Kendrick Lamar, GNX (2024) - Album Review

By Leo McGurk

Named after the car his father took him home from the hospital in as a baby, GNX is another homecoming for Kendrick Lamar. Dropped without warning at the end of what’s been an undeniably monumental year for him, GNX is a celebration of West Coast hip hop, showcasing both where it’s been and where it’s going, and the album packs a healthy amount of braggadocio, polemic, and introspection into its 12 tracks.

Kendrick raps aggressively and directly across the project; on the opening track, wacced out murals, Kendrick says ‘fuck a double entendre, I want y’all to feel this shit’, setting the tone for what’s to come. Lamar calls out the entire rap industry, including legends like Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne, for a perceived lack of authenticity with bars like ‘Won the Super Bowl and Nas the only one congratulate me / All these n—s agitated, I’m just glad they showin’ they faces’, and ‘Quite frankly, plenty artists, but they outdated / Old-ass flows, tryna convince me that you they favourite’. This directness is reflected on other tracks like man at the garden or tv offwith Kendrick, again, calling out his contemporaries on the latter song’s chorus: ‘It’s not enough / Few solid n—s left but it's not enough’.

Despite his claim on wacced out murals’, however, the project is full of clever bars. One that stuck out to me came on ‘peakaboo’: ‘Peakaboo, I just put them boogers in my chain / Peekaboo, eighty pointers like a Kobe game’. Kendrick compares his large diamonds (80 pointers referring to diamonds over 0.8 carats) to Kobe Bryant’s famous 81-point game for the LA Lakers, the second-highest amount of points scored by a single player in a game in NBA history, whilst also driving home the Los Angeles connection, a recurring theme on this album, but more on that later. These more fun, slightly ignorant cuts across the album, squabble up and hey now being others, provide a welcome break from what would otherwise be a pretty emotionally and topically heavy album.

As previously mentioned, Kendrick gets very introspective on this album, too. On ‘gloria’, the album’s final track, Lamar engages in an extended metaphor about his ‘complicated relationship’ with his own musical craft as though it was his romantic partner, reminiscent of Kanye West’s 2007 ode to his hometown of Chicago, ‘Homecoming’, complete with a theatrical, and somewhat over-dramatic, reveal at the end of the track. On ‘reincarnated’, Kendrick raps from the perspectives of different African American musicians that he seems  to believe should serve as cautionary tales for artists, being ‘reincarnated’ each verse. The first is seemingly in reference to blues singer and guitarist, John Lee Hooker, who Kendrick appears to view as greedy and as something of a sellout (‘But I manipulated my power as I lied to the masses / Died with my money, gluttony was too attractive’), and the second is in reference to a female ‘musical genius’ with an ‘angelic’ voice, that ultimately passed away due to substance abuse (‘Self indulged, discipline never been my sentiments / I needed drugs, to me, an 8-ball was like penicillin’), which some have suggested parallels the career of Billie Holiday. Lamar then goes on to discuss his own life and his relationship with God, but I’ll stop here. You could probably write an entire article about ‘reincarnated’ alone, there’s so much to unpack.

Musically, GNX is a tastefully nostalgic listen. After a huge year for him and the wider West Coast, Kendrick pays clear, deliberate homage to the roots of West Coast hip hop throughout his production choices on the album. 

The punchy, pulsing synths that come in around 40 seconds in on ‘wacced out murals’ are unmistakably synonymous with that 90s West Coast hip hop sound. I was immediately reminded of Nate Dogg and Warren G’s classic ‘Regulate’, or E-40’s ‘Captain Save A Hoe’. The staccato synths are raw and almost abrasive, actually more so than on the aforementioned tracks from the 90s, almost as though Lamar is exaggerating the sound, something we will see becomes a theme as the album progresses. The G-Funk interlude on ‘hey now’, to the vintage drum-machine cymbal hits on ‘squabble up’, and across the album as a whole, stood out as key examples to me. Even on the smoother, slower ‘luther’, featuring SZA, the recurring electronic cowbells and soft, Latin guitar plucks during the opening ensure that the track, and the album, stays musically grounded in the West Coast. 

