"The Blacker the Berry"- Kendrick Lamar (Prod. Boi-1da)

Weird. Claustrophobic. Ferocious. Militantly black. Proud. Conflicted. I could be at this all day long and not exhaust the Oxford Dictionary for adjectives describing "King" Kendrick Lamar's head turning "The Blacker the Berry." The dude's grasp of the language and his knowledge of its potency is greater than entire English departments, so you're "better off trying to skydive..." than parse one of his tracks. It's far less of a Herculean effort to sit back and listen, though listening can be taxing too.

That's undoubtedly true of "The Blacker the Berry," which pummels you with Boi-1da's "Funky Drummer" percussion and makes you shiver with the zombiefied guitar circles. It most closely resembles "m.A.A.d. city" in terms of suffocating atmosphere, but even that feels tame in comparison to this. Lamar snarls a lot more on this one and plays into the utter paranoia of it all by suggesting schizophrenia in the intro. It's unnerving when he pointedly asks "you hate me don't you? You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture." Where before the city was "maad," now the kid is. And he's not sure what to do.

The "naïf," "idealistic" teen that accompanied us then has rotted into a man who can't come to terms with the fact that he's internalizing all of the racial hatred faced by Black Americans and unleashing it on his "kinfolk." He's weeping over the death of Trayvon Martin, and then killing someone "blacker than me." Whatever preaching he's doing with the Panthers is being negated by penitentiary trips. The chains binding his ancestors now entice Lamar to snatch and run, without the least bit of concern for his fellow man. Arguably that's the greatest tragedy of the Ferguson or Los Angeles riots; entire groups of people feel so "institutionally manipulated" that they stop giving a shit about their own communities. What's the smell of a dead neighbor when the trash has been picked up in weeks?

Despite the savior status he's often tagged with, Kendrick doesn't have any answers on "The Black the Berry." That's not what the song, which pays homage to the similarly conflicted "Keep Ya Head Up," is about. It's all about painful self-reflection, the sort that leaves you realizing "I'm the biggest hypocrite of 2015." If you leave the piece unaffected that's your fault, not Kendrick's. He's doing everything he can to expose generational plots and see through deceits. What other "King" works that hard?

(Details on the new LP are still scarce, but I wouldn't be surprised if it dropped at some point between now and festival season.)

"i"- Kendrick Lamar

T.I. had a 2006 album where he proclaimed himself King. In the same year Pusha T's regal status was signified by a cockeyed crown he wore on the cover of Hell Hath No Fury. Hip hop's seen "the best rapper alive," "superheroes," and a "rap god." But every last one of those artists feels distanced from their audience. In being royalty you naturally slip from the everyday tedium of normalcy. The longer you sit on the mountaintop, the less time you have to commune with the villagers down below. 

One glaring exception to the rule and perhaps the only legitimate claimant to the title of king is "King" Kendrick Lamar. Between good kid, m.A.A.d. city's runaway success in 2012, the Twitter-breaking "Control" in August 2013, a particularly firebreathing BET Cypher session last October and a continuous stream of breathless guest verses in 2014, Lamar's firmly established his kingship. But he's also retained his "humanity" in the process. He headlines festivals while still rocking those Nike Cortez shows and white tees. Lamar still lays his head in Los Angeles and shows up to local radio stations to let the hometown hear a new single first, a single where he cops to lacking confidence. 

That new single, "i," has already been discussed to death for being "too pop," "too breezy," a sure-fire bet to soundtrack a Disney movie in the next five years. With its shuffling guitar, clopping pots and pans percussion, communal clapping and message of having to love yourself before you can love anyone else, it is poppy and breezy. Those liquid solos you hear in the chorus, pulled from the Isley Brothers' "That Lady," are the sort of thing that would've played in any number of 70s cop flicks. But Kendrick Lamar raps his ass off on this one. With absolute ease he stacks up images of "A war outside and a bomb in the street, and a gun in the hood and a mob of police, And a rock on the corner and a line full of fiends." If that weren't enough to allay fears, his message of loving yourself first isn't new terrain. Since day one he's shown us how far someone can go if they believe in themselves; continually exhorting himself and his audience to go farther. And of course this is just the first taste of what's to come from the third LP. There's a strong chance this is the "radio friendly" track Lamar pushes to make label execs happy before dropping another classic of chaos and confusion in the 21st Century. Whatever the case may be, Lamar can rest easy. The crown's not going anywhere for now.

There's no set release date for Lamar's third LP, but you can watch him discuss the process of recording the new album on Power 106.

"Stigmata" ft. Action Bronson & Asaad- Ab-Soul

Black Hippy Crew's chronic over thinker Ab-Soul hasn't exactly been shy about voicing his displeasure over the lack of a release date for his third LP These Days... And given the strength of past tracks "Dub-Sac" and "Tree of Life" that dissatisfaction is entirely deserved. But things have been rapidly changing in the last week or so with TDE CEO Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith letting fans pick the record release date and Soul's issuing of the warped "Stigmata" late yesterday. 

"Shadowy" was the word I used to describe the beat for "Tree of Life", but it seems more appropriate for "Stigmata". Rahki's production is so lurching and ashen that the only way you'd even notice it is from the half-burned weed flecks and stammering drum strikes piled on top. Truth be told, it'd be near impossible to notice any beat once Ab-Soul and guests Action Bronson and Asaad are clear for take-off. At one point in his opener, Solo combines iTunes with astigmatism and cracks a stone with his bare hands. "Watch with the Internet alone I enlighten the whole globe," goes one particularly religious-minded line. It's the closest the song gets to corner proselytizing, as the insatiable Bronson is content to go fine-dining and "shredding up the sand dunes." And while Soul and Bronsolino are out in the world, relatively unknown Philly rapper Asaad is cooped up in his house rewriting bars. Considering how high above his weight-class he's punching, the confession is likely true. "A blessing in disguise, nobody knew it was there," is how he paints the picture of himself on a burbling canvas. Work like this is the reason no one in this trio will be unknown.




