Review: DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar (Written in 2022)
A music review I wrote in 2022. The cadence of this review changes slightly in the context of Lamar’s latest song, “Not Like Us.” The review is more about me than about the album, though.
A few years ago, I built up a small following on Twitter making...let’s say “content.” I would never be recognized in a convention specific to that “content,” much less on the street, but I did make some money off it.
It took a weekend for my following to turn on me.
A few months prior to that weekend, I had an altercation on a private forum with other “content” creator. I expected it to stay private. Instead, the other creator—long after the altercation had resolved—chose to escalate publicly, framing the altercation in the language of gendered abuse.
Within a few days, everyone in the scene chose to exile me. “Content” creators that had once spoken highly of me stopped talking to me. Everyone who had a simmering issue with me spoke up at once. Someone compiled all my sins in a handy thread. A few people posted apologies for ever dealing with me. A handful of people reached out privately to tell me that they thought I was unfairly targeted—but they didn’t speak out publicly, for fear of being next.
Because the internet calls someone who defends an abuser another abuser.
For the next few months, I tried to make more “content,” with two thoughts in my head:
One: I’m burnt out. I can’t trust people. I’m trying to make things, but I keep re-reading the horrible things people said about me, because I know where it all is.
Two:
If I gotta slap a pussy-ass [hater], I’ma make it look sexy
If I gotta go hard on a bitch, I’ma make it look sexy
I pull up, hop out, air out—made it look sexy
They won’t take me out my element
Nah, take me out my element
With the release of his 2015 magnum opus To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth secured a compelling argument for “greatest rapper of all time.” Whereas Lamar’s previous album good kid, m.a.a.d. city retained a cinéma vérité sensibility (despite being incredibly polished in production and lyricism), To Pimp a Butterfly is operatic. Its production is a love letter to Black American music, and the lyrics are Lamar’s thoughts about what it means to be Black in America—all of them. It’s almost eighty minutes long.
Only Kendrick Lamar could make an album like this with any competence. I don’t personally resonate with it, but calling To Pimp a Butterfly a no-skip masterpiece is not controversial.
But there are no bangers. “King Kunta” has swagger, and “Alright” has energy, but “i” is the only truly danceable track on the album, and that’s if you ignore the lyrics.
The response to the single release of “i”, six months before the full album, clearly spooked Lamar, because he did not put the single version of “i” on To Pimp a Butterfly. Instead, he used a live performance that was derailed by a fight in the crowd. Lamar stops the music to address the altercation, shouting “how many [Black men] we done lost bro...this year alone?”
After the back-and-forth, Lamar returns to the performance with an a cappella poem he apparently had in his back pocket.
Kendrick Lamar doesn’t want you to dance—he wants you to listen.
And if his audience is having a fistfight during a song about embracing love in a grim world, they’re not listening.
Kendrick: Hello ma’am, can I be of any assistance? Seems to me that you have lost something. I would like to help you find it.
Stranger: “Oh yes. You have lost something.”
Kendrick: “...”
Stranger: “You’ve lost…your life.”
Most discourse on “cancel culture” misunderstands what it is. It’s independent of ideology, and it’s not a culture so much as a side effect of the social internet handing the mantle of celebrity to anyone who wants it.
With social media, the world now has not only celebrities, but also mini-celebrities, micro-celebrities, and nano-celebrities, all with fans and thus the dangers of having fans at all.
One thousand followers is considered a minuscule fan base, but 0.1% of one thousand is one person. Edge-case fans are inevitable. And if someone has a million followers, one-in-a-million freaks are a statistical inevitability.
Thus, once you reach 1,000-2,000 non-bot followers, you will find that one of those followers has, in fact, devoted great swaths of their free time to hating you, specifically. This kind of person is rare, but not special—haters are everywhere on the internet. Your personal hater follows everything you do and archives everything remotely objectionable in a seething rage. Blocking your hater doesn’t work—they’ll make an anonymous “sock puppet” account. Deleting old posts doesn’t work, either—your hater has screenshotted and downloaded everything. Acting perfectly actually makes things worse—text posts are easy to fake, and even the thinnest veneer of perfection makes your hater hate you more.
And you are not perfect. Eventually, you will post a “bad take,” reveal an embarrassing secret, or even fail to be cruel enough to a targeted Bad Person. At any controversy that your regular fans notice, your hater circulates your deemed list of sins through every channel they have. Because social media feeds are designed to exploit the human mind’s sensitivity to threat, your fans find your sins—large or small, real or misleading—on their feeds.
Inevitably, some accusation sticks—even if it only makes sense in bad faith—and you find yourself mired in internet drama. Your life and work are now Discourse, and God forbid a poster stay silent for the Discourse. And, you, internet nano-celebrity, see every morsel of criticism, every person who even slightly agrees with your hater, every post saying that you should go away forever.
To your hater, nothing you do will satisfy them. You can make the most beautiful art, write the most insightful essays, or save thousands of lives, and your hater will craft compelling arguments that you are scum and that your work is bad.
The hater will dig a hole in your lizard brain, reminding you that they are watching you, and that they know that you are watching them back, in a panopticon where everyone is both prison guard and prisoner.
You are “canceled” with the strain breaks you and you log off indefinitely.
