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If you've been reading a bunch of year-end lists this year, you might be tired of seeing Kendrick in the #1 slot again and again. Especially after he topped our list and several others in 2015 and 2012 too. (BV didn't actually do a list in 2012, but if we did, there's a good chance Kendrick would've topped it.) Yes, it's predictable, and the urge to not pick an obvious, hugely popular #1 is a very real urge, but Kendrick Lamar topping these lists is predictable for a reason. It's only once in a while that a talent like this comes along, and it's worth treasuring any time it does. Kendrick is like a Michael Jordan or a Tom Brady; it doesn't really matter what team you root for, you gotta admit they're some of the best to ever play the game. Kendrick's hot streak of good kid. m.A.A.d city, To Pimp A Butterfly and DAMN. comes out two decades after what people tend to recognize as hip hop's greatest era, and he can go bar for bar with any of the top MCs from that era. He's like rap's Nirvana in that he comes about 20 years after the definitive artists in his genre yet he'll be sharing space with his forebears on lists and countdowns for years to come. And he's like Radiohead circa OK Computer/Kid A in that he's in the midst of a run where anything he touches blows away the competition, and any arguments that suggest otherwise just feel contrarian. This might all sound like hyperbole, but the quality of DAMN. backs all of these claims up, and that's why it should be taken so seriously.

DAMN. follows To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar's most challenging and ambitious project, and its comparative simplicity is why some fans and critics have suggested it pales in comparison. It is indeed more simple, but suggesting that makes it automatically worse is sort of like suggesting the Ramones are automatically worse than Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Its simplicity served a purpose. In the time since To Pimp A Butterfly came out, the attention turned in a major way towards rappers who were kind of just making pop records. Once Kendrick's biggest rival, Drake now makes pop music more often than he makes rap music, and guys like Future and Migos are leading the critical and commercial conversation with music that has its merits but also veers more pop. And while Kendrick himself has no problem with "mumble rap" as a style of music, you get the sense that he made DAMN. as a way to remind everyone that he honors rap history and can do a fine job of putting his own spin on it. It's a raw, bare-bones album, just like stone cold classics like Straight Outta Compton, The Infamous and Illmatic are raw, bare-bones albums. All it needs is booming beats and Kendrick's mind-shattering rhymes to be as effective as the more lush-sounding To Pimp A Butterfly and good kid, m.A.A.d city.

If it wasn't clear from the sound of DAMN. that Kendrick is out for blood, he takes a few chances to tell you. He takes shots at "wack artists" on "ELEMENT.," and though he never mentions who he's talking about, you get the sense that he's talking about nearly every rapper who isn't him. He dishes out just about every boast and every diss in the book on "DNA.," again suggesting that, whoever you are, you probably aren't as good as Kendrick Lamar. Hey, he can't fake humble just 'cause your ass is insecure.

But DAMN. isn't the best album of the year just because of the shit talk and the throwback production. Its true power is revealed after repeated listens prove that it's just as multifaceted as its two predecessors, even if it seems simpler on the surface. Songs like "FEAR." and "PRIDE." allow Kendrick to work in the rich-sounding production of the last two LPs, and lyrically the album is as dense as TPAB is musically. He examines his own very complicated relationship with religion and doesn't come to a simple conclusion; he looks at his place in the world as an artist, a lover, a family member, a friend; he mourns the current state of politics and the talking heads on Fox News who tell him his own anti-police brutality song is worse than racism; and he ends the album with one of the most gripping stories of his career. Closer "DUCKWORTH." goes into great detail about an incident when Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith could have potentially killed Kendrick's father, Ducky, years before starting TDE and signing Kendrick to his label. "If Anthony killed Ducky, Top Dawg could be servin' life / While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight," the song ends, before a gunshot rings out. It's the kind of stranger-than-fiction story that you might wonder why Kendrick waited this long to tell, but it makes sense that he did. If he put this on his debut album when he was still largely unknown, it might not have had the same impact. Now, when Kendrick asks "Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence?", the question resonates because we accept the superlative he awards himself as gospel. [A.S.]

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