Album of the Year #16: Kendrick Lamar - untitled unmastered. - HipHop

Album of the Year #16: Kendrick Lamar - untitled unmastered.
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Album of the Year #16: Kendrick Lamar - untitled unmastered.

Posted: 26 Jan 2017 11:36 AM PST

Artist: Kendrick Lamar

Album: untitled unmastered.

Listen:

Album Background

Kendrick Lamar almost doesn't need an introduction at this point, but it could be helpful to put it all in context. Kendrick Lamar is a Compton rapper born in 1987. He grew up on Tupac, NWA, and Snoop Dogg, but was also raised on a healthy dose of the classics like the Isley Brothers and George Clinton from his parents. His first album, managed by Top Dawg Entertainment but released independently, was Section.80 and it came out in 2011, one year after his breakout mixtape O(verly) D(edicated). The album sold only 9,000 units in its first two weeks.

Kendrick Lamar exploded onto the mainstream in 2012 with his critically lauded and commercially explosive major label debut album good kid, m.A.A.d city. The album sprung onto the charts at #2 and sold around 225,000 copies first week, dwarfing S.80's sales. Here, Kendrick took an old school West Coast sound that we all knew and updated it for the modern era, all the while telling the story of one turbulent, violent, gang-influenced night in his hometown.

In terms of studio albums, Kendrick then went on a hiatus for about 3 and a half years before finally releasing his major-label follow-up, critically acclaimed, and even more commercially successful, To Pimp a Butterfly. This album saw a major switch-up in Kendrick's style, demonstrating his proficiency at rapping over a wide array of beats from soul to funk to jazz, and this time his lyrics focus on topics broader than himself. Although the narrative still largely takes the shape of following the events of Kendrick's life as he becomes disillusioned with life as a star as he sees his status corrupt his character, the themes of the story have wide reaching implications for the black condition in America in 2015.

Now. That album is over. Everyone's expecting to wait another 2-3 years for another Kendrick project. We're all satisfied with that behemoth of an album he's just given us. And then, out of nowhere... BOOM: untitled unmastered. This is a pseudo-studio-quality collection of songs that Kendrick had been performing on late night shows and in concert, continuing the same general musical aesthetic from Butterfly, though we're not removed from the Kendrick narrative we found there and the instrumentation is a bit more modernized in parts of this project than it is on his last album.

Review

Kendrick begins to set up his philosophy on this album by starting off the narrative in the middle of the Biblical Judgement Day. He talks about this, the day he is experiencing, being "the final calling" with no birds in the skies or dogs in front yards, and that everyone is walking around in nervous disbelief because "[their] belief's the reason for all this". The way they acted in their lives is why they haven't already ascended to Heaven and that scares them because, since "life [is] no longer infinity," because today is the last day, they can't change anything.

Kendrick spends much of this song setting the stage of how truly awful this scene is, but at the end describes himself being confronted by God and, dispite doing everything he was supposed to have done for God in his opinion, he is denied entry into Heaven. Kendrick doesn't understand why he is meant to be stuck here on Earth, but it certainly seems he doesn't believe that he deserves to be here.

It doesn't take long, though, for Kendrick to start begging God for that golden ticket. On "untitled 02" Kendrick is now stuck here in the apocalypse with no way out. He's suffering the consequences of whatever it is he really did wrong in life. He equates his situation to that of a person in jail, saying that he's "stuck inside the belly of the beast". He calls out and begs for God to answer him, but as he continues to do this and gets no answer, he eventually just calls for Top Dawg, the head of TDE, Kendrick's label. He calls for his friends and begins to just have fun with his money and with women and with life. He feels abandoned, both Kendrick in the apocalypse and Kendrick in the jail cell, neither getting any sign that God cares about them.

Of all the songs in the "narrative" of this album, "untitled 03," "untitled 08," and "untitled 06" don't fit the literal narrative very cohesively, though they do thematically connect to the album as a whole. Sonically, the organ and the backing vocals on "03" totally match the soul-jazz-funk vibe he's had going for the whole record and for Butterfly before it. But narratively it doesn't fit quite perfectly. Kendrick addresses some racial stereotypes of an Asian, Indian, Black, and White man. He gains advice from the Asian and Indian, he understands what not to do from the Black man's stereotype, and he understands what type of people to avoid from the White man. Then we get a triumphant scream from Bilal toward the end of the track where he says that "[he] will enjoy the fruits of [his] labor if [he] gets free today". Here, as well as on the last track, we see Kendrick making a turn away from religion and ideology and toward emphasizing the importance of making happy himself and those he loves.

As "Mortal Man" was on Butterfly, "Compton" was on good kid, and "HiiiPower" was on Section.80, "untitled 08" seems to be our "outro while the credits roll" song on untitled. The narrative and themes that Kendrick wanted to address at the beginning of the album seem to have been address and brought to a conclusion with a bow on top, and we've got one final, admittedly still very good, song with some of the best verses and flows on the whole album about the impact money does and should have on our mood and our demeanor. On top of having some great lyricism, the beat is unbeatably funky and bouncy.

