‘GNX’: Kendrick Lamar at his most anti-heroic

That’s an incredibly heavy crown to bear. More importantly, it’s a trap. No blood-and-flesh human can live up to the demands and expectations of being a real life prophet—that sort of divinity inevitably leads to either downfall or martyrdom. Nobody knows that better than Lamar, a rapper who grew up within the morally grey universe of gangland Compton, and who has always been aware of his own fallibility.

His 2022 album, titled Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, was him rejecting the throne and dismantling the halo around his head. It showcases Lamar at his most vulnerable—and most human—as he grapples with childhood abuse and trauma, confesses to sins like infidelity and sex addiction, and disavows the notion of rappers as anybody’s saviours. It was a knotty, messy sprawl of an album, steeped in paranoia, temptation and the sobering awareness of one’s own vulnerability. You could tell that Lamar needed a change of pace, a chance to shrug off his messianic legacy and start afresh.

He got the opportunity to do just that this year, when Drake and J.Cole anointed themselves—alongside Lamar—as the “Big Three" on First Person Shooter. Lamar wasn’t having it. “Motherf–k" the big three, n—a, it’s just big me," he responded on Future & Metro Boomin’s track Like That, igniting a generation-defining rap beef. It was rap as vicious bloodsport—no rules, no honour, just two rap giants pummelling each other with everything they had, including accusations of paedophilia, sex-trafficking and domestic abuse.

There’s no disputing that Lamar won the bout. If Meet the Grahams—which accused Drake of hiding yet another child—was the sucker-punch, then the infectious, club-ready Not Like Us was the knockout blow, getting a whole nation to dance and grind to accusations that your opp was a “certified paedophile". Not Like Us hit heights that no diss track has ever done before: going to No.1 on the charts, multiple Grammy nods in the major categories, a Super Bowl half-time show gig.

It wasn’t just personal animus driving Lamar’s evisceration of his Toronto rival. His diss tracks drip with disgust and condescension, aimed at what Drake represents—the rot and moral decay that sits at the heart of corporatised hip-hop. Having overthrown the anointed king of the current rap regime, Lamar now makes his own play to fill that power vacuum with GNX, the album he surprise-dropped on a late November Friday. The laser-focused record is a blueprint of Lamar’s vision for what hip-hop should look like in the future—proudly regional, rooted in the genre’s history, supremely self-confident and relentlessly pugilistic.

At the centre of it all is Lamar at his most anti-heroic—the vengeful king of rap who bristles at insults both real and perceived, who rains sulphur-and-brimstone on his enemies and revels ostentatiously in his undisputed status as the GOAT. Opener Wacced out Murals sets the tone, as Lamar fumes about someone desecrating his mural before aiming salty, venomous bars at anyone he thinks has disrespected him.

“It used to be fuck that n—a, but now it’s plural," he declares, directing devastatingly funny barbs at contemporaries and legends alike. Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, comedian Andrew Schulz, nobody is safe from Lamar’s withering return fire. “Before I take a truce, I’ll take ’em to Hell with me," he declares.

Squabble Up continues in the same vein, its trunk-rattling bass and freestyle-electro synths soundtracking a paean to the joys of scrapping in the street and the invigorating feeling of (self)righteous indignation. “Bitch, I cut my granny off if she don’t see it how I see it," Lamar raps on the rambunctious TV Off, a line that’s breath-taking in its sheer pettiness. Elsewhere, the lush, moody Man at the Garden is an exercise in braggadocio and uncomplicated triumphalism. “More money, more power, more freedom, everything heaven allowed us/ Bitch, I deserve it all," drawls Lamar, basking in his status as the greatest rapper alive.

When he’s not tap-dancing on the graves of his vanquished foes, Lamar is engaged in another round of personal myth-making—this time as the bridge between West Coast’s glorious past and its bright future. Lamar and his producers—including Mustard, Sounwave and Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff—pack the album full of callbacks and Easter-eggs.

LA mariachi singer Deyra Barrera’s melancholic voice appears on several songs, a nod to the city’s Mexican heritage. Reincarnated features a flip of a classic Tupac beat as the rapper situates himself within Black musical history, the latest in a lineage that also includes John Lee Hooker and Dinah Washington. There’s nods to G-funk (Dodger Blue), hyphy (Hey Now) and a duet between SZA and the late NYC soul legend Luther Vandross. Lamar brings this hip-hop history in conversation with up-and-coming talents from LA and the Bay Area—ceding space to Hitta J3, Youngthreat and Peysoh on the posse-cut title track, giving Roddy Ricch a verse on Dodger Blue. He may be nostalgic for the past, but Lamar isn’t interested in resurrecting it. Instead, he uses it as a pathway to imagining the sound of rap to come.

There are mis-steps—such as the too on-the-nose penmanship-as-romance grift of closer Gloria—and contradictions. Lamar’s vision for rap sounds less like revolution than evolution, his own take on the empire-building of forebears like Jay-Z and Ice Cube. Nevertheless, GNX is a thrillingly visceral reminder of hip-hop’s emotive and cultural power, its ability to articulate grand, radical ideas about the way we live and feel. At a time when too much of the hip-hop orthodoxy is addicted to the allure of chasing trends and chart numbers—who count success in dollar bills, not cultural impact—that reminder was much needed. Hip-hop was once called Black America’s CNN. GNX makes a powerful case that it could—and should—be that again.

Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.