It was evident that rapper Kendrick Lamar would release an album just before his probable coronation, at the end of January 2025, at the Grammy Awards, the American music awards, where he has seven nominations, five of them for a single song. not like us, a piece destined to crush his rival, the Canadian Drake, considered too pop, too diluted. He couldn’t leave his fans hungry after this. “distortion track” (attack song) which broke all the online listening records in the world. We could also expect a new project for February 2025, before halftime of the Super Bowl, the final of the National Football League (NFL) football championship, where the boy from Compton must give the show. But no one expected a sixth album so soon.
Not content with defying all odds by publishing, on the afternoon of Friday, November 22, GNX, A true love letter to California, the little genius of rap, the only one who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, added, to everyone’s surprise, twelve songs, of which eleven were co-produced by his partner Sounwave but above all by the very prominent pop producer , Jack Antonoff, to whom we owe the latest albums by Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Sabrina Carpenter.
But there is very little talk of pop on this album that begins with the flights of the Mexican singer Deyra Barrera, a mariachi that Lamar had seen during a game of the Dodgers, the Los Angeles baseball team. The one who accompanies the guitarists and trumpet players was invited to sing in the studio, without knowing that she would be found three times on this album: at the beginning of the album Para los terribles. Wacced out Muralsin the introduction to Reincarnatetitle dedicated to Tupac Shakur, Kendrick Lamar’s idol who himself paid tribute to the Mexican community in his song Live and die in Los Angeles., and in conclusion with the title glory.
Even the softest and coolest songs are real R’n’B bombs, designed for underground dance floors like luther, in tribute to crooner Luther Vandross, who died in 2005, in a duet with singer SZA; Dodgers Bluea funk ballad about the highways of Los Angeles that the city’s gangsters are sure to play on their car sound systems; EITHER Cuckoo, which begins with a soul sample from the 1970s, Give me a helping hand, of Little Beaver, one of those stories that the city pimps murmur, playing with words and their sounds.
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