After knocking Drake to the ground during a hip-hop battle at the top (and resulting in the summer hit “Not Like Us”), Kendrick Lamar took everyone by surprise by releasing a new album, GNX. But is this record part of his supervillain strategy aimed at annihilating Drake and all the other rappers in the world?
Yes and no. If GNX is much more than an ode to insult, Kendrick Lamar assures that it contains “between one and five songs, maybe more” in the tradition of “Not like us”. It is true that the album refers to his battle against Drake, and that it contains his anthology of direct and indirect insults, as well as some dedications. Let's take a closer look at all this.
Direct insults
Lil Wayne
The opening song, Wacced Out Murals, contains almost all of the album's direct insults. First target? Lil Wayne, to whom the lyrics “Irony, I think my hard work let Lil Wayne down” are addressed. When Kendrick Lamar was announced as the headliner for next year's Super Bowl in New Orleans, Lil Wayne said he felt “bad” for not being cast in the role in his own city native, and this is what Kendrick Lamar is referring to here. In response, Lil Wayne tweeted what sounded like both a peace proposal and a veiled threat: “Man wtf I do?! I just be chillin… Let this giant sleep.”
J Cole
The second frontal attack targets J Cole, who published online, then removed, a song directly attacking Kendrick Lamar: “7 Minute Drill”. “Fuck apologies,” Lamar responds, rapping, “I wanna see y'all geeked up / Don't acknowledge me, then maybe we can say it's fair / Take it to the internet and I'm take it there.” In other words: stop opening it if you're going to peel yourself as soon as it starts to heat up.
All the other rappers in the world
A funny nod is made to the title “TV Off”, where one of Kendrick Lamar’s lines (“Ain’t no other king in this rap thing, like siblings / Nothing but my children, one shot, they disappearin”) refers to the hit “Kick in the Door” by The Notorious BIG. Given that the latter served as an insult to the entire hip-hop scene of the time, this is a good clue as to how Kendrick Lamar views his contemporaries: on “Wacced Out Murals,” he declares elsewhere that he finds them “all average, with lots of old people.”
