‘GNX’: Kendrick Lamar at his most anti-heroic
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Over the past decade or so, the Kendrick Lamar mythos had become increasingly grandiose—the only rapper to win a Pulitzer; a conceptual genius making high-brow art; the saviour of hip-hop who embodied the genre’s moral backbone. Critics raved about how he had “elevated gangsta rap", and declared K.Dot as “(his) generation’s most potent artistic voice".
By the early 2020s, rapheads would talk about Lamar in the same hushed, reverential tones as 20th-century philosophers discussing Ludwig Wittgenstein. That’s an incredibly heavy crown to bear. More importantly, it’s a trap.
No blood-and-flesh human can live up to the demands and expectations of being a real life prophet—that sort of divinity inevitably leads to either downfall or martyrdom. Nobody knows that better than Lamar, a rapper who grew up within the morally grey universe of gangland Compton, and who has always been aware of his own fallibility. His 2022 album, titled Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, was him rejecting the throne and dismantling the halo around his head.
It showcases Lamar at his most vulnerable—and most human—as he grapples with childhood abuse and trauma, confesses to sins like infidelity and sex addiction, and disavows the notion of rappers as anybody’s saviours. It was a knotty, messy sprawl of an album, steeped in paranoia, temptation and the sobering awareness of one’s own vulnerability. You could tell that Lamar needed a change of pace, a chance to shrug off his messianic legacy and start afresh.
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