Stephen Prager
Staff Writer
At the abrupt conclusion of “Mortal Man”, the closer to Kendrick Lamar’s likely career-defining album, To Pimp a Butterfly, there’s a sense of terrifying closure. The album is a whirlwind of emotions, featuring Lamar projecting his self-loathing onto the world around him and sharing his rawest and most honest thoughts about the state of his home and his country at large.
In the final moments of the album’s epic finale, “Mortal Man,” Lamar shares the album’s central metaphor, the metamorphosis of a butterfly surrounded and institutionalized by a “mad city”, with the ghost of his idol, the late, great Tupac Shakur. The music swells, and Lamar finds himself frantically calling Tupac’s name, to no answer – the final sound we hear is a pain-stricken “Pac?!” indicating that Lamar’s guiding voice left as quickly as it was resurrected.
This scene comes at the end of an album of a truly dense piece of artistry that displays so much volatility, mistrust, and anger that it seems at points like a shocking Janis Joplin-like death or Jeff Mangum-like disappearance is looming for Lamar. It’s the double-edged sword of pouring your heart and soul into a piece of art – what is there left to give when you’ve laid all of your thoughts and demons on the line?
Of course, Kendrick Lamar did come back, and his fourth LP, DAMN., is about the most logical comedown possible following his magnum opus. It picks up in the aftermath of Lamar’s meteoric rise to a life of fame, something unimaginable for someone who grew up in an environment as unforgiving as Compton.
Despite its aggressive title, DAMN. is fairly restrained in comparison to its predecessor. It maintains some of the same quirky production value, with time signature changes, spoken word poetry, and news soundbites that represent Kendrick’s current disillusionment with the world around him. Yet Lamar raps with an unfamiliar detachment that seems to have manifested in the shadow of his greatest achievement.
DAMN. simply doesn’t have the energy that was synonymous with To Pimp a Butterfly. Nowhere on the album is there a song with the swagger of “King Kunta” or the infectious artlessness of “i.” DAMN. is more of a character study of Kendrick Lamar himself instead of the chaos that surrounds him, and it is by nature a less chaotic album. Instead of the dense fusion of traditional hip-hop with elements of soul, big band jazz, and rock that made To Pimp a Butterfly appear gritty and representative of the diversity of the city, DAMN. sounds slick, as if it was produced to put Lamar’s voice back at center stage. “DNA.” is a fine example of this - with a repetitive backing track that sounds like something an amateur freestyler might rip from Youtube, the song can turn its focus to Lamar’s questioning of whether he is defined by the “loyalty and royalty” or the “poison and pain” inside his DNA. It a fine choice for Lamar to re-calibrate himself and make a more straightforward rap album, especially considering that the subject matter really isn’t conducive to the disorienting bombast that To Pimp a Butterfly mastered.
If this sounds like an overly safe or cowardly choice for an artist of Lamar’s caliber, it assuredly is not. The album’s orientation towards minimalism is actually fairly risky because forces his voice and lyrics to carry the weight of the album, to mixed results. It works on “YAH.”, for example, because Lamar’s slightly slurred vocals meld perfectly with the dreamy keyboard effects that dominate the song. “GOD.” also uses minimalism to its advantage, as the quiet synthesizers in the backing tracks create a feeling of isolation as Lamar pleads with God to not be judged for his sins. However, it works less effectively on “HUMBLE.” which encompasses Lamar’s troubled childhood in ways that feel derivative of better songs like “Hood Politics” or “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.” And then there’s “LOYALTY.”, which flat-out wastes Rihanna’s talents on hackneyed lines like “on your pulse like it’s EDM” and “gas in the b*tch like it’s premium”.
As is a general principle with Kendrick Lamar, his best songs are the ones in which he leaves his blood, sweat, and tears on the track and swings for the fences creatively. DAMN. does have its fair share of songs that break the album’s status-quo. The best song on the album is “PRIDE.”, a sweeping anthem that features Lamar’s admittedly idealistic and impossible vision of a world that he’s saved by putting aside his pride and greed to truly help the poor and struggling. “DUCKWORTH.” is a similarly impressive track, telling the story of how one small moment of mercy from a notorious criminal to Kendrick’s father sets off a butterfly effect that allows the criminal to avoid life and prison and allows Kendrick to grow up with his father and eventually find prosperity, instead of dying “in a gun fight” like so many others from his home. Lamar is not nearly as politically outspoken here as he was on To Pimp a Butterfly either, but DAMN’s “XXX.” at least deals with some of his shock and terror following the election of Donald Trump – with lines like “You overnight the big rifles, then tell Fox to be scared of us” that suggest that Lamar is resigned to the fate of the nation and has no desire to change it, only to weather whatever storm may come.
That’s a key difference between DAMN. and Lamar’s previous work – it doesn’t have the fighting spirit that defined To Pimp a Butterfly or even good kid, m.A.A.d. city. Instead, it’s like a one man show where Lamar plays both the hero and the villain. It actually seems somewhat unusual to have a Kendrick Lamar album that doesn’t feel genre-defining or genre-defying, especially considering the deification he receives from many people who want to see genres getting redefined through experimentation. But DAMN. is best looked at as an inoffensive transition album more bent on concluding what surely will be looked at as a classic era of Lamar’s music defined by its daring verve. It’s not jaw-dropping or apocalyptic like To Pimp a Butterfly, but nobody is likely to leave expecting DAMN. to drive Lamar off the deep end either. Instead, it leaves the listener looking ahead at a future era that once again defies every limit aside from Lamar’s ambition.
Grade: B
