Have you and your significant other had “the talk” about “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe”? You might find out the hard way that the title isn’t going to be the sticking point. It’s the words right before it: “sometimes I need to be alone.” Now, every healthy relationship requires each partner to carve out some space for self-care, that isn’t too much to ask. And because Kendrick Lamar has something of a messiah complex, he fills the verses with loopy conscious rap moralizing about the radio and materialism and how those can obscure the vision of your third eye into your true soul. Or something like that.

But then the chorus abruptly asks for a more impure kind of purity, one that exists outside the spiritual realm—sometimes, when you get your drinks and your music just right, the resultant vibe is a power so incredible and fleeting, you want to keep it all to yourself. In fact, another person can only ruin it. Are you really going to tell a loved one how much you relate to that? It’s bad enough to get a quick check with all disrespect saying there are times where you’ll be #4 at best behind “my drink,” “my music” and “my vibe.” How about being told that you’re such a distant #4 that any attempt at protest can only be met with a response of “bitch, don’t kill my vibe”?

And Kendrick Lamar is much better with words than you, so what chance do the rest of us have? Well, to me, what’s amazing is how the song that most successfully presents Kendrick Lamar in the way he sees himself—the foremost vessel for the incomparable power of hip-hop—is the one where you really don’t have to pay attention to his rapping. Let’s not forget that the only person who believes in Kendrick Lamar as much as himself is pretty much a billionaire and you could hear Sounwave’s blinding, gilded production here as Dr. Dre outsourcing a tribute to an empire built on expensive headphones. This track is AT&T Stadium, Virgin America, “YOU GET A