Surveying the contemporary rap scene, Kendrick (on Untitled 2) hollers: “I see jiggaboos… I see Styrofoam”. Untitled 1, with its Book of Revelations imagery (“planes falling out the sky, trains fallin’ off the track”) finds Kendrick reproachfully addressing the boss upstairs: “I tithed for you, pushed the club to the side for you, who love you like I love you?” There are gnomic hints of Old Testament wrath amidst the cauldron of conflicted feelings Kendrick ventriloquises. Now subject to the financial pressures of the mainstream, Kendrick must resist the orders to compromise his art.īut then there’s Kendrick’s true master. On Untitled 3, Kendrick describes the antagonistic process of doing business with the exploitative “white man” – “put a price on my talent, I hit the bank and withdraw”. With Kendrick, everything is calculated, and untitled, unmastered.’s un-title can be trusted to carry at least a double meaning.
Jay Z once ruefully eyed hip-hop’s conscious/commercial divide by rapping: “Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense / But I did five mill and ain’t rapped like Common since.” This conflict continues to dominate the discourse about rap lyricism, but over the last few years, Kendrick Lamar has been proving that you can bridge that divide.ĭespite his weird voice, his weirder voices, his oblique lyrics and baroque song-structures, ‘King Kendrick’ has sold millions, won Grammys, and managed to (to paraphrase Buzzfeed, probably) ‘break the internet’ simply by releasing a collection of ‘untitled’ off-cuts from last year’s universally lauded and largely anti-commercial album To Pimp a Butterfly.
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