"DAMN." and the Freakout Album.

There’s a storied history of artists creating what I am dubbing “freak out albums”; an album that exists as the oddity in their catalog, the album which splits their discography in those works before & after that record, that album that acts as a resultant of some huge emotional event in the artist’s life. In the case of Kid A, it was Thom Yorke undergoing a mental breakdown of sorts and the other band members experiencing burnout after a period of immense popularity leading to copycats and fear of an inability to satisfactorily follow-up OK Computer. For Yeezus, it was Kanye West on the precipice of domestic bliss, with a wife and a child on the way, as well as a violent reaction to the maximal tendencies and excess that had defined My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Watch the Throne. Even for records like Nirvana’s In Utero or Neil Diamond’s Trans or even when Bob Dylan went electric, this idea of a radical shift or destroying expectations permeates these works or moments. What I’m trying to say is, there exists a long and important history of artists doing things that break the mold, either as a result of impulsive desires or just to try something new. So, then, where does Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. fit into all of this?

You know who he is, but just in case you don’t, Kendrick Lamar is an American hip-hop artist from Compton, California, creating music in the same vein as N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and the long lineage of musicians from that region creating important music. Lamar had been rapping for years, but didn’t break out till 2012’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, an album universally hailed as a masterpiece for its approach to Lamar’s life in “the hood”. It’s an album very much like Nas’ Illmatic or Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, in that it weaves not only a story for its protagonist but it also exposes its listeners to Lamar’s view on the societal ills that continue to plague the black community. From there, Lamar’s profile skyrockets as blogs all across the land fall over themselves feting him; he’s hailed as the next Nas, the next Ice Cube, the true heir to NWA, and so on and so forth. All this time, he’s seen as this humble kid from Compton who may have accidentally created a masterpiece, a one-hit wonder in the wings who’s unlikely to take this any further. And then 2013 happens, more specifically “Control” and the B.E.T. Cypher happens.  “Control” has gotten a reputation as one of those very important songs, like “Ether”, “99 Problems”, “Through The Wire”, etc.; it’s this moment where suddenly Kendrick internalizes this acclaim and goes full braggadocio. He immediately calls himself the King of both coasts, and calls out that infamous group of Meek Mill, ASAP Rocky, Mac Miller, Tyler the Creator, Pusha T, Drake, and more by staking his intention to make them irrelevant. And of course, people don’t tend to like that, so you got people taking it in stride, like Mac Miller, and then you got people getting a bit irked by it, like Drake, which sparked this whole series of subliminal shots & disses against one another. And as if that wasn’t enough, he caps of 2013 with one of my favorite features ever, his verse on “Nosetalgia” by Pusha T, which pretty much exists as an extended metaphor to say one thing and one thing only; Kendrick Lamar is dope.

If anything, what Kendrick did in 2013 was make things so much harder for himself; he not only called out several incredibly talented people all with albums lying somewhere on the “great” side of the scale but he raised expectations of his sophomore album to astronomical levels. Suddenly, it was as if the world itself wanted to see what Kendrick Lamar was going to do next. And then, in 2015, he releases “To Pimp A Butterfly.” And suddenly, all his trash talk became legitimate. To Pimp a Butterfly was one of those albums that gained untold amounts of relevance for not only its timing but its nuanced message to a community that was struggling with the ramifications of a justice system systematically doing them injustice. It was a message of hope, a message of peace to stop gang violence, a personal reckoning with fame and religion, and a journey of self-discovery, all wrapped into one future jazz-hop package. It’s an album that received appraise from everyone on close to every facet of media, barring Fox News, and became a symbol of Lamar’s apotheosis from Rap King to Rap God, complete with the fan base hailing him as such. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for the Grammys as Lamar sold a pittance compared to the juggernaut that is Taylor Swift Inc, and so not even acclaim from the President of the United States itself couldn’t earn Lamar a hallowed Album of the Year win. Thus, what do you do when you’ve created not one but two back-to-back classic albums and the world eagerly awaits your next step?

