hiphop Kendrick Lamar

[shower]

Someone drop a link please

[Elementalism]

Someone drop a link please

Bro like I said on the other page, Google is your friend.

Type in 'kendrick deluxe' and the fifth link down is you. The links on that Freshremix.ru site are bless.

[The Infamous]

good kid>>>>>>>cole world

and i anticipated j.coles album more, his mixtape campaign was serious

it was a mediocre effort. kendrick produced a true body of work.

deffo cole world was poor no replay value

[Flojo]

Kendrick falls into this weird category I have - artists that I know are talented but I just don't like nor dislike.

Gonna give this the headphone treatment now and see if this changes my mind.

/

cole world was a poor effort

i went back and listened to it and it sounds so average

I thought it sounded average at the time compared to The Warm Up / FNL.

[Yoshie]

not heard the album yet but apparently this aint on there.

SOLID beat.

Best dre verse have heard in a while. (Probably ghosted)

It's on CD2, guess thats bonus

[Afroman]

Album loink ploise?..Soife in adavoons

[Lionel & Dave]

i've been watching Kendrick for quite some time now and have throughout remained completely non-committal yet non-dismissive at the same time, partly due to the claims of him actually being the one right now, (something i've always reserved for Jay Electronica). his lack of charisma has always been a problem for me.

this however is the best body of work he's put out thus far.

i checked that mixtape when it dropped, have bumped Section.80 which i like bar some of the horribly cringe moments present.

this comes like a debut album. like when you discover a new artist an they paint a whole new picture for you. his artistry is focussed and well executed. the way he's recreated that whole west-coast compton imagery from a whole new angle is nuts.

[Young £]

pos

trust me, its like he kept so much back, and let it all out on his debut.

[Thizz]

Best album of the last 10 years.

[Natty]

What people still have faith in J cole?

pmsl

If his next release is good this could come back to haunt me but I think J Cole is done

[The Infamous]

yeah j cole fizzled out before the sideline story dropped

friday night light and the warm up gassed me up a lot then the album was a anti climax

/

i agree with natty hes done

[Haze-e]

Cole had a poor album granted, but people must be forgetting the three quality mixtapes in The Come Up, The Warm Up and FNL. Re-listen to those and you know J.Cole is never done.

He just needs to drop a mixtape on the same levels as those and reaquire his buzz.

[The Infamous]

i dont think i will ever listen to him again

was good while it lasted 2009-2011

his fans are the worst

[Young £]

you lot are mad

you write off people like chief keef etc, even the likes of Joey Badass who may off peaked too early not your J.Cole's

J Cole from production, to rapping is world class level, he isn't going anywhere and he will better than he was before im sure of it

back on topic though.....

[The Flyest]

his fans think he is jesus the messiah

[The Flyest]

i thought sideline story was decent though

wasnt poor at all

imo

[Young £]

http://hiphopwired.com/2012/10/22/kendrick-lamar-school-boy-q-ab-soul-jay-rock-the-recipe-remix-listen/?utm_source=HipHopWired&utm_medium=twitter

http://hiphopwired.com/2012/10/22/kendrick-lamar-ft-jay-rock-ab-soul-schoolboy-q-swimming-pools-black-hippy-remix-listen/?utm_source=HipHopWired&utm_medium=twitter

[Young £]

From mic to plug, "Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City" is stellar.

Of all the likely First World pressures that have inevitably crept into the life of Kendrick Lamar over the past year and change - since he and his Top Dawg Entertainment cohorts unleashed their brand of genre pushing Hip Hop on the world - only one truly matters: Releasing a successful debut album. Following 2011's tour de force Section.80, a slew of shine-snatching featured lyrical clinics, and a downpour of cosigns ranging from Brother Ali to Lady Gaga - K-Dot's in a position few in Rap history not named "Nas," "Canibus," or "50 Cent" have ever occupied. Only two of those sport initial releases that validated the hype machine; only one of those commercially. The same one that Kendrick's current Aftermath label-head, Dr. Dre, launched into ubiquity back in 2003. Add that backdrop to the critical acclaim of fellow TDEers Ab-Soul and ScHoolboy Q this year (with #controlsystem and Habits & Contradictions, respectively), and Compton's kid is swimming in a mote of expectation. Fortunately, at least creatively speaking, Kendrick delivers with ease. From mic to plug, Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City is stellar.

