Rap music is miraculous.You could be staring down what promises to be a lazy Friday afternoon, the week before a holiday, and then you could glance at your computer and realize that the world has changed.
The album that you’ve been waiting on, the one that you didn’t want to presume to expect, could suddenly fall out of the sky — the whole thing just arriving on your phone all at once.Shit could get crazy, scary, spooky, hilarious.
It’s that rarest of beasts: the good kind of emergency.A great album is one thing.
There are lots of great albums.There are countless great albums that you’ll never hear, that the world will never acknowledge.
And then there’s the other kind of great album, the kind that hits the earth like a meteor and immediately changes the composition of the atmosphere.If you’re old enough, you might recall the days after Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ came out.
In certain cities, you would hear five different tracks from that LP whenever you left your apartment.Tha Carter III was like that, too.
The Blueprint.Late Registration.
And now GNX, the sixth studio album from Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, is about to join that pantheon.A great album, any great album, is cause for celebration.
But the other kind of great album, the one that suddenly swallows up the world and becomes the immediate subject of every worthwhile conversation? That kind of album exists on a different level.It’s why we do what we do.
It’s why we get up in the morning.Kendrick Lamar has been responsible for this kind of stop-the-world moment before.
This year, he did it over and over again.About 13 months ago, J.
Cole invoked the idea of a “Big Three” on a Drake song, and this awoke the sleeping dragon.Kendrick Lamar was off on a different trip.
He disappeared for years, and then he returned with Mr.Morale & The Big Steppers, a thorny and insular record about wrestling with his own demons and working on himself.
He followed that release with ...