For Kanye West, it was “to alienate.” For Radiohead, it was “to differ.” For Kendrick, the answer appears to be less clear cut. Sonically speaking, if To Pimp a Butterfly was a move back to an older period of hip-hop, then DAMN. is definitely rooted in a modern bass-heavy trap-esque sound. One thing the album doesn’t lack is bangers, with songs like “DNA”, “Loyalty”, “Love”, and “God” having some of the most exciting beats on the project as a whole. In terms of both theme and lyrics, it doesn’t feel like the album is grappling with any of the huge themes that To Pimp a Butterfly became known for. Yes there are references to Trump and minor observations of what a post-election world has become, but for the most part, DAMN. is relatively insular focusing on Lamar. In the same vein, DAMN. also doesn’t have this clear-cut grandiose elaborate narrative enveloping it. The album begins with a recollection of a dream or a nightmare or a hallucination of a blind woman shooting Kendrick, We know the album is meant to reference some cyclical turn of events as evidenced by “Duckworth” rewinding to the beginning of the album, but Kendrick doesn’t really spend much time fleshing out this idea or making it blatantly obvious to the listener what the purpose of the framing is supposed to be. From my view, I think its Kendrick seeing his life flash before his life as he’s shot; in those moments, he recounts his highs and lows and what kind of man he is. The implication of a cyclical loop coupled with the reveal of “Duckworth”, to me, implies that this doesn’t have to be Kendrick’s unique story; the themes of this album are undoubtedly religious in nature as pride, love, sin, and devotion all play a role in this narrative. The appeal of religious stories lies in their generality as they are used to spread ideas on what is good or moral human behavior. As such, I think that what Kendrick wants to do with this project is explore the mentality of the victims in these cases of institutional violence by assuming he himself was put in that similar role; that is to say, this album is what would be running through Kendrick’s head if he died the same way as Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, or one of the others on the long list of African-American victims of police brutality or even judicial injustice. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but this ambiguity on the album’s core message is one that I want to talk about in relation to the idea of “freakout albums.”

Like I mentioned before, “freakout albums” are albums seeking to destroy expectations. They seek to subvert what their audience wants by creating art that remains true to themselves. In that way, DAMN. continues that storied trope by creating an album that isn’t meant to be a masterpiece. It’s messy, it’s ambiguous, it’s scattered, and it’s less cohesive than its predecessors; in fact, I’d say it has more in common with untitled unmastered and Section.80 than Good Kid M.A.A.D. City or To Pimp A Butterfly because it functions more as a collection of songs centered around a set of themes than a cohesive narrative with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. That’s not to diminish the album, though; I like this album a lot more than I did To Pimp a Butterfly as each track on this album has this unique sonic profile that endears to me a lot more than the antiquated jazz-rap sound of To Pimp A Butterfly. As a freakout album, though, it works so well because it annihilates your expectations of what a follow-up to one of the best albums of the past 10 years should be. Kendrick clearly made an album that he wanted to make, and not the album critics or his cult members wanted him to make. He’s taking an approach to his legacy that artists like Nas, Jay-Z, DJ Shadow and so many more have taken, which is to release what he wants to release regardless of how it’ll be perceived. It’s brilliant and it’s clearly impacting his fan-base. As of this writing, across the Internet, people are desperately seeking any proof whatsoever of a second album waiting in the wings to “complete” this album and give it the meaning that, in their eyes, it lacks.

It is the nature of expectations to both help and harm artists. Expectations can boost your profile, but it also means that people want things out of you; they want to feel changed or enlightened or impacted by your art. So, it’s the duty of the artist to fulfill that. But, sometimes, those expectations get set so high that it’s impossible to overcome them. Sometimes what the fans want is so incomprehensibly complex or ambitious or just downright impossible that no amount of work can really match what they want out of you. And that’s where Kendrick must have found himself. In a situation like that, there’s really only one thing that can happen, which is disappointment. So, given the choice between making something true to your spirit that fulfills you and making something that aims to measure up to that impossibly high hurdle, Kendrick made the right decision. He chose to disappoint and set a new baseline, one where he can say “I might produce another To Pimp a Butterfly or I might create something else that’s good in its own right but not as world-changing as TPaB.” Kendrick chose the path of Jay-Z, Nas, My Beautiful Valentine, the Avalanches, and so many more, in the process reaffirming his role as the one with the vision. Because if you don’t have faith in your creative vision, you end up like Kanye, pulling songs of albums to rework them because people say they don’t like it and creating an album that doesn’t fully commit to being a crowd-pleaser or an artistic statement.

And that’s my two cents on DAMN.