Lucy Nichols finds much to appreciate in the rapper’s latest album, but finds it less political than previous work 

Kendrick Lamar’s sixth album, GNX, was released as a surprise in November. The album comes after a very successful year for the mega-celebrity and superstar rapper.  He is already award winning this year, with Not Like Us, a dis-track aimed at fellow mega-celebrity millionaire, Drake.

GNX consolidates Lamar’s position as one of the best living rappers. He is, after all, the only rapper to win a Pulitzer prize. This latest album is an ode to Lamar’s hometown, Compton, Los Angeles, and to the history of hip-hop, despite him taking passes at hip-hop giants Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne. 

Lamar celebrates the much-maligned genre of hip-hop, pulling in a variety of elements frequently found across the broad genre. It features ‘g-funk’ beats, a style of backing track developed by Dr Dre. GNX features mariachi interludes in Spanish, chilled-out synths, and strings. There is an impeccable attention to detail. Every word, beat, and sample feels very deliberate. 

The only music video so far released for the album is for squabble up. Lamar, clad in blue, is joined by a variety of archetypical side characters and props that anyone familiar with LA culture since the 90s will recognise. The video features an American flag where the white stars and stripes are black, members of the Bloods gang (infamously wearers of red and at odds with the blue-wearing Crips), Latino dancers, a lowrider car, a black man ostensibly dressed as Jesus and, finally, a statue of a black panther – a reference to the revolutionary lack rights organisation founded in California, or potentially his presence on soundtrack to the Black Panther Marvel film.

Motifs from Lamar’s long career are subtly repeated in several instances. GNX’s fourth track, man at the garden, uses vocals that are reminiscent of the opening track on his debut album, good kid, m.A.A.d city. In reincarnated, the sixth track on GNX, he is not Kendrick but plays musicians that have come before him and shaped black music, such as Tupac and Billie Holiday. 

Polyphony like this is typical in Lamar’s work. In GNX, as with his other work, this is used as a means to address complex social issues from a variety of perspectives, either through Lamar playing different characters and different versions of himself, with other artists featuring on his albums, or interludes from real life friends and family. 

His use of repetition of elements such as these is perhaps as an exercise in introspection for Lamar, but I imagine this is actually to remind listeners of his prowess as a much-loved and celebrated artist. With polyphony, he represents not just himself but all of black, working-class America. 

The politics of Lamar’s earlier work is absent in GNX – though this has arguably been the case for him for a number of years. His debut album was undeniably political, his second album To Pimp a Butterfly arguably even more so.

Since becoming more successful, richer, and better known, Lamar’s gritty edge has to some extent been lost. He is set to play the super-bowl halftime show in February 2025, which he announced in a YouTube video with him in front of a colossal American flag. Kamala Harris also used his song Not Like Us on her campaign trail, even though it is a dis-track calling another rapper a paedophile.

There is an overwhelming sense of self-righteousness in GNX, which is thematically far more focussed on Lamar’s ego than his earlier work, which demonstrated the tragedy and disillusion of working class African American life in the early 2000s.

The album is certainly worth listening too, though for fans of hip-hop that is unabashedly political, anti-racist and genuinely moving, better to listen to Kendrick Lamar’s earlier releases.