Kendrick Lamar Reimagines Rap’s Future and Reckons With His Past on GNX

It could, and should, be argued that the definitive artist of 2024 has been Kendrick Lamar—not Charli xcx, or Billie Eilish, or Sturgill Simpson, or Taylor Swift, or even Tyler, The Creator, who just dropped his latest epic earlier this month and paid homage to K.Dot in the process on “Rah Tah Tah.” With a Super Bowl halftime performance coming in early 2025, Lamar reinvigorated a listless culture at the coda of spring with a month-long avalanche of gutting, bloody blows directed at one of its kingpins, Drake. Then came the think-pieces and the taking sides of it all, as the two hip-hop giants turned an industry inside out with a beef so poisonous that it called to mind the greatest rap feuds, like Ice Cube versus N.W.A., East Coast versus West Coast, Eminem and 50 Cent versus Ja Rule and Kurupt versus DMX. No moment between Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s feud reached a high quite like “Hit ‘Em Up” did when 2Pac and the Outlawz dropped it in June 1996, nor was it as immediately consequential, but their beef wasn’t just a spectacle—it was a lesson in context, and a necessary prelude to considering Kendrick’s new album, GNX, which he dropped without warning at noon ET on Friday, November 22nd.

Kendrick and Drake have worked together here and there for more than a decade, beginning with the “Buried Alive Interlude” on the latter’s Take Care in 2011 and “Poetic Justice” on the former’s good kid, m.A.A.d city a year later. In 2023, J. Cole said he, Drake and Kendrick were the “big three” in the rap game. In March 2024, Kendrick responded via a verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That” (“Motherfuck the big three, n***a, it’s just big me”). A beef commenced shortly after between the three before Cole smartly dropped out and let Kendrick and Drake trade daggers. Drake released “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle,” the latter using AI-generated vocals from Snoop Dogg and 2Pac, a move that prompted 2Pac’s estate to step in and demand the song be taken down from all streaming platforms.

But let’s be honest, the beef didn’t begin until Kendrick entered the chat. He dropped “euphoria” on April 30th and then, less than a week later, put out “6:16 in LA,” which Drake responded to, in a matter of hours, with “Family Matters”—a track that alleging that not only is Kendrick Lamar a domestic abuser, but that one of his kids was fathered by former Top Dawg Entertainment CEO Dave Free. It only took an hour for Kendrick to hit back, putting out “Meet the Grahams” and accusing Drake of sex trafficking, fathering a second child in secret (a déjà vu moment, calling back to Pusha T’s bombshell diss track against Drake that revealed the identity of his secret son, Adonis) and being a sexual predator.

If that wasn’t enough, Kendrick responded to his own song with “Not Like Us,” which accused Drake of pedophilia and shot to #1 on the Hot 100 chart—joining the ranks of “You’re So Vain,” “Hollaback Girl,” “Bad Blood” (featuring Lamar), “good 4 u” and the aforementioned “Like That” as diss tracks that became hits. It was glorious, surreal and galvanizing. When Drake tried responding with “The Heart Part 6” days later, there was no reputation left to salvage or momentum left to flip. The OVO leader was nothing more than debris collapsing beneath Kendrick’s probable desolation. But let’s back up a few years.

In 2022, Kendrick Lamar returned to the spotlight with his much-anticipated, long-awaited DAMN. follow-up: Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. The record was a polarizing feat of anti-role model language; a takedown of the legacy everyone else built for him in the wake of To Pimp a Butterfly’s global and critical success in 2015. Dropping TPAB bestowed a crown upon Kendrick’s head; he was, suddenly, a torchbearer for progressive, conscious hip-hop. JID, no-doubt a progeny of Kendrick’s creative apex, dropped a lights-out TPAB sibling a few months after Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers crashed the year’s party. Kendrick was mentioned in the same conversations as the Mos Defs, Lupe Fiascos and Commons of the world; he was supposed to be epochal voice of Blackness in rap, thanks to his third studio album, released four months before he turned 28 years old, putting a cap on the Obama years with a resounding, 16-psalm reckoning with radical Black politics and a venomous, still-present Americana.

