One of his most important and exciting nuances is his narrator/rapper split where you can never be sure how honest his rapping is – might he just be playing a character or an earlier version of himself (as was often his method on his previous rekkerd)? And sometimes this irony can work well. But more often it just creates unsolved confusion for us while we give him an undeserved pass for saying stuff that could end up meaning almost anything just cos meaning almost anything is a virtue no matter how unintentional. “The yams are the powers that be,” but he also has “got the yams,” so who knows how may rapgeniuses it’s gonna take to explain that bit of lyrical contradicting thoughtlessness? Oh, but it’s ironic and dealing with dual-meanings...or something. I find it to be just lazy connections, and it takes me out of that deep groove.
For how conceptual this album gets credit for being, I see almost no coherence other than loose topics (that many hip hop albums deal with anyhow) with a particular focus on race. I also get that it’s got mass appeal, and high school kids will be blown away, and that’s great – it sounds radical for a mainstream rap album since Kendrick so rarely does rap while still touching on enough elements to be understood by that audience, and he’s legions more self-aware than most rap videos will ever be. (His referenced literature is likewise stuck in a high-school bookroom, which helps. Kids can easily pick up on those Mockingbird parallels and Achebe.) But it’s not getting near The Coup in its politics and mouthful references or Freestyle Fellowship in its jazz-splunk spray or even some mainstream stuff that did get Kendrick level support like Outkast in its funk synthing spirituality. Yes, I’m glad a new generation of 10th graders is hearing something out of their regular mold since it can get massive mainstream appeal and promotion, but it’s not changing anything for me.