(Via New York Times)
"In the world of hip-hop, Lamar is widely considered to be a future king. Last year, he was nominated for seven Grammys, four of them for his 2012 major-label debut, “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” which sold more than a million copies in the United States. His lyrical style and his background (Compton, Calif., born and raised) have shaped his reputation as the kind of old-school rapper you don’t see much anymore, a street poet who has earned the affection of hip-hop purists as well as younger listeners. “He’s the first person in a long time that a lot of the old heads respect,” says the filmmaker and author Nelson George, one of the first journalists to write about rap music. “They see him as a real hip-hop M.C.”
Part of what sets Lamar apart is pure lyrical agility. The producer and songwriter Pharrell Williams has likened Lamar to Bob Dylan. “He’s a singer-songwriter,” Williams says. “You can just see the kid’s mind like a kaleidoscope over a beat.” Lamar does indeed have a Dylan-like ability to pivot from playful to mystical, to reframe quotidian details as profound revelations, and he has an instinct for swirling, rhapsodic metaphor. He opens the track “Hol’ Up” with this couplet: “I wrote this record while 30,000 feet in the air/Stewardess complimenting me on my nappy hair.” A few verses later, he raps: “I lived my 20s at 2 years old, the wiser man, truth be told, I’m like 87/wicked as 80 reverends in a pool of fire with devils holding hands.”
In person, Lamar is so serene and warm, and on his record, so erudite and philosophical, that it’s tempting to read him as a mellow, cerebral guy, a monk reincarnated as a young rap star. But that would be a mistake. Lamar has made his name in part by trying to reawaken what George calls rap’s “combative” energy, which has always been central to the genre’s identity but has fallen off in the past decade.
“If my edge is dull, my sword is dull, and I don’t want to fight another guy whose sword is dull,” Lamar later told me. “If you’ve got two steel swords going back and forth hitting each other, what’s gonna happen? Both of them are going to get sharper.” He laments what he sees as the impotency that has taken over the rap game. “Everybody that’s in the industry has lost their edge,” he said. “There’s really no aggression. You gotta say things particular, and everything is so soft.” Last August, in a guest appearance on “Control,” a track by Big Sean, Lamar named himself, alongside Jay-Z, Nas, Eminem and Outkast’s Andre 3000, as the best M.C.s of all time. He also called himself “the king of New York” (a big no-no for a West Coast rapper) and sent out a message to his immediate peers: “I got love for you all, but I’m tryna murder you niggas/Tryna to make sure your core fans never heard of you niggas/They don’t wanna hear not one more noun or verb from you niggas.” The influential hip-hop magazine XXL called it “the verse that woke up the rap game.”"
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