DAMN. told a different story—a timeless story of trauma and survival with its lens pointed inward. As a follow-up to one of the greatest rap albums of all time, it was a letdown. As an album standing alone in the pantheon of the man who held the pen, it was another triumph worth the two-year wait. Like the institutional failures under the knife on TPAB, DAMN. put the ramifications of a lifelong interpersonal crisis on display. Expectations, addictions, violence, legacy—it’s all there, wrapped into one stirring, vilified, boastful medley of woe. But the importance of To Pimp a Butterfly continued to follow Kendrick Lamar into a new decade. There was an absence, though. Ever the architect of a multi-generational language, the 2020s started to erode away and we escaped a few lockdowns without a K.Dot record to help make sense of the very same pandemic most of us lived through. I think, in hindsight, the truth is clearer than ever: You can’t make music about dying forever. Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, flaws and all (namely the one step forward, two steps backward “Auntie Diaries”), was an earnest, eye-opening text from a man who, really, has always just been a son of Compton, California and not much else—a man who’d survived but hadn’t once turned his back on the very wreckage that hurled him ashore.

I find myself returning to one song from Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers often: “Mother I Sober.” I think, in the lexicon of Kendrick Lamar’s world, it’s the most definitive example of who he is as a writer. It’s a no-punches pulled, contradictory and egotistical transformation that gnawed at the truth of the Kendrick we know by showing us the Kendrick we rarely saw. Generational grief, with the hope that healing exists on the other side of hurt, spilled into the culture and industry Kendrick works in (“I know the secrets, every other rapper sexually abused / I see ‘em daily burin’ they pain in chains and tattoos”). Family habits and nature-versus-nurture come aplenty: Kendrick’s mother was abused and his uncle sought retribution; addiction is a centerpiece for community harm; newfound sobriety comes not as an excuse, but as a measure of grace; guilt and shame are the antithesis to growth; karma is prayed upon while bodies remain sacred.

I bring this up because the Kendrick we meet on GNX was heard two years ago on “Mother I Sober.” The viciousness he delivered the “A conversation not bein’ addressed in Black families / The devastation, hauntin’ generations and humanity / They raped our mothers, then they raped our sisters / Then they made us watch, then they made us rape each other” verse with comes as a lived-in, tangled web of misogyny, pride, chaos and judgement. It was that ferocity of grievous intent that allowed him to pick Drake apart piece by piece earlier this year; it’s a mourning that opens the door up for recovery—a recovery Kendrick’s ancestors weren’t afforded. He dreams of having superpowers strong enough to prevent his own children from inheriting all that impedes him from a kind of morality that exists with compromise but not casualty. Two years ago, it felt like there was closure in that, in saying the words long after everyone quit listening.

Whether or not the ending of “Mother I Sober” is full of ego or autonomy is up to whomever is listening to it, as the song concludes with Kendrick’s longtime fiancée Whitney declaring that he broke a generational curse and his children thanking him for re-calibrating their inheritance. Who is responsible for answering every man’s equation? I don’t know, but I think rapping about all of the faults that have collapsed into you—the very same faults that you have no doubt perpetuated, because you are as imperfect as the rest of us—and, in turn, devising your own absolution is an act of reclamation. Who will be the architect of our own grace but us?

GNX’s release was a surprise to many, but the paper trail was there. At the beginning of the “Not Like Us” music video, he teased what would become “squabble up” and, during the MTV Video Music Awards in September, he dropped a then-untitled track on his Instagram page that started with a massive declaration: “I think it’s time to watch the party die.” A summer of clubs across the world shouting “certified lover boy, certified pedophile” to the high-heavens later and Kendrick was ready to start rap music’s rebuild—wanting to trade “all of y’all” for the late, “sunken place”-bound, haunted Nipsey Hustle. Calling GNX “aggressive” feels like a disservice to the clarity Kendrick has earned, so let’s not mistake the genius of the“kill ‘em all before I let ‘em kill my joy” line for violence. Any interstitial meanness pales in the company of the record’s greater idea: Kendrick Lamar wants to make rap a better place or, at the very least, burn it to the ground and start from scratch—all while he counts the thorns of his own crown from the very top of the detritus. “Tell me why you think you deserve the greatest of all time, motherfucker / I deserve it all,” he raps at the end of “man at the garden,” questioning and declaring his oneness in a single breath.

Jack Antonoff, who produced “6:16 in LA,” nabs a production credit on 11 of these 12 songs—a move that has prompted many talking heads to question how he could graduate from making milquetoast arrangements on an album like Midnights to cushioning all of Kendrick’s daggers with soulful sounds that emphasize the rapper’s LA roots so aptly. It’s why a song like “luther,”which samples Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn’s “If This World Were Mine” and features contributions from Kamasi Washington, will go down as one of his sweetest efforts yet. This publication has not been kind to Antonoff’s musicianship and production, and I certainly have been one of his most vocal detractors. But his work on GNX with Sounwave (who previously worked on Mr. Morale) boasts a special awareness, as the two pair Kendrick’s continuity with beats that sound anything but dated (a stark contrast to Midnights (and even parts of The Tortured Poets Department), an album with synth-pop elements that arrived out-of-style on release day)—notably, the sample of Debbie Deb’s “When I Hear Music” on the “squabble up” arrangement sounds vibrant and nuanced.

