For the second half of the song, he includes the firestarter verse he performed in January on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." But the scorching iteration of that live performance is nowhere here-he's laid-back and matter-of-fact, but his threat just as heavy: "I can put a rapper on life support/ Guarantee that's something none of you want."Īt times Kendrick is joined by other voices-TDE's Jay Rock and Punch, and Wise (again) on "untitled 05," which sounds like a long jazz-groove session made just to find the best parts Cee-Lo Green shows up over the bossa nova breeziness of Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammed's "untitled 06"-but, much like TPAB, untitled unmastered. "World is going brazy/ Where did we go wrong?/ It's a tidal wave/ It's a thunderdome," he sing-raps, sounding half-possessed, half-saved. He's crying for his bosses-both Top Dawg and God-while lamenting urban addiction and dysfunction, and contemplating mortality.
His vocal tics and morphs have long been technologically-aided affairs, but on "untitled 02" he's full of elastic long tails-partially gleeful Lil Wayne, wholly sanctifying choir sinner. One of the most enchanting things about this project is hearing how Kendrick manipulates his own voice before the studio modulations kick in. It's also the collection's most fully-formed song perhaps the only one that emerges as a finished thought here. It's insightful and uncomfortable, if not outright offensive: Asians are linked to Eastern philosophy, Native Americans to the land, Blacks to lust, whites to greed. It's classic Kendrick-a reductive-yet-sprawling fever-chill of observations on race and the music industry that mixes stereotype with history and wisdom. There's little doubt that just about all of these songs are from TPAB sessions-"untitled 03," subtitled with a date of "," had already been performed four months before Butterfly's release, during the the long goodbye of "The Colbert Report" with help from Terrace Martin, Thundercat, Bilal, and Sonnymoon's Anna Wise. But it feels like an extension of that album's world-an asterisk, perhaps, or an extended coda. Now, he’s released a handful-and-a-half of song sketches in a project that's neither album nor mixtape (or even EP or LP), and seem to have even less a chance of radio play than TPAB did upon its arrival.
TPAB-a Grammy-winning ride of densely knotted rhymes, tangled ideas, and deep sounds-positioned Kendrick Lamar as a reluctant messiah figure, and its dialogues with self and manifestations of God resisted quick-and-easy unpacking. No other rapper has taken up so much real estate in the past 12 months while releasing so little music and sharing as little about themselves as Kendrick.
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