Kendrick leans into this sound heavily to drive home his West Coast connection in a way he hasn’t done this explicitly before. Through both his lyrics and production choices, Lamar places himself among the great artists of West Coast hip hop. This is perhaps most explicit on the aforementioned ‘reincarnated’, which is also a clear interpolation of Tupac Shakur’s ‘Made N—z’, with its rolling piano and grooving bass. Lamar’s almost comically aggressive flow is also very much reminiscent of Shakur, too, as though he were channeling him somehow to make this claim. Many have described this album as a victory lap for Kendrick after a great year, but this feels more like a celebration of his whole career to me, and Lamar staking his claim for the throne of West Coast hip hop while paying homage to those that came before him.

This is driven home by Kendrick’s choice of features on the album, too. Apart from SZA and Roddy Ricch, extremely well-established, international artists in their own right, Kendrick Lamar chose to platform underground LA artists across the project. I can’t say I was familiar with any of these artists before I heard the album, but none of them felt out of place, and they all delivered on the tracks they were featured on. Special praise is due to Dody6, featured on ‘hey now’, and AzChike, featured on ‘peakaboo’. Dody6, who still has just 40k followers on Instagram, seemed calm and collected on ‘hey now’, getting off a number of cool, slick bars in a verse that started with him and Lamar going bar for bar before Dody then finished on his own. ‘I sharpened up a knife and came home to a blow, / My bitch gon’ get to tweaking like she playing with her nose’ stuck out as a particularly sharp line. On ‘peakaboo’, AzChike demonstrated an infectious chemistry with Kendrick, which only develops as the song goes on. Whilst he might not demonstrate the same clever wordplay as Lamar, he brings a real energy to the track through his crisp and expressive flow and cadence. His opening lines ‘Surprise bitch, it’s that n— Chuck E. Cheese / Let me FaceTime my opp, I’m in the street’ certainly put a smile on my face; it's a really fun listen. 

All of the rappers featured deserve a mention. I really enjoyed Peysoh’s verse on the hyper-local posse cut that also serves as the album’s titular track, ‘gnx’, on which he switches his flow up multiple times on a 16-bar verse. Outside of genuinely enhancing the album in their own right, these features serve two key purposes. Firstly, whilst Kendrick stakes his claim to the throne, he also introduces a whole new wave of artists coming up in the wider Los Angeles and West Coast scene. Rather than making this moment all about him, Kendrick platformed a number of voices that weren’t getting much attention outside their own area and gave them an international audience. It's a really brave and admirable move. Secondly, Kendrick is able to silence many of the critics claiming that he doesn’t give back to the community he’s from. The most famous of these is probably Drake, who, on his diss track ‘Family Matters’, claimed that Lamar does not ‘go back to [his] hood and plant no money trees’. Here, Kendrick plants some ‘money trees’ for up-and-coming artists for us all to see. Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre said the regionality of the album ‘felt like an elaborate gotcha to Drake’, but I think there’s a lot more at stake for Kendrick than an already-settled beef here. At the peak of his power, when he probably could have secured a feature from nearly any artist in the world, he extends an arm to those coming up in a scene he’s celebrating all across this album. It seems like this goes a lot deeper than just rap.

However, I understand that it’s practically impossible not to place the album in the context of Lamar’s recent feud with Drake. As much as I tried not to, some of the bars on the album were very hard not to interpret as disses. The final verse of ‘wacced out murals’ starts with a couple of indirect bars for Drake: ‘N—-s from my city couldn’t entertain old boy / Promising bank transactions and even bitcoin’ potentially referring to Drake’s failed attempts to pay for information about Lamar. On ‘hey now’, when Kendrick drops: ‘What the fuck you wearin’? Bro, it’s tacky / N—--s layin’ on they deathbed tryna match me’, my mind immediately went to Drake’s first post-beef Instagram post, in which he was widely ridiculed for dressing like Kendrick. Lamar follows this up with ‘shit get spooky every day in October’ later in the song, probably in reference to Drake’s alleged bad behaviour, which Kendrick has famously discussed at length on his diss tracks from earlier this year. For context, Drake’s record label is called October’s Very Own, and he references it frequently in his music. 

