Kendrick Lamar doesn’t want to be a savior, but he’s certainly a spokesman on his latest track, released guerilla style just days after his Super Bowl LIX announcement. The song, where Kendrick raps about it being time to “let the party die,” doesn’t find him expressing much joy at being the first rap soloist to grace the Super Bowl stage. Instead, it sounds like there are more pressing things on his mind — he’s so fed up with the rap ecosystem that he uploaded the five-minute song without a title.
Over Cardo’s brooding beat, Kendrick calls out a rap game that, from his vantage point, is full of “clowns,” “devils,” and “degenerates.” He goes on to target “the rappers that report the lies,” and “the radio personality pushin’ propaganda for salary.” He ponders, “Why reason with these niggas if they can’t see the future first? / Why argue with these clowns if the circus is well at work?”
In the runup to 2022’s Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers, Kendrick shared “The Heart Part IV,” where he lambasted the ills that we’ve come to accept as “culture,” complete with a music video in which he shapeshifted into figures like Kanye West and Will Smith. Three years later, it seems like he has an even stronger desire for a cultural reset. He ends the first verse of his new song with a line saying he “would trade all of y’all for Nip, I can’t be proud of you niggas.” He spends much of the song outlining the violence he’d like to enact toward those he feels are complicit in corrupting the youth.
The track showcases Kendrick’s gift for gravitas. He evokes spirituality throughout the song, including a hook where he pleads, “Dear God, please, forgive me, you knowin’ how hard I tried.” He also references philosopher Eckhart Tolle’s “new earth” theory, noting that his vision for the future would be “filled with beautiful people makin’ humanity work.” Rapper Lecrae, whose music contains heavy spiritual themes, gets namechecked as does rapper Dee-1, who regularly takes aims at rappers who he feels are promoting negative messaging.
Overall, the track feels like a call to arms toward Kendrick’s idea of a better world. He rhymes “So where the soldiers at? / The ones that lost it all and learned to learn from that.” One could think Colin Kaepernick fits that bill, and that Kendrick’s Super Bowl halftime show announcement has him working with the entity that took so much from the Quarterback. If he wants to uproot the culture, he may have some habits and alliances of his own to examine. But even despite the moments where a second thought uncloaks contradiction, Kendrick’s palpable delivery and penmanship credibly sell the track. The urgency in his delivery bodes well for his next album — whenever it comes.
For many, the track was one more swing at Drake, whom he’s had a war of words with since April. Some of the lines could apply to the Toronto artist — but he’s calling out most of the game here, and reducing the song to a Drake diss is missing the overall message, and probably wishful thinking for a “round two” in a battle that both men seem to be moving on from.
There’s no evidence that the ominous “Round Two” clip that Drake uploaded to his Instagram was actually about Kendrick. People attributed meaning to an ambiguous post from a guy who, on the night before his Honestly Nevermind album dropped, decided to post hentai porn on his Instagram story like his account was hacked; there’s not always a rhyme or reason to his social presence. Drake’s last words explicitly about the beef were bowing out on “The Heart Part 6.” And Kendrick just said “no round twos” in a clip that’s been blasted to millions of people. Scathing tracks like “Meet The Grahams” and “Family Matters” elucidate that they’re both grown men who will say it with their chest if they care to — we don’t have to do guesswork for them.
DJ Akademiks was a critic of the track, calling it the “wrong move” and concluding “You can’t say there isn’t a game 2, then immediately drop a track seemingly baiting game 2.” He has an incentive in all of this since he’s been something of a defacto master of ceremonies in the bloodthirsty and sensational “party” Kendrick wants to end. Many of the fans who spectate the cycle of Black nihilism as entertainment tune into Akademiks for their fix, and Kendrick just might be aiming at Ak when he raps about, “The radio personality pushin’ propaganda for salary.” He ends the line asking, “Let me know when they turn up as a casualty.”
The bar harkens to Nas vying to “roll to every station, murder the DJ” on “Hip-Hop Is Dead.” It’s the eponymous track of a 2006 album where Nas similarly aims at the rap establishment, calling out wack rappers, money-hungry labels, and radio payola for decaying his beloved art form. There are more parallels between him and Kendrick: at that point, Nas was 15 years into his career, was the victor of the then-biggest beef of all time, and was regarded by many as the greatest lyricist of his generation. He explained the premise to MTV, noting that, “When I say ‘hip-hop is dead’, basically America is dead. There is no political voice. Music is dead … Our way of thinking is dead, our commerce is dead. Everything in this society has been done. It’s like a slingshot, where you throw the muthafucka back and it starts losing speed and is about to fall down.”
Jay-Z expressed a similar disdain for the state of the game on 2009’s “Death of Autotune,” where he called out a lack of aggression amongst hip-hop artists, and over-commercialization, declaring, “this ain’t for Z100.” Kendrick’s reached whatever point those two rap icons did where they were simply over it. It’s no surprise that Nas congratulated Kendrick’s Super Bowl announcement in his Instagram Story last week, agreeing that he “can’t wait to watch the party die!!!!”
Kendrick released this latest track 18 years after Hip-Hop Is Dead in a landscape that feels even more dire than the one Nas spoke out against. Rap music is faltering on the charts because it reflects the slow putrification of late-stage capitalism. Too many major label artists are treading water with the same old albums with the same old themes over the same old beats, and everyone seems so hopeless that we’re collectively letting it happen. We’re desensitized to the cycle of the few exciting artists we have falling prey to gun violence or addiction. The industry is being overrun by people who view rap as a hustle and have no inherent allegiance to hip-hop culture or the people who started it. And the bulk of hip-hop’s profits are going into the pockets of people who don’t actually care about the communities that all these traumatic narratives are coming from: labels, predacious bloggers, and streaming giants.
If Nas hadn’t already coined Hip-Hop Is Dead, it would be a fitting title for Kendrick’s latest. “My nigga Jay Estrada said I gotta burn it down to build it up / That confirmation real as fuck, it ain’t too many real as us,” Kendrick raps, a reference to the term “destroy and rebuild,” which Nas used as a song title in 2001.
Every great work of art has a simple premise. Kendrick Lamar’s catalog, at its core, feels like the journey of a survivor from Compton clamoring for peace of mind. Here, he gives us the latest chapter, where the very streets he vied to escape are being caricaturized by people looking to exploit them, and he’s seeing too many of his peers fall for the trick bag.
