No matter, ultimately, because listening to Damn already leaves this listener, at least, wrung out, down to the soul. Then again, perhaps Lamar was right that they would subtract from the whole. If he follows the pattern of TPAB, perhaps we’ll get to hear some of those in the future on an EP, in the manner of Untitled, Unmastered. Several reports from his collaborators say that there were plenty of hot tracks that went unused (which helped propel the online second-coming rumors this weekend). I can analyze why every track on Damn is here, but there are a few (“Element” and “God,” primarily) that to my ears enhance the cycle more than they do the music. It perhaps shows one of his (few) artistic faults, a tendency to want to knit things up too tightly, to adhere too strictly to concept. I suppose Lamar and his producers might have changed it in pursuit of more concision and coherence, but I lament it. Oh, religion, why must your moral insights always come with a catch?)
He sounds that out in “XXX” in a couplet full of thematically apt, internal slant rhymes: “Gang members or terrorists, et cetera, et cetera: / America’s reflections of me-that’s what a mirror does.” (However, Lamar does flirt with more conspiratorial ideas in several places: the notion that black people are the true Israelites, and as God’s actual chosen people, have been singled out for suffering as some kind of a test.
Like another great inquisitor into American morality, James Baldwin (a nonbeliever, but also schooled in the pulpit), Lamar doesn’t think it’s so simple as whites being genetically rotten, but that majoritarian America projects its own evils onto the marginalized. White America’s self-soothing denial of its role in black pain and oppression is a similar kind of sin, on a larger scale, to the ones he’s illuminating on many other earthly planes, as highlighted by all his blunt, elemental one-word titles such as “Lust,” “Love,” and “Fear.” Tracks like the latter, one of the album’s most heated and penetrating, as well as the equally scathing “DNA,” probe for the root causes of our personal and collective misdeeds, yet they question whether those explanations are just the excuses we make. Lamar isn’t just beefing back, but pointing out how societies as a whole also make choices and shirk their responsibilities. That’s what the much-discussed Fox News samples on the first few tracks are about, with clips of conservatives grousing on air about Lamar’s work and hip-hop in general as the true scourge of black America. It was because he wanted to testify about sin and redemption, in 14 songs, like the Stations of the Cross. It was no coincidence that he dropped it on Good Friday, though not, as the internet instantly convinced itself, because Lamar was going to “rise again” with a whole second album on Easter Sunday. Characteristically, Lamar carries that impulse to a further extreme, as a true believer and always a tormented moralist: As a whole, Damn really is an extended sermon. The first track, “Blood,” kicks off with cosmic-choir harmonies, posing the question, “Is it wickedness? … Is it weakness? … You decide …” Musically it calls up the choral sections on 2016 albums by Kanye West and Chance the Rapper that announced rap had a gospel-music revival going on. Unlike those records, though, Damn is not a cinematic or operatic story cycle.
Damn has the thematic weight and structural intricacy to fit into what’s becoming a historic album run à la mid–1960s Bob Dylan or early–1970s Stevie Wonder, following TPAB and 2012’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City.
So Kendrick the competitor is on full alert here, but Lamar the artist and conceptualist never hits the snooze button either.
(However, there are relatively few of the trendy island rhythms and house beats that prevailed, for instance, on Drake’s latest release Lamar’s not angling for Song of the Summer.) And instead of appearances from more obscure guests like Bilal, there’s a superb feature from Rihanna (rapping, even) on the core-values statement “Loyalty,” and even a (thankfully) subdued one from U2. Where TPAB drew heavily on the 1990s legacy of California rap as well as older jazz and soul, Damn more often evokes the Dirty South sound whose tendrils extend into most contemporary hip-hop. Lamar’s label head Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith also played a much more active role. Live free-jazz performers and electronic experimenters mostly cede to more commercial banger-makers such as Mike Will Made-It and in-house team member Sounwave producers’ producers such as the Alchemist and 9 th Wonder and a newer collaborator called Bēkon, formerly known as Danny Keyz. So on Damn(officially styled, along with the song titles, in all caps and with an emphatic period at the end), the album he dropped at the end of last week, the sound palette is stripped back to starker beats, effects, and vocal hooks.