This goes beyond just disses, however. ‘Heart pt. 6’, the sixth entry into Lamar’s eponymous series of tracks spanning his entire career, feels a lot like a direct response to many of the claims Drake made on his diss-track of the same name. Kendrick spends a whole verse celebrating his relationship with longtime friend and collaborator, Dave Free, who Drake claimed was sexually involved with Kendrick’s partner. Lamar paints an intimate portrait of their relationship, chronicling their time before fame, and depicting a man that ‘wore multiple hats, a producer, a manager, director and DJ’, ‘squabblin’ [...] For this little thing of ours we called TDE’ (Top Dawg Entertainment). Lamar also dispels some of the wider doubt cast on the friendliness of his relationship with his former label by Drake. On his first diss track, ‘Push Ups’, Drake appeared to suggest Lamar was being exploited by Top Dawg and its CEO Anthony “Top” Griffith. It’s worth pointing out, however, that Drake is not mentioned on this track, directly or indirectly. I think ‘heart pt. 6’, and the rest of the album, looks forward rather than looking back (‘Now it’s about Kendrick, I want to evolve’). It's worth mentioning most of the limited number of disses on the album are featured on ‘hey now’, which sees Kendrick rapping at his most braggadocious and boastful. Essentially, when Kendrick mentions Drake on GNX, I think he’s just talking his shit, and it’s really not that deep. You can’t ignore their beef listening to this album, but I really think Kendrick’s mind is elsewhere, with Drake only featuring in brief moments on a few of the album’s more aggressive tracks.

Finally, it should be mentioned there are a few moments that feel a bit awkward on this project. Alphonse Pierre also mentioned how some of the bars on the album just don’t quite hit the same when Kendrick’s newfound mega-celebrity status is considered. I think this is particularly prevalent on ‘man at the garden’, and its repeated refrain of ‘I deserve it all’. Now Kendrick Lamar does, at least comparatively to most people, ‘have it all’, so the track feels more cold rather than motivating or inspirational. If you can remove it from that context, it’s hard to claim that it doesn’t go hard, but the context is pretty hard to escape from after such a huge year. Also, the constant switches of pace on the album don’t really work for me. Kendrick sets a clear tone with ‘wacced out murals’, backs it up with ‘squabble up’, but then slows right down with ‘luther’ and ‘man at the garden’. This acceleration and deceleration means some of the slower cuts get a bit lost in the midst of the hard hitting tracks. With that being said, however, I think some of these slower cuts are quite forgettable anyway. ‘Dodger blue’, in spite of its wide supporting cast, fails to stand out amongst the rest of the project topically or musically. ‘Luther’, whilst being a great track, felt a lot more like SZA’s song than Kendrick’s, but, hey, maybe that’s just a testament to her talents. We’ve also got to talk about the beat on ‘gnx’, which has also attracted some criticism. Anthony Fantano of TheNeedleDrop aptly, if harshly, claimed it ‘sounds like getting wasted and using fruity loops for the first time’.

Nonetheless, I’m still really, really impressed with GNX. It's a tight, mostly consistent album that neatly fits around central themes, whilst still providing a suitable degree of variation to keep you interested, though this can feel a bit disorienting at times. Kendrick explores some really unorthodox narrative concepts, from the metaphorical romantic relationship with his pen, to being reincarnated as Tupac and a number of other artists, with both, somehow, not feeling out of place on the album and serving as some of the project’s most memorable moments. That’s not to say some of the more simple tracks don’t hit as hard, if not more so. Kendrick’s direct criticism of the rap industry on ‘wacced out murals’ and the deliberately ostentatious ‘hey now’, supported by the aforementioned confidence of up-and-comer Dody6, are both some of my personal favourites.

Over a decade in, Kendrick is far from running out of steam, and is still finding new ways to innovate and experiment. GNX is another highly enjoyable entry into what's rapidly becoming one of the best discographies in hip hop, and, to be honest, beyond. It's bursting with personality, depth, memorable bars, wit, and really, really fun production, which I think I’ve discussed enough already. At just under 45 minutes, it doesn’t hang around too long, and I highly recommend it if you’ve not already given it a go.

Leo McGurk