Kendrick Lamar has many such haters—some of them are hosts on Fox News. He leads DAMN. with clips of their segments.
This album is for you.
DAMN. only has three songs that bear the dynamism of a rap banger—that is, a song worth dancing, racing, or picking fights to. However, the bangers define the first impressions of the album. Lamar glares at the listener through the album art, beneath bright red all-caps serif. Even the song names are all-caps and punctuated, as if Lamar is barking out the tracklist mere inches from the listener’s face.
You called my last album pretentious? You want the bangers back? Well, here’s an album full of bangers. Witness me.
The songs “DNA.”, “ELEMENT.”, and “HUMBLE.”—the three tracks that got music videos—hit like meteors. Lamar’s performances prioritize momentum and bravado, rapping about his musical skill in a manner that demonstrates his skill, and calling out his haters for being inauthentic, for being weak artists and—crucially—for being disloyal. It would be standard-issue brag rap, except that Lamar occasionally cuts the drums for extended sections and—in two electric moments—strips the beat to just a booming kick, screaming bloody murder for extended verses.
Sike! You get no bangers. Kendrick Lamar doesn’t want you to dance—he wants you to witness.
I’m better than all of you. I could end any of your careers in an instant. And if I leave, the whole scene will be weaker from my absence.
I have always held arrogance in my soul. From elementary school, I got strong grades with little effort. By tenth grade, I was crushing the hardest curriculum my high school could find for me, while openly scrolling through Reddit in class. By college, I was pulling a 3.8 in engineering school with a philosophy minor while building a reputation in the campus activist scene and getting a full night’s sleep every night. I have been called some kind of genius or superstar since I was five.
I try to keep my ability in context—there are smarter people than me, and raw smarts cannot replace work ethic, emotional strength, or basic likability. But as my “content” creation career burned before me, “ELEMENT.” spoke to the self-absorbed bile in my throat:
Most of y’all ain’t real, most of y’all gon’ squeal
Most of y’all just envy, but jealousy get you killed
I knew my “content” was among in the best in the scene. I had elevated the caliber of work and discussion among the scene, and I had done it with honesty about my privileges and my goals. The people who turned on me were weaker artists than me, often relying on clout games to get on my level, often cosplaying as deeply oppressed starving artists when their lives were actually quite comfortable.
They were envious snakes—even the ones that I thought were my friends, the ones who had shared long conversations with me. Losing those “friends,” however, felt like betrayal. On social media, you can have parasocial relationships with people with the same scale of fame as you. If anything, the illusion of friendship is stronger—but they’re only profile pictures in your DMs.
Mutuals aren’t friends. Colleagues aren’t friends. The difference is in loyalty.
The slower songs reveal the true motives of DAMN. They have the stylistic embellishments of pop hits, but they sound too exhausted to keep up the energy. Don’t be fooled by the expert wordplay and lush production—Kendrick Lamar was burnt out for the production of this album.
“YAH.” opens with an announcer screaming “New Kung Fu Kenny!” like he’s opening a bombastic freestyle, but the song itself depicts an overstimulated exhaustion I found familiar in my “content” days. Spend enough time being “terminally online” and your brain will always be buzzing too. “FEEL.” plays a similar move, opening with a beat exuding relaxed swagger before abruptly switching into the uneven plodding of the actual song.
The feelin’ of apocalypse happenin’, but nothin’ is awkward
The feelin’ won’t prosper
The feelin’ is toxic
I feel like I’m boxin’ demons, monsters, false prophets, schemin’ sponsors, industry promises
Throughout the album, Lamar repeats, “Ain’t nobody praying for me,” and “What happens on Earth, stays on Earth.” Both refrains have a double meaning as a threat and a cry of pain. On one hand, if no one is loyal to you, if you believe that your actions on Earth will not follow you to the Kingdom of Heaven, if there are no consequences, why not choose violence? Why not shred every hater and naysayer with your impossible talent? It’s not like anyone can stop you.
On the other hand, if no one celebrates your success, if nothing you do will bring salvation, if there are no consequences, why do anything at all?
I felt that nihilism. Why make “content” at all?
So I stopped.
I logged off.
I let myself be cancelled.
It took five years, two children, and a pandemic for Kendrick Lamar Duckworth to produce another album, and he approaches Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers as a changing man. He went to therapy, started untangling his traumas and misdeeds, and spent less time on his phone—that’s what he means by “fasting.”
Some of the album can be seen as a sequel to “DAMN.”, especially “N95,” a hype song about getting off social media and having higher standards for the people around you. (You can tell who wasn’t paying attention by the people repeating “THIS SHIT HARD” in the comments.)
But the last song on Mr. Morale is the most important one for knowing what Lamar will do after this album, now that he has no contractual obligations to Top Dawg Entertainment.
Ask me when I’m coming home
Blink twice again, I’m gone
I choose me, I’m sorry
I consider myself an ex-artist now. I still have ideas for “content,” I still write snippets of fiction, and I’ve been working on this music review for a few months, but I’m not publishing any of it. I’ve redirected my focus to my day job, to light advocacy in my city, to being an athlete for the first time in my life. I only write when I feel like it, and those flashes of inspiration have been rare in 2022.
I chose me over my art.
And I’m happier for it.