He came of age with his fans, and by 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, he put to music their chest-clenched frustrations. Dre by 2013, he was playing “SNL” and touring with Kanye West. After years of such releases, Kendrick dropped a self-titled EP in 2009 that featured Big Pooh from Little Brother and elicited such Nah Right comments as “I like the beats on this” and “who da fuk?” Accolades swelled with each project by 2011, he was considering signing with Dr. Kendrick is a relic of the mid-aughts rap blog era, where bedroom WordPress pages would post. Lamar’s recitation is so effortless you wonder where he breathes, or if he does at all. On “FEAR.,” he relays daily threats from his mom (“I’ll beat your ass, keep talking back/I’ll beat your ass, who bought you that? You stole it”) and from his neighbors (“I’ll probably die because I ain’t know Demarcus was snitching/I’ll probably die at these house parties fucking with bitches”) over low-slung blues stirred by The Alchemist. His boyish nasal instrument is distinct and inimitable as it slithers up and down in pitch on “PRIDE.” Even when Lamar sounds like Eminem, or Drake, or OutKast, he sounds like himself, and he arguably outpaces them all as a writer. The raps on his fourth studio album DAMN. Storytelling has been Lamar’s greatest skill and most primary mission, to put into (lots of) words what it's like to grow up as he did-to articulate, in human terms, the intimate specifics of daily self-defense from your surroundings.
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