Antonoff flips samples so well that he should’ve started producing West Coast rap records after his fun. tenure instead of starting Bleachers. But, given that Antonoff is the kind of artist who, in his own work, pays tribute to those who’ve influenced him (most famously, Bruce Springsteen), he is arguably the best producer for a Kendrick Lamar project like this—a record so deeply imbued with work from the artists who’ve inspired his own rise, like YG (“tv off”), D4L (“hey now”) and Willie Hale (“peekaboo”).

Kendrick clearly takes pointers from 2Pac all over this record, too, especially on “reincarnated,” which samples the late rapper’s “Made N****z,” and does a “Hit ‘Em Up”-conjuring round of “fuck you”s on “wacced out murals” that’ll make your head spin—taking aim at Lil Wayne (“Used to bump Tha Carter III, I held my Rollie chain proud / Irony, I think my hard work let Lil Wayne Down”), a certain square-jawed, crowd-working comedian (“Don’t let no white comedian talk about no Black woman, that’s law”) and Drake (“N***as from my city couldn’t entertain old boy / Promisin’ bank transactions and even bitcoin”) with the ultimate 2Pac-honoring line of all: “Aye, fuck anybody empathetic to the other side.”

The songs from Kendrick’s feud with Drake aren’t present on GNX, but the beef itself casts a shadow over the record—as Kendrick references “Taylor Made Freestyle” on “wacced out murals” (“Snoop posted ‘Taylor Made,’ I prayed it was the edibles”) and releases his own sixth installment of his “Heart” series (and a feat of storytelling on part with “DUCKWORTH”), this time clearing the air about his relationship with Dave Free and Top Dawg Entertainment (“We tried to freak the system just to make a couple ends meet / That’s my n***a for shit sure”), shouting out his Black Hippy bandmates Ab-Soul and Jay Rock, comparing Terrence “Punch” Henderson to the great NBA coach Phil Jackson (“Strategies on how to be great amongst the averages, I picked his brain on what was ordained”) and recalling his amicable separation from TDE (“To all my young n***as, let me be the demonstration / How to conduct differences with a healthy conversation / If that’s your family, then handle it as such / Don’t let the socials gas you up or let emotions be your crutch / Pick up the phone and bust it up before the history is lost”).

I trust Kendrick Lamar because he is willing to corner his constituents with a matter-of-factness largely unparalleled in hip-hop. On “Mortal Man” nine years ago, he rapped “That n***a gave us ‘Billie Jean’ / You say he touched those kids?” about fans turning their backs on the people they once claimed to love, pointing a finger at accused abuser Michael Jackson’s fall from grace. Now, he’s turned the finger at himself on “reincarnated,” performing a back-and-forth with his inner-self and wagering that he’s back in God’s good graces after uniting the Pirus and Crips gangs at his “Pop Out” concert in Inglewood in June (“I kept 100 institutions paid / Okay, tell me more / I put 100 hoods on one stage / Okay, tell me more / I’m tryna push peace in L.A. / But you love war / No, I don’t / Oh, yes, you do / Okay, then tell me the truth / Every individual is only a version of you / How can they forgive when there’s no forgiveness in your heart? / I could tell you where I’m going / I could tell you who you are / You fell out of Heaven ‘cause you was anxious / Didn’t like authority, only searched to be heinous”), boldly rejoices that he “rewrote the devil’s story just to take our power back” and likens his year to the Hebrew bible’s Isaiah 14 (a verse about the fall of Babylon and Israel’s great, prophetic restoration).

“All I ever wanted from you was love and approval
I learned a lot, no more putting these people in fear
The more that word is diminished, the more it’s not real
The more light that I can capture, the more I can feel.”

The “I could tell you where I’m going” line has remained with me, if only because it’s coming from the man who started a high-profile rap feud because J. Cole paid him a compliment. Then, he scorched every part of the earth that Drake has ever walked over and mercilessly beat him into submission, turning tracks around on a dime that would handicap any other artist’s career indefinitely (and you could argue that Drake’s sort-of-silent summer is just the first step in a long road of image rehabilitation). And, even at his lowest point (Mr. Morale), he remained the greatest living rapper. The emphasis is on the “I” in Kendrick’s phrasing, because GNX is nothing if not a map of rap’s future measured by its cartographer with a very exclusive guestlist. J. Cole and Drake are not a part of Kendrick Lamar’s vision; Nas is (and K.Dot makes sure to pay respect to the great New York MC on the “One Mic”-recalling “man at the garden”), and so are GNX’s featured voices: Dody6, Lefty Gunplay, Wallie the Sensei, Siete7x, Roddy Rich, AzChike, Hitta J3, YoungThreat, Peysoh, Deyra Barrera (all of whom are SoCal up-and-comers) and his old labelmate SZA.

