and his collaborators plop a new Compton on top of the familiar one, smashing together past and present. city presents Compton as a treacherous wonderland that variously devours and nurtures its young.
A concept album about a single day in teenage Kendrick’s life, good kid, m.A.A.d. Before Kendrick Lamar retreated inward and declared “I choose me,” he chose to channel every resident of his small corner of California.
0 kommentar(er)