GKMC lives in its narratives. There's the one where Kendrick's driving his mom's van while his girl is texting him titty shots. ("Sharene a.k.a Master Splinter's Daughter"). There's the one with MC Eiht where K-Dot talks about staging a robbery while working as a security guard and smoking cocaine laced marijuana ("m.A.A.d. city"). "And they wonder why I rarely smoke now / Imagine if your first blunt had you foaming at the mouth," he raps over the Sounwave and Terrence Martin-produced ratchedy madness. There's "Sing About Me, I'm Dying's" awesome perspective flip where he spits as a gang banger, then Keisha's sister (from Section.80) in consecutive verses and both literally speak their demise into existence. The Just Blaze produced "Compton" (featuring Dr. Dre) and the gloriously ignant "Backseat Freestyle" are the only true cypher cuts. No brain-twisting exploits like "Rigamortis" included this time around, for example. And that's alright. Kendrick's joy ride is as visceral as a John Singleton flick or something; equal parts Boyz In The Hood, Higher Learning, and Baby Boy, only the 2012 version told on wax. The interludes cinematically tie the good kid fighting his way through a mad city theme together and are conveniently included at the end the of songs instead of as separate tracks so they don't clutter the listen when rocked on random. The production and engineering are absolutely impressive. Structurally and conceptually, as an album, GKMC is amazingly tight.

But what keeps this LP littered with replay value is Kendrick's range as an emcee. Styles and cadences pivot on a dime, whether on or off beat. He'll flip octaves like he's harnessing first generation Dungeon Family members. Tracks like "Swimming Pools (Drank)" and the Drake-assisted, Janet Jackson-sampled "Poetic Justice" are the type of songs that should be on radio more often: Genuinely imaginative in approach. Lines like "I can feel your energy from two planets away / I got my drink / I got music / I would share it but today I'm yelling 'Bitch, don't kill my vibe!'" ("Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe") are not only supremely relatable under any tax bracket, but quotable enough to reach bootleg T-shirt status. He never takes a verse off, never forgets the importance of connecting as a person.

With Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City, Compton's flag bearer unveils a group of songs equally potent individually and collectively, meeting the mainstream and rabid fans in the middle, improbably touching that thinnest slice between mass appeal and mass respect. "I'm tryna keep it alive and not compromise the feeling we love," K-Dot kicks on that previously mentioned track-to-be Tee. "You're tryna keep it deprived and only cosign what radio does..." This isn't just a debut album. This is a shot at history.

4.5 out of 5

hip hop dx

Every great ‘hood movie has the character who takes the gangster stigma to the extreme. Loud, cocky, fearless and, of course, crazier than Tony Montana snorting on a mountain of narcotics is what makes characters like Menace to Society’s “O-Dog” or Juice’s “Bishop” shocking, amusing, and quotable. But there is a reason why Kane and Q were the main character’s in those motion pictures: their internal struggles in maintaining the acceptance of their peers at the expense of their own family instilled morals was more relatable and even more compelling.

For the BET Hip-Hop Award’s lyricist of the year and West Coast torch bearer, Kendrick Lamar, the well-to-do, Black male youth is taken on a journey through the extreme vices of the ghetto lifestyle with his personal morality and identity in trouble at every turn on his Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope debut, Good Kid, m.A.A.d City,.

After stealing his family’s van, Kendrick takes a joy ride through muffled echoes and flat percussion to meet up with a summer fling on the intro track “Sherane a.k.a Master Splinter’s Daughter”. Upon meeting his crush, he also encounters some mentors who introduce him to the L.A. street life. Sounwave’s sultry guitar licks and soothing strings make a perfect background as Kendrick shuts off from his moral reasoning in order to embrace his new-found immorality on “B*tch, Don’t Kill my Vibe” (“I can feel the changes/ I can feel the new life/ I always knew life could be dangerous”).

