Kendrick Lamar - GNX (November 22nd, 2024) Album • Page 22

Definitely, I don’t hear TPAB that much in other stuff

 

I think all of the past 5 are classics

 

My mom says I’m a classic

 

The monoculture of 15-20 years ago is gone, there isn’t really a canon anymore so I have given up on fighting the “classic” battle. Kids get their “classics” from anonymous lists on /mu/ reposted to Tiktok or reddit now

 

TPAB is one of the musical achievements of the 2010s. A singular album that will be listened to for decades. You can feel Kendrick pour everything he loves about music into it, you can feel the time it took to painstakingly craft an album that i consider to be as perfect as any album ever made.

And yet, its impact on hip-hop/the world was so minimal, so disappointing, that Kendrick returned with DAMN., an album primarily focused on the world being hopeless.

 

I don’t really see the purpose of debating whether something is a classic tbh. Tons of bad shit is ‘classic’ and tons of good shit isn’t. I do think, tho, that more people are clearly aping some rap songs at this point than tpab

 

I wanna dance to A. G
I wanna dance with George, I wanna dance to SOPHIE
I wanna dance to HudMo

 

I WANNA DANCE TO SQUABBLE UP

 

And DAMN pulled the sound of the radio to him almost as if he was proving that he could

Which is precisely why chunks of Morale disappointed me...it was Kendrick running to the dominant sounds of the day and rapping over trap drums instead of bending them to where he was artistically a la DAMN.

 

I’m curious what artists you guys are referring to aping Some Rap Songs. I feel like that record drew attention to a bunch of great artists already doing that sound before Earl got to it

 

I absolutely consider that one, LOYALTY and GOD three of his worst. PRIDE is also an absolute nothingburger to me. don't know why I'm continuing to go back and forth on this though lol, this thread is on a real kick with the DAMN squad today

maybe the snooty I-know-better tone ain't the one for you if you don't want people responding in kind, consider a different approach?

 

Mr morale is him saying “I’m a sex addict and I need to talk about that over my cousin’s beats”

 

"LOYALTY" is good, "GOD" is a great experiment from him in an album that is largely accessible (that song included)

nah, this ain't it

 

All I said was that I thought people forgot how good DAMN was, an album that I myself love and have forgotten how much I enjoyed it until I recently returned to it. If you didn’t like it then and still don’t like it, I’m sorry to hear that but also that’s fine? I don’t really care if we disagree

 

DAMN is probably the kendrick album i listened to the most.

 

Obviously MIKE had that style down prior to SRS, but who else are you referring to? I feel like a lot of the other artists (sixpress, standing on the corner) were all a little too spacey and unfocused on their earlier stuff. SRS took that style and distilled it to its purest form. I think you hear the SRS style on Mach Hommy, Griselda, Fahim, Droog, Boldy post 2018. Not as much their flows (which were already pretty solidified) but the beats they started going over. Maybe it was just me falling in love with SRS and then hearing it in everything after.

 

I’m thinking artists like Navy Blue, Mavi, Medhane, MIKE, Sixpress…I mean hey they may have been influenced by old Odd Future in the first place making it a full circle moment, but Earl drawing more attention to that group of artists feels more like a “rising tide lifts all boats” kind of thing to me

 

Navy Blue, Mavi, and Medhane are all post SRS, aren’t they? Or at the very least were working with Earl to create that record?

 

they all had projects before him IIRC. I swear to god there was a piece about Earl where he talked about moving and getting acquainted with a group of artists who already kinda had this sound in the works. Craig Jenkins or Paul Weiss might’ve written it, I’ll have to seek it out.

 

I think @cherrywaves is right, I seem to remember that piece as well. I do think it's the best (and one of the more abstract) versions of that sound to come out, but while I kind of get what Spo is saying, I don't necessarily hear it in a lot of Griselda or Griselda-adjacent (Mach-Hommy, Boldy) artists.

 

I've listened to this a bunch now and I honestly don't ever see myself ever putting it over anything from GKMC to DAMN (maybe about equal with Section 80 and Mr. Morale) but this still might already be my rap AOTY, that's how fucking good his catalogue is

 

I prefer the Tyler and Doechii albums fwiw

 

Tyler album is considerably better than this

 

The Tyler album is good, but this feels like it's on another level.

But then again, i've never been a big Tyler fan, so i'm probably not the best person to compare them.

 

Which reminds me, I need to give the Tyler album another listen.