The peace and love he yearns for on GNX is mixed with “fuck you” platitudes and skyscraper-sized middle fingers. That affection, the first brick gets laid down at home. The Pirus and Crips come together on a California stage and shout “Not Like Us” together—who gives a damn about the rest of the world? This an album begging for rap’s glory days to be resurrected, a love letter to Southern California disguised as a (soon to be) #1 record. On “wacced out murals,” Kendrick laments the destruction of a mural of him in Compton; K.Dot only raps the hook on “gnx,” letting Los Angeles’ future (Hitta J3, Peysoh, YoungThreat) take the wheel; he name-drops Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game on “peekaboo”; “dodger blue” is a major cypher of SoCal, measuring gang rivalries like “Dreamers and the Jets” and calling bullshit on posturing locals who don’t drive on the 10: “Don’t say you hate L.A., but live in L.A. and pretend / “My neck on Tarantino, Alejandro, Spike Lee / Just know you took the scenic route if you stand by me, stupid.” Kendrick summons G-funk, mariachi and hyphy music all on one album; as Joseph Campbell once wrote: “The labyrinth is thoroughly known.”

Coastal beefs, yesteryear-beckoning factions, victory laps coalesced with brotherhood, a vow to “live one in harmony now”—GNX contends that it’s time to fill rap music with the politicking of old, where powerful people coalesce selfishness with gain for the greater good and artists take their time with their art. And, as Kendrick wagers, who better to lead such a rebirth than himself? He collects metaphors and turns them into totems; burns bridges but unites an entire city. On the Mustard-produced “tv off,” Kendrick declares that there are a “few solid n***as left, but it’s not enough.” It’s time to make revelation a reinvention, so you better gather up all of your beloveds. But, to get there, you’ve got to bring every part of yourself with you.

Two years ago, Kendrick Lamar used deepfake technology to rap verses of “The Heart Part 5” as O.J. Simpson, Will Smith, Nipsey Hustle, Jussie Smollett, Kobe Bryant and Kanye West. Again on GNX he reimagines himself as Black figures and uses trauma, empathy and greatness as a near-biblical deluge of healing. During “reincarnated,” Deyra Barrera sings “Que reflejan tu mirada / La noche, tú y yo” (“That reflect your look / The night, you and me”) and Kendrick wonders which of his own past lives are pointed back at him: a Black woman on the Chitlin’ Circuit with a voice “straight from Heaven” who dies from drug abuse; a post-WWII, R&B guitarist who lied to his audiences and “died with [his] money” in the sunset. Kendrick then flips the script into his own “present life,” bemoaning how, even after his “instincts sent material straight to the charts,” that his own kindness became a detriment (“I spoke freely, when the people needed me I helped them / I didn’t gloat, even told ‘em ‘No’ when the vultures came”). But quickly, a clarity shows itself: “Can you promise that you won’t take your gifts for granted?” God asks. “I promise that I’ll use my gifts to bring understanding,” Kendrick affirms.

GNX is a fascinating listen that’s as flawed as any of Kendrick’s previous albums. He converses with the divine, walks the margins that separate good and evil, takes a dive but hits on the cash-out, puts his next-up disciples under the light and calls upon pop music’s most in-demand producer to make his West Coast domination legible. The “look what I’ve done for you” chorus from “The Heart Part 5” reverberates across this surreal, hypnotizing, danceable trip through a hip-hop prophet’s own ego death and immediate, braggadocious, finessing renewal. As it is written in Isaiah 14:

“The realm of the dead below is all astir
to meet you at your coming;
it rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you—
all those who were leaders in the world;
it makes them rise from their thrones—
all those who were kings over the nations.
They will all respond,
they will say to you,
‘You also have become weak, as we are;
you have become like us.'”

But GNX is right: There ain’t no legends if Kendrick Lamar’s legend ends. The party may be dead, but it’s far from over. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning artist, his music is enshrined in the Library of Congress and good kid, m.A.A.d city entered the Billboard 200 upon its release 12 years ago and has remained there for all 629 weeks since. Like the man on the mic says: “Tell me why you think you deserve the greatest of all time, motherfucker / I deserve it all.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.