Kendrick Lamar starts his exhilarating new album by complaining that someone vandalized a mural depicting his face — a mural depicting his face in triplicate, in fact — on the side of a Honduran restaurant in his Compton hometown. Never mind that somebody cared enough about Lamar to paint the mural in the first place. What the 37-year-old rapper is pissed about is that this billboard-sized monument to his greatness was defaced.
That’s the energy Lamar is tapped into on the deeply irritated “GNX,” which came out by surprise Friday morning, eight months to the day after he jumped into an epic feud with Drake that ended up lifting Lamar to new heights of commercial success and cultural prestige. (That the Pulitzer Prize winner vanquished Drake in their beef now goes without saying.) In April, he scored a No.
1 single with his appearance on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That”; in May, he did it again with his own “Not Like Us.” Lamar put on a historic all-star concert in June at Inglewood’s Kia Forum, then announced that he’ll headline the Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans in February, just a week after “Not Like Us” is set to compete for record of the year and song of the year at the 67th Grammy Awards. Yet grievances abound on “GNX,” whose dozen tracks had taken spots 1 through 12 on Spotify’s U.
S. Top 50 by early Sunday and which is all but certain to debut atop the Billboard 200 next week with one of 2024’s biggest openings. In “W.
