On “DAMN.,” he’s drawn to the idea of being judged by what we leave behind. Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad

At some point during 2015, Kendrick Lamar came to seem like much more than a rapper. One of his best songs, “Alright,” was adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement as an informal anthem; sing-alongs erupted at rallies and protests across the country. “Alright” somehow manages to sound carefree yet urgent, like a radio jingle perforated by drum fills. “We been hurt, been down before,” Lamar raps, preaching about the glory inherent in struggle. “We gon’ be alright.” He sounded like a prophet, capable of articulating what people in the streets desired but couldn’t put into words.

Lamar appeared to embrace the role. In the video for “Alright,” he soars over Los Angeles and the Bay Area, astonishing all who see him, until a cop brings him down. At the BET Awards, he performed the song on the roof of a vandalized police car. At the 2016 Grammys, he began his performance as part of a chain gang. His verses felt like pronouncements, the words rushing out as though he had been tasked with conveying an entire community’s joys and sorrows. It has become commonplace for hip-hop’s biggest artists to see themselves as globalist curators, absorbing and spreading new sounds. But Lamar’s circle seems only to grow smaller, his music indebted to those who came before.

Lamar was born in Compton in 1987, the same year Eazy-E released “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” which, for many people, came to define the city. While in high school, he began recording mixtapes, which caught the attention of a local manager named Anthony (Top Dawg) Tiffith. In 2012, Lamar put out his major-label début, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city.” It was loosely structured around a seemingly average day from his teens: seeing about a girl, testing his parents’ patience, hanging out with friends and imagining that they are inside the reckless lyrics of a Young Jeezy song. What made the album powerful was its acknowledgment of life’s precariousness, an awareness that arrives in the course of the day, as someone close to him is shot and Lamar begins rethinking his faith. (He is a devout Christian.)

The success of “good kid” helped inspire “To Pimp a Butterfly,” released three years later. The songs on that album communicated Lamar’s ambivalence about his sudden fame, particularly at a moment when the nascent Black Lives Matter movement was casting light on all the young people, growing up just as he had, who would never see their twenties. He wanted to stay grounded, and not to sell out, and he explored this desire by making dark, adventurous music steeped in seventies funk and spaced-out jazz. It’s not that he spurned the mainstream. His albums have sold well, and he’s contributed verses to hit songs by Taylor Swift and Maroon 5. But these simple, tidy guest appearances underscore how much attention he pours into the carefully rendered characters, symbols, and places that populate his own albums.

On April 14th, Lamar released “DAMN.” It’s filled with contradictions, seesawing between supreme needs and animal wants, heroism and self-loathing, loose thrills and the possibility of eternal damnation. The songs are at odds with one another: “LOVE.” is an ode to trust and commitment, backed by majestic, gliding synths; “LUST.” is rash and hellish, as Lamar, over a drum loop played backward, raps about seeking the quick affirmation that comes from being desired. “ELEMENT.” is Lamar at his most effortless and cocky, peering down from on high; it’s followed by “FEEL.,” which finds him nursing a chip on his shoulder, mind racing toward the conclusion that his insecurities may never fade. He begins recognizing his own sense of megalomaniacal paranoia: “I feel like this gotta be the feelin’ what Pac was / The feelin’ of an apocalypse happenin’.”

The phrase “What happens on Earth stays on Earth” is repeated on a few songs—a reminder of something greater, beyond this existence. Throughout “DAMN.,” Lamar wonders if it is nature or nurture that determines who he is. “I got power, poison, pain, and joy inside my DNA,” he raps. The question becomes whether that means his fate is preordained by virtue of his blood, his faith, or his skin color.

The considerable pressure put on Lamar has been unfair, and “DAMN.” rejects the notion that he has all the answers. Still, within hours of its release, there were theories, which proved to be untrue, that on the first track Lamar represents his death, and that a follow-up album, in which he is resurrected, would come out on Easter Sunday. It feels like a relief when the renowned New York d.j. Kid Capri, a voice from a different era, pops up between tracks to play the role of the hype man, as though to remind you that what you are listening to is still hip-hop, not holy scripture.

Religion is often invoked in hip-hop in a metaphorical way, a method of dramatizing one’s struggles against temptation or judgment. Two of last year’s most acclaimed releases, Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo” and Chance the Rapper’s “Coloring Book,” turned spirituality into a kind of gilt-edged aesthetic. Those artists’ songs were radiant and euphoric; you wanted to see the light that they saw.

Until “GOD.,” the album’s penultimate track, Lamar’s version of faith feels heavy-handed and wearying: far from the megachurch’s spotlit pulpit, he’s more like a street-corner preacher whom people go out of their way to avoid. God is invoked not merely to lend texture to his triumphs. Lamar’s faith reminds him of the possibility of judgment, of an old-fashioned belief in the discrete categories of good and bad. Where others might simply bow to self-contradiction as inevitable, Lamar remains drawn to the idea that we will be judged by the path we walk, and by the work we leave behind. “I don’t love people enough to put my faith in men / I put my faith in these lyrics, hoping I can make amend,” he raps, over Steve Lacy’s slowed-down, jingle-jangle guitar, on “PRIDE.”

“DAMN.” ends with “DUCKWORTH.,” a song about faith and the possibility of karma, a reminder that every decision matters. It recounts the story of Anthony, a gangster from Nickerson Gardens, a public-housing complex in Watts. Over a loping beat by 9th Wonder, Lamar describes Anthony as a good-natured kid who grew up too fast, whose family history of “pimpin’ and bangin’ ” instilled in him a very narrow vision of the good life. His crossroads seems minor: he is thinking about whether to rob the local KFC, when a worker there named Ducky starts sliding him extra chicken and biscuits, hoping to get on his good side.

Anthony is Top Dawg Tiffith, Lamar’s manager. Ducky is Kenny Duckworth, Lamar’s father. As the story comes into focus, in the final seconds of “DAMN.,” so much of what has preceded this chance encounter begins to take on a new significance. Suddenly, the references throughout the album to an entire people being “cursed,” trapped in situations beyond their grasp, gain in resonance. “I’ll prolly die anonymous / I’ll prolly die with promises,” he had rapped on “FEAR.”

“DUCKWORTH.” is the sound of turning back these fates. Anthony takes Ducky’s kindness to heart and decides to spare him. “That one decision changed both of they lives / One curse at a time,” Lamar raps, some twenty years later, of Anthony and Ducky’s reunion in the recording studio. Their anonymous lives have been made monumental. Their everyday choices led to magnificent consequences: “Because if Anthony killed Ducky / Top Dawg could be servin’ life / While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight.”

The track ends with a gunshot and then the sound of a record getting spun back, as if Lamar were speaking in tongues. Or maybe it’s a moment of profound, almost divine hope that he can turn back time. The record rewinds all the way to “BLOOD.,” the first song, picking up just after the opening words, which begin to resound with possibility: “Is it wickedness? Is it weakness? / You decide / Are we gonna live or die?” There are the choices we inherit, which may not be choices at all, and there is the path that we make by walking. ♦