"Stigmata" may or may not be appearing on These Days... which is slated for a June release.

"Rain" ft. Vince Staples- Mac Miller

Mark May 11, 2014 as the day any lingering doubts about Mac Miller were officially eradicated. While last year's Watching Movies with the Sound Off re-positioned Pittsburgh's Malcolm McCormick as a psych-rap kid in the clutches of the Odd Future/TDE/Brainfeeder crews, new mixtape Faces firmly entrenches him in those respective camps. Over the course of an unwieldy, but gorgeous hour and a half the "Donald Trump" rapper delves into loping weed-rap with the likes of: Schoolboy Q, Sir Michael Rocks (of Cool Kids), Earl Sweatshirt, Ab-Soul, frequent Flying Lotus collaborator Thundercat, Rick Ross, and perhaps most curiously Mike Jones. And though his laid-back delivery rarely bests his collaborators, he sounds so comfortable in these blurry surroundings that he's never fully vanquished. 

The 9th Wonder produced "Rain" which appears near the end of Faces offers some of the best evidence of Miller's lyrical easiness. Over a rippling guitar figure, Miller leisurely spits "that prayer hand emoji, that s*** that injured Kobe" without once raising his blunted voice. He speaks on "running from my shadow" and deals with "high-heel depression," but 9th Wonder's chirping vocal samples and stuttering drums are so warm it's difficult to pick up on the icy mood Miller's conveying. Ditto for Vince Staples who breathlessly about "funerals" being "usual." As Miller attempts a "space migration" to flee from his problems, Staples remains grounded. When a stray bullet hits his brother, all he can do is declare fate to be dead. It's a far more morbid view of the world, but one that still dovetails with Miller's drizzling pain. If he was in the same area before, now's on the same wavelength.

Faces can be downloaded for free here now.

"Tree of Life"- Ab-Soul

"Breathe easy," Black Hippy member Ab-Soul stutters over the whooshing airplane intro of his latest release "Tree of Life". As a musical commandment, it's nearly impossible to keep. Even more than fellow Hippies Kendrick Lamar and Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul is absolutely suffocating. By the time the assonance-heavy "It's my turn, Mr. LongTerm of turmoil
I'm holdin' up the terminal takin' flicks," fully uncoils you're left breathless on the floor clawing skyward for any sort of relief. Similar to efforts from the Wu's headiest member GZA, an Ab-Soul track is a subtle barrage. The jibing "I got most of you mothaf****s stumped, rap like I go to church with work in the trunk," feels like a wild flail until later in the day when you spot a redwood-sized welt on your chest.

In truth, much of the foliage-centered "Tree of Life" has a writhing-quality to it. Frequent collaborator Curtiss King's hollowed out boom-bap provides Soul with ample room to flex and he explores every corner of the shadowy production. He shuffles from the Travelodge to the W "just to shower," a terrific humblebrag elucidating the long distance he's traveled in a short amount of time and what the trip now affords him. Venturing down another one of Soul's backroads, we see him mixing enough lean to "give Sprite's stock a boost." And in that subdued state, Ab-Soul's caught thumbing through "Benjamins" while pondering "photosynthesis." He's so hyper-focused that Joey Bada$$'s "world domination" interlude drifts by as a relative afterthought. "I hope you get the analogy," Ab-Soul wishes near the end. If anyone does, it won't be easy.





"Tree of Life" may appear on Ab-Soul's upcoming Longterm 3 mixtape.

"Backwards"- Kendrick Lamar & Tame Impala

"I feel relentless," "King" Kendrick Lamar snarls over a bed of lush strings and palpitating drum beats reconstructed from Tame Impala's 2012 psych tour-de-force "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards”. Leave it to Kendrick to best describe his pace since he dropped the game-changing good kid, m.A.A.d. city in 2012. He could've comfortably rested on his laurels, taken a year off to enjoy the immense spoils his major label debut afforded. Instead he soaked the entire rap game in gasoline and struck a match, then took the BET Cypher to a cataclysmic new level. It seemed as though the only "fun" he was having in 2013 was sliding in on the chintzy beat of Schoolboy Q's "Collard Greens" from Oxymoron. But even then he was promising to swipe girlfriends and doing bilingual double-time in his lightning verse.

That relentlessness is put into 20/20 focus late in Lamar's first verse when he lets everyone know, "this is what I live for." Rapping isn't what he's doing in between commercial spots or movie cameos. It's his lifeblood carrying him towards "immortality." And even if he reaches it, with his workmanlike nature he'll start the race over. He'll appear with Imagine Dragons just to prove traditional rap can't pin him in. He'll pop up on a Sci-Fi film soundtrack and turn what was once effusive into something much more ferocious. Now Tame Impala frontman Kevin Parker's tender coos aren't the focal point, they're a dire break from a verbal barrage. "I got my hopes up again, oh no... not again," Parker whispers from the bottom of a psilocybin canyon. That's all Kendrick Lamar does circa 2014 and he's yet to disappoint.

The Divergent soundtrack, which also features pairings between A$AP Rocky/Gesaffelstein and Chance the Rapper/Pia Mia is out March 11 and you can hear "Backwards" now through Pitchfork Advance.