“The Art of Peer Pressure” explores K. Dot’s first acts of deviance, with a story of doing drugs, fighting, and robbing with the homies. The track captures just how going with the flow can end up with a night of crimes. Up-and-coming West Coast producer DJ Dahi adds his signature background samples and elastic bass on “Money Trees”, where fellow Black Hippy member, Jay Rock, ventures from his own flow in order to out-K-Dot Lamar out of his own rhyme scheme, resulting in one of the most memorable verses on the album (“Imagine rock up in those projects, swear them n*ggas pick your pockets, Santa Claus done miss them stockings/ liquor spilling, pistols poppin’, baking soda yola whipping, ain’t no turkey on Thanksgiving”).

Towards the end of the album, Kendrick starts to question the impact of his immoral decisions on his character and decides it’s time to get baptized on “Sing about me, I’m dying of thirst”: (“My mama said see a pastor, he’ll give me a promise/ what if today was the rapture and you completely tarnished?/ The truth will set you free/ so to me you should be completely honest/you dying of thirst, you dying of thirst/so hop in that water and pray that it works”). An old-Kanye beat pattern and harmonizing spiritual vocal sounds makes it seem as though Kendrick might have cracked The Da Vinci Code to “Jesus Walks”.

It is rare accomplishment to have such an array of different producers on one project to sound this cohesive. But songs like the playful but mediocre “Backseat Freestyle” and the hard-hitting, Dr. Dre-featured “Compton” seem to stick out like a sore thumb. The Drake featured “Poetic Justice” also seems a tad cliché and misplaced, yet these are minor missteps.

What makes Good Kid, m.A.A.d City resonate so well is how Kendrick relates his own personal guilt of partaking in the street lifestyle without being condescending to the gangbangers who still are living the ‘hood life. Ironically, he even compares himself to Cuba Gooding Jr.’s protagonist “Trey” in Boyz in The Hood – a morally-sound youngster who tried out gangster lifestyle only to find out he would be better off admiring it from afar.

Rating: 8.5/10

all hiphop

[Flojo]

Nah writing Cole off is mad premature imo, The Warm Up is probably my most played tape/album of the past 5 years.

The problem was the subjects he covered so well in the Warm Up and FNL were pretty much the same as what he covered on the album just not as well which is probably because quite a few of them were written time ago.

He's still got it in him.

/

I gave this the headphone treatment last night and enjoyed it as an album, it's rare these days to hear a cohesive album that has a production vibe that runs throughout but he did it well although I think it could have done with a tiny bit more variation. Song wise it's strong conceptually but also melodically, more time lyrical rappers fall down on there hooks but he's nice with the melodies and the flows - the hook on bitch dont kill my vibe is the best example for me.

It's a weird album in the sense it's so obviously west coast but it almost feels like a throwback to NY Hip Hop of the 90's. Of all the albums dropped by the new school spitters I reckon this one will stand the test of time better than anyone's, mainly because you can tell he hasn't attempted to be current whatsoever. I rate.

[Elementalism]

Nah writing Cole off is mad premature imo, The Warm Up is probably my most played tape/album of the past 5 years.

The problem was the subjects he covered so well in the Warm Up and FNL were pretty much the same as what he covered on the album just not as well which is probably because quite a few of them were written time ago.

He's still got it in him.

/

I gave this the headphone treatment last night and enjoyed it as an album, it's rare these days to hear a cohesive album that has a production vibe that runs throughout but he did it well although I think it could have done with a tiny bit more variation. Song wise it's strong conceptually but also melodically, more time lyrical rappers fall down on there hooks but he's nice with the melodies and the flows - the hook on bitch dont kill my vibe is the best example for me.