On "untitled 06," both Kendrick and Cee Lo Green explore (as horrifically cliched as it sounds) the duality of man. Kendrick mentions, as he has many times in his music, that he's a Gemini and that this makes him accutely aware of the dual persona he lives and the two paths he has to take at all time: the righteous or the self-satisfactory. Here again we're hopping out of the narrative as we did on "03," as we get what is essentially a love song used as an analogue for Kendrick to reinforce that he believes in being true to oneself, both with respect to their romantic relationships and with their relationship with God. Instead of panicking and crying over the flaws God notices in him at the beginning of the album, he celebrates them here and asks both this woman and God (who we've learned may also be a woman) to accept him as he is because there's more to him than they might've otherwise thought.

On "untitled 04" and "untitled 05," Kendrick gives the stage of the main truth-telling to two women: SZA and Anna Wise. On "04," SZA delivers her "head is the answer" chorus which can be taken both comically (as it will be on a later track) and seriously, where we find that the answer to Kendrick's situation both in real life and in his apocalypse-bound, fictional self, is in his own mind, and not in the mind of others. Then on "05" we have Anna Wise speaking from the perspective of God, saying that when she sees people bleeding, drowning, burning in sacrifice for him, he is grateful. He appreciates their suffering.

On three songs now Kendrick has blurred the line between a romantic relationship with a woman and a relationship with God, has given a woman's voice to his main point of "head is the answer," of your own mind being the most important thing to follow in life, and has straight up made the voice of God be that of Anna Wise, a woman. I thought this was certainly an interesting little vein running through the album.

This angers Kendrick as he seems to think that he's made these sacrifices, he "used to go to church and talk to God," and he asks Him (or Her) why He (or She) "want[s to] see a good man with a broken heart," only to not let him into Heaven in the end. Later on in the song, Jay Rock talks about living every day to its fullest, getting some material goods from his labor to make himself feel good. This seems to be a good idea. But Kendrick comes in to say that this capitalistic mentality is corrupting him. So even though he's decided that he needs to focus more on himself and his loved ones, he seems conflicted about this as we move into the next track.

On the biggest, longest, most dense song on the album, Kendrick gives a thematic shout-out to good kid, m.A.A.d city. He takes a song about not needing the grandiose, the material, the narcotic in order to feel good about yourself, but sort of masks it, sonically, as a modern hip-hop song about smoking and drugs. The synths or altered strings or whatever they are in the background are drugged out to the extreme and we even get an appearance of the Anthony Fantano trademarked Rattling Hi Hats, if only subtly, throughout the song as well. After Kendrick gets done saying all the things that won't get you as high as being yourself, as loving yourself, there's another voice that comes in on the verse and tells him to "shut [his] fucking mouth and get some cash," that obviously material things make your life better, that obviously everyone should be trying their hardest to get theirs.

Then comes the refrain of "we don't want problems / we don't want tricks / we do want dollars / we do it big". This other voice is continuing to hammer home this message of the importance of self-indulgence, until the beat switch comes in. Here, Kendrick raps as soberly as he does anywhere on the album. He talks about how yes, he does spend things on himself but only at the same times as using his money to do real good in his community too in doing things like building youth centers in his neighborhood. Kendrick decides that the consequences of his actions, in the end, are the most important thing. He doesn't care that along the way his character might've become something that others might find reprehensible. He's inspired "a thousand emcees to do better" and helped his community and, on top of it all, lived a good life doing it. And that's what matters to him.

Overall, untitled unmastered is an album about loved ones. It's an album about pleasing others. It's an album about how heavily we weigh our own needs and wants against others'. It's is an album about religion and nonreligion. It's an album about Kendrick and where he is in life post-Butterfly and it handles its subject matter more subtly and expertly than every other album that came out last year.

Favorite Lyrics

"Somebody said you bumped your head and bled the floor

Jumped into a pit of flames and burned to coal

Drowned inside the lake outside; away you flow

And that means the world to me."

-"untitled 05" (Anna Wise)

"Never would you lie to me

Always camaraderie, I can see, our days been numbered

Reveleation greatest as we hearing the last trumpet

All man, child, woman, life completely went in reverse

I guess I'm running in place trying to make it to church."

-"untitled 01"

"Shut your fuckin mouth and get some cash, you bitch, you

You be in your feelings, I be in my bag, you bitch, you

Santa's reindeer better have some ass, you bitch, you

Everything I'm working gotta be the gas, you bitch, you"

-"untitled 07"

Discussion Questions

For you, did this album feel as cohesive as it did for me? Did it need to be, or do you think it works well as a series of disjointed B-sides?
Are there any of Kendrick's three albums you think this is better than?
For people who didn't like To Pimp a Butterfly, do you like this any more? If so, what do you think is the key difference between the two?
What do you think is the most important takeaway from this album? Either thematically, in terms of Kendrick as an emcee, in terms of where rap is going, where rap needs to go, anything at all.
Do you believe there's any truth to the feminist message hidden beneath the the broad strokes themes of this album, or am I looking for something that isn't there?

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