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kendrick lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d city (4)

and it’s round four. even though this one is rather fresh, its almost a classic by now. not few claim that kendrick lamar’s latest installment ‘good kid, m.A.A.d city’ is setting standards for contemporary hiphop music - and they definitely got a point.

gkmc was released on aftermath and interscope records just a few weeks ago, yet its already been creating quite a furor throughout blogs and magazines (with the likes of flying louts heralding lamar as the next big thing in hiphop. quite an accolade one might say.) lamar’s second full studio release features not only a bunch of quite interesting producers, like scoop DeVille, just blaze, the neptunes, and of course his long time mentor dr. dre that he has been releasing with before (word has it they teamed up on ‘detox’ and they obviously dropped ‘The Recipe’ earlier this year). for gkmc, lamar also invited a couple of mcs over to do some nice collabs, among other you’ll find some Jay Rock there as well as compton’s doyen MC Eiht.

one might say it has been a safe bet since the release of lamar’s mixtape ‘section 80’ that he might be representing a promising, uncorrupted and independent hiphop artist on the rise, a quite welcome refreshment to the rather popular side of hiphop (billboard top 20 btw) from overproduced autotune like beats you got to hear otherwise. it comes with 12 tracks, reaching from dark and serious rhyming to bouncing player tunes. for me, to be honest, gkmc turned out to be a grower. i kind of liked the beats and the sound right away. but i was not really sure about that tough gangster-player like talk you got to hear on the record. now after quite a few spins and after listening closer to what lamar is actually telling this first impression starts to change. the whole album is pretty conceptional, telling a quite riche and very authentic narrative about the life of kendrick - back in the days his rapper alter ego was k. dot - in his hometowm compton. its packed with dark stories about him, his homies, loved ones and his neighborhood and quite autobiographic. kendrick tells his stories with complex, fast paced and lyrical rhymes. great technique, great production, great beats (some samples are truly beautiful btw, like janet jackson’s ‘anytime, anyplace’ in ‘poetic justice’. that said, i’m still not fully over the bragging player lines. but that’s just my high-level nit-picking here.

anyways, as always i leave you with a track to listen to. this time it’s (the second half of) ‘the art of peer pressure’. good stuff.

phew, quite a lot of hiphop lately. well stay tuned there’s some jazzy stuff coming up, i heard. ;)