It's a weird album in the sense it's so obviously west coast but it almost feels like a throwback to NY Hip Hop of the 90's. Of all the albums dropped by the new school spitters I reckon this one will stand the test of time better than anyone's, mainly because you can tell he hasn't attempted to be current whatsoever. I rate.

That is the word I've been searching for all week.

Coherent was the closest I got to, then consistent. FFS.

[Nola D]

was gonna post a review but didnt wanna look like a neek f*ck it, read this today thought it was (long) but well written.

Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d. city

Interscope Records / Aftermath Entertainment: 2012

First things first: good kid, m.A.A.d. city, Kendrick Lamar’s debut album on Aftermath/Interscope records, is unequivocally awesome. But you already knew that. Since the MC’s unconventionally great Section.80 (2011), Kendrick has become the new Holy Ghost of rap music for this decade. His intricate rhyme schemes and complex layers of thought flow through the headphones of backpackers and stick-up kids alike. Through the rattling sound system of the busted Camry on Rosecrans Avenue to the perfectly-tuned home theater in a yuppie’s Williamsburg condo. Compton’s latest Chosen One is hip-hop’s ubiquitous Next Big Thing. The keepers of hip-hop’s written record have dusted off the pedestal. Message boards and blogs all proselytize the same: Kendrick’s voice is unique, his flow technically perfect, his Southern California pedigree vital.

During the build-up to the release of good kid, m.A.A.d. city I’d been consumed with how Kendrick Lamar fits contextually inside a hip-hop marketplace that is as wide open as it’s ever been. A glance at his two dozen or so feature spots over the last several months finds Kendrick not allying himself with any particular “movement” inside the genre. It’s this same philosophy that, at first, confounded listeners when they heard Section.80 (this critic included). Because we’re so used to compartmentalizing our artists—whether it’s by style of beat, or subject of rhyme—when someone who is so all over the playing field comes along, our stubborn ears don’t initially know what to do.

Regardless of the 4.5 score you see below (which, if we’re being honest, is a number based on blatant subjectivity and my best efforts at assessing hard empirical evidence like technical ability and beat selection) Kendrick Lamar is one of a few rap artists today who are essentially critic-proof. He doesn’t insert himself into any particular niche (at least not flagrantly) and any resemblance to your favorite rapper—whether “gangster,” “commercial” or “conscious”—is a consequence of something specifically extracted from his lyrics. There are other popular hip-hop artists who tread this foreign territory—you could actually argue that Drake, who appears on the album’s only throwaway track (“Poetic Justice”), is one of them—but none have been able to handle the effects of their environment (time, place, social conditioning, a rapidly shifting music industry) as deftly as Kendrick has. Contextually, the MC also known as K-Dot remains an island unto himself.

To wit: “The Recipe” (featuring Dr. Dre) is one of the best rap singles of 2012. It also contains a relatively one-dimensional, derivative verse spit by Kendrick, probably his weakest set of bars on all of good kid, m.A.A.d. city. (Note: The track actually appears as a bonus on the “deluxe” version of the album, presumably meant to exist independently from the main body of work.) The MC cycles through a laundry list of standard Cali rap rhetoric, summarized easily by “the three W’s”: women, weed and weather. Kendrick is such a good rapper, though, that the tired missives don’t preclude the song’s excellence. “The Recipe”, in all of its trunk-rattling glory, ends up being a standalone example of where Kendrick might exist if his overactive brain were to go into partial hibernation. It is not at all a bad place, but thankfully that’s not what happens on the rest of GKMC.

The young rapper’s perspective is rooted decidedly within the environs of Compton, CA and in the restraints of a particular time in his life. Instead of unabashed brag rap telling listeners what we already suspect (Best Rapper Alive?), we get dramatic set pieces and vivid snapshots of a young Kendrick Lamar growing up in a city with mad potholes, proverbial and otherwise, at every turn and intersection. If Section.80 was a lament of a childhood informed by unhealthy living (sugary cereals; the crack epidemic), mainstream broadcast violence (Wile E. Coyote; your local news at 11) and racist politics (Reaganomics), then good kid, m.A.A.d. city documents how a precocious and preternaturally self-aware Kendrick interfaced with his native city during adolescence and into young adulthood. And the results are dynamic.

The pitfalls of sexual maturity are splashed all over this record, not least on album-opener “Sherane aka Master Splinter’s Daughter.” The track’s eponymous femme fatale is the object of Kendrick’s desire, an urge so powerful that obvious warning signs are ignored (Sherane’s brother is gang-affiliated) in favor of getting a nut. Whether things end up going wrong or not is beside the point. The bigger lesson here is how a teenager’s universal compulsion intersects with the everyday hazards of the ghetto. It’s a foregone conclusion that adolescent boys will allow themselves to be led blindly around by their d*cks, but to what end in Compton, California?

“The Art Of Peer Pressure” follows a similar theme, illustrating how tenuous the line is between an innocent joyride and catching your first case. A usually drug free, non-violent Kendrick turns into a mini-Mr. Hyde when under the influence of his homies. A close call with the police is detailed in tense first-person narrative over a cinematic beat by Tabu, the producer taking cues from Organized Noize’s most atmospheric work on ATLiens (everything feels like it’s illuminated by flickering street lights). The gods of good karma (or maybe just God Himself) is what determines Kendrick’s fortunate escape. So many rappers document in blatant terms how lucky they are in ducking checkered pasts, but Kendrick just eases it into his story, the humdrum details of the event—his moms blowing up his cell; the homies bickering over where to roll to next—filling in the blank spaces of yet another wayward night.

The fleeting levity of youth turns to harder lessons of adulthood on title tracks “good kid” and “m.A.A.d. city”. The latter features a vicious turn by OG Compton rapper MC Eiht and a resurrection of N.W.A.’s glorious production aesthetic from 1991. “Sing About Me / I’m Dying Of Thirst” is a somber two-song suite on which Kendrick keeps two promises: the first to a fallen neighborhood soldier, and the second to the Heavenly Father after a tragic turn of events resets the moral compasses of Kendrick and his crew.

The ghost of Tupac inhabits many of these tracks—a few earning the Thug Life Spiritual epithet so specific to his legend—though Kendrick is already twice the lyricist his forebear ever was. Pac was an emotional wrecking ball, making his impact through the power of blind assertion. Kendrick is not without his bombastic moments (“Backseat Freestyle” is the square root of cold nihilism and ruthless determination) but his mic methodology is downright academic compared to that of his role model. Even the obligatory “make that money” joint (“Money Trees”) is laced with illustrative nuance. A downright bitter Jay Rock rips through his guest verse with aplomb and hunger, sounding resentful about being born into a life that requires chasing paper above all else. “Everybody gon’ respect the shooter / But the one in front of the gun lives forever” sings a despondent Kendrick who, judging by the somber beat by DJ Dahi, feels more tethered to the almighty dollar than liberated.

And that’s the brilliance of Kendrick Lamar and, in turn, the entirety of good kid, m.A.A.d. city: an ability to seem unaffected and able to stand outside of its environment for the sake of not just being a participant in a vital piece of American history, but as one of its chief historians. The perpetual motion of Compton, Calif. stops for no one, its madness resolute and unconcerned with the happenstance of a good kid managing to make his way. And as rare as it is for that kid to make the hard right choice— to get out of the car when the directive is most certainly a doomed one—even rarer is it when that kid ends up being not only one of his city’s best rappers, but one of its most astute critics.

4.5 out of 5

[Haze-e]

Finally had the chance to give it the headphone listen.

Album is too nice. As Flojo said it's very cohesive!

[mixer152]

Only half way through but this album > Cole World the Sideman story, easily.

[DRC]

Mixtape of samples used on the album for anyone who's interested

http://pitchfork.com/news/48330-download-a-mixtape-of-samples-used-on-kendrick-lamars-good-kid-maad-city/

[Elementalism]

Salty f*cker.

Shyne has officially lost the plot.

/

Ed: