“TRUTHFULLY,” Kendrick Lamar told me, shortly after New Year’s, “I figured that only people from my community would understand this.”
“This” was “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” his major label debut, a bildungsalbum that told the story of growing up in one of America’s most dangerous cities and which, upon its release in 2012, found Lamar still living there, on his mother’s couch, in Compton, Calif. When we met, he was on a couch in a snug recording suite in Santa Monica where, later that evening, work would continue on new music in the wake of 2015’s “To Pimp a Butterfly.” It’s a record that draws as deeply and as knowledgeably on the music of his hometown as it does on the history of jazz. Lamar, who self-defines as a musician and a writer, not a rapper, nonetheless produces a torrent of language that is as lyrical as it is technically sophisticated. His flow, a term that can seem all too hopefully applied to a great many rappers’ lines, is uncommonly fluid, descended, in its dexterity, variety and vigor, from one of Lamar’s influences, Eminem. And yet, Lamar’s energy and intensity are absolutely his own, and aimed at a radically different set of human concerns, social and spiritual.
