It was obvious that rapper Kendrick Lamar would release an album just before his probable coronation, at the end of January 2025, at the Grammy Awards, the American music awards, where he has seven nominations including five for a single song, Not Like Us, a piece intended to crush his rival, the Canadian Drake, deemed too pop, too watered down. He couldn’t leave his fans hungry after this diss track (attack song) which broke all online listening records in the world. We could also expect a new project for February 2025, before halftime of the Super Bowl, the final of the American Football championship of the National Football League (NFL), where the kid from Compton must put on the show. But no one expected a sixth album so soon.
Not content with defying all predictions by publishing, on the afternoon of Friday, November 22, GNXa true love letter to California, the little rap genius, the only one to have won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2018, added to everyone’s surprise twelve tracks including eleven co-produced by his sidekick Sounwave but above all by the very active producer view of pop, Jack Antonoff, to whom we owe recent albums by Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Sabrina Carpenter.
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But there is very little talk of pop in this record which begins with the flights of Mexican singer Deyra Barrera, a mariachi that Lamar had spotted during a Dodgers game, the Los Angeles baseball team. The one who accompanies the guitarists and trumpeters was invited to sing in the studio, without knowing that she would be found three times on this disc: at the beginning of the album for the terrible Wacced Out Muralsin the introduction to Reincarnateda title dedicated to Tupac Shakur, the idol of Kendrick Lamar who himself paid tribute to the Mexican community in his song To Live and Die in L.A., and in conclusion with the title Gloria.
Even the softest, coolest songs are real R’n’B bombs, intended for underground dancefloors like Luther, in tribute to the crooner Luther Vandross, who died in 2005, in a duet with the singer SZA; Dodger Bluea funk ballad on the highways of Los Angeles that the city’s gang members will definitely play on their car sound systems; Or Peekaboowhich begins with a 1970s soul sample, Give Me a Helping Handby Little Beaver, one of those stories muttered by the city’s pimps, playing with words and their sounds.
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