ALL is quiet in hip-hop’s game of thrones. “Kendrick Lamar, the best rapper alive, is still the best rapper alive”, ran one headline after the release last week of “DAMN.”, the star’s fourth studio album. The consensus among critics and fans seems to be that this is that rarest thing, an artist at the height of his powers, rendering all others forgotten. A review in Time took pains to state that Mr Lamar is not merely excellent but also the Most Important Rapper in America.

If Mr Lamar’s status is uncontested, he is also an uncontroversial figure compared with rap’s previous supremos. He avoids drugs and seldom drinks. He lacks Tupac Shakur’s aggression and Eminem’s fetish for gore. Whereas Kanye West was described by Barack Obama as a “jackass”, Mr Lamar was invited last year to perform at the White House on the 4th of July. The rapper’s fondness for quoting scripture, ably demonstrated on his latest album, would surely put the current Republican president to shame. His intellectual heft delights university-educated music critics. Azealia Banks, a female rapper, once accused him of “playing that non-threatening black man shit”.

This may seem a dull profile for someone who professes to be the saviour of hip-hop. But Mr Lamar is the most utterly compelling thing the genre has right now. Charts are dominated by rappers from ever-wealthier backgrounds, many of whom appear detached from the struggles once etched into the genre. Mr Lamar, who attended the same Compton-area high school as Dr Dre, is an exception. “We gon’ be alright!”, the chorus line of one of his songs, was chanted in the streets by protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite a cleanish persona, his urgent lyrics and sense of history have been widely celebrated as a counterweight to hip-hop’s creeping sterility.

That is happening even as a strain of black militancy, propelled by anger over the shootings of unarmed African-Americans, becomes more visible in popular culture (note Beyoncé and her backup dancers in Black Panther outfits at last year’s Super Bowl concert). And yet the response by black musicians to simmering racial tensions in America has been one of introspection. Singers such as D’Angelo and Frank Ocean fused the intimate with the political in the style of Marvin Gaye and Nina Simone. Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” explored black womanhood and infidelity. But it was Mr Lamar’s previous record, “To pimp a butterfly”, that was hailed as the “What’s going on” of this era: a protest album disguised as an immersive personal statement (or vice versa, if you prefer). It was an 80-minute ode to black self-love, adorned with trombones and Fela Kuti samples and brimming with steeled optimism.

All that is gone on “DAMN.”. This is a minimalist follow-up to a maximalist masterpiece, in the vein of Mr West’s brash album from 2013, “Yeezus”. The quiet release last year by Mr Lamar of “untitled unmastered”, a proto-album devoid of art and song titles altogether, was an early sign of an artist trying to escape the expectations that his ambitions had placed upon him. Whereas the cover art on “To pimp a butterfly” featured Mr Lamar’s friends striking poses in front of the Obama-occupied White House, “DAMN.” is a grim self-portrait. The track names are short words in full caps with full stops. Replacing the jazz elements that flowed through “To pimp a butterfly” is a discordant batch of raw materials: siren-synth 808 beats, candy-cane autotune, slow, sparse reverb, scattered across the album’s 54 minutes but never blended into a cohesive whole.

Unlike Mr Lamar’s previous two albums, “DAMN.” has no unifying idea. There is little sign of the calls to arms that have peppered his lyrics ever since 2011’s “HiiiPower” (“So get up off that slave ship / build your own pyramids, write your own hieroglyphs”). The tracklist is awash with contradictions: “HUMBLE.” follows “PRIDE.”; “LOVE.” follows “LUST.”; “GOD.” follows “FEAR.”. “I don’t give a fuck / I’m willing to die for this shit”, he says on “ELEMENT.”. On “XXX.”, he offers murderous eye-for-an-eye advice to a grieving friend before giving a lecture to children on gun control. His hypocrisy is part-performance, part-confession.

The conflict and imbalance suggests that not all is well in Mr Lamar’s kingdom. Much of the hope that sprung from “To pimp a butterfly” feels extinguished. It is not just that Mr Lamar’s inward gaze seems driven by the depression with which he has long struggled. It is that on previous records, this despair was an artistic device, expertly manipulated in the service of a higher task. Here, there is a sense of emotion overpowering the artist. Mr Lamar’s focus on religion is stronger than ever. He pleads with God and cites Deuteronomy as proof that black Americans are cursed. On “FEAR.”, he utters the words “I’ll prolly die” a dozen times; on “FEEL.”, the phrase “I feel like” is heard 36 times. Under normal circumstances, the battering ram is not Mr Lamar’s artistic weapon of choice. “Everybody asking me to pray for ’em,” he says. “But who the fuck prayin’ for me?”

That is the paradox of Kendrick Lamar. In 2015 he made “music’s equivalent of the Great American novel”, as NPR put it. But once an artist holds up a mirror to America, his audience expects to see its own collective reflection in the next work. When “DAMN.” was released on Good Friday, rumours spread rapidly among online tea-leaf readers that the “second part” of the album would arrive on Easter Sunday. This was a bemused flock that had waited in vain for a sermon about what it means to be living in the post-Obama era. Mr Lamar’s greatness means his every move must be a commentary. If he does not attempt to create a tapestry of America, then what is he saying about America? No wonder it’s lonely at the top.