DAMN. (2017)
DAMN. is a 2017 conscious hip hop album by Kendrick Lamar.
Fourteen tracks, one word per title, every one in capitals with a full stop after it. Kendrick Lamar released his fourth album on April 14, 2017, and it trades the live band sprawl of To Pimp a Butterfly for hard drums, short distances and a much meaner low end.
Mike Will Made It sits at the centre of the sound. HUMBLE. and DNA. work with almost nothing in them, a piano figure or a bass drop and a lot of deliberate empty space. Sounwave, DJ Dahi and Ricci Riera fill in around him, with Top Dawg Entertainment head Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith running the record as executive producer. The rest of the credit list is stranger than the album sounds: James Blake, the Alchemist, 9th Wonder, Greg Kurstin, BadBadNotGood and Steve Lacy all leave fingerprints on it.
Guests stay small and pointed. Rihanna takes the hook on LOYALTY., Zacari floats through LOVE., and U2 turn up on XXX. as texture rather than spectacle. Lamar keeps switching gear between them, from fast and sneering to something close to a whisper, and the one word titles read as headings for what each track is turning over.
Top Dawg, Aftermath and Interscope put it out, and the Pulitzer board gave it the 2018 Prize for Music, the first outside classical and jazz. Of Lamar's major albums this is the shortest, the bluntest and the easiest place to begin.
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DAMN. in our writing
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A few thoughts on DAMN.
Atlanta runs on the same wavelength, funny and unsettled inside the same scene, and it treats rap as a place people live rather than a genre to explain. Can't stop, won't stop lays out the history underneath Lamar's references, Bronx block parties through to the West Coast he keeps reporting from. Decoded has Jay-Z annotating his own lyrics line by line, good company if the density here makes you want to read rather than replay. Travis Scott: Look Mom I Can Fly shows the touring machine that a record this size feeds. On the Come Up, Angie Thomas's novel about a teenage rapper, takes battle verses seriously as craft, and The Autobiography of Gucci Mane covers the same industry from the far end of the South.
Kendrick Lamar albums in the order they make sense
DAMN. cuts the live band and the long form, so where you start changes what you hear. good kid, m.A.A.d city gives you the storytelling, Section.80 the early writing, To Pimp a Butterfly the jazz players. Then hear how much Kendrick strips out in 2017. Mr. Morale and GNX carry the same voice forward.
Hip-hop history books for people who only know the records
DAMN. runs on Mike Will Made It's empty space and a long West Coast lineage. That lineage has a paper trail. Jay-Z takes apart his own lyrics in Decoded, Jeff Chang traces the movement's first thirty years in Can't Stop Won't Stop, Ed Piskor draws it as a comic, and Shea Serrano argues about the best song every year since 1979.
Rap stories on screen that get the business right
DAMN. spends its fourteen tracks on ambition, family and the cost of getting famous in Compton. These shows and films work the same ground from the inside: Atlanta on the grind below the charts, Rap Sh!t on Miami hustle, On the Come Up on a teenager's first battle, CB4 on how ridiculous the business gets.
Rap albums with one producer running the whole sound
Mike Will Made It gives DAMN. its hard drums and its silence, and HUMBLE. survives on a piano figure and a bass drop. These albums work the same way, with one person setting the palette: Pharrell across Let God Sort Em Out, Dr. Dre behind Eminem, Kanye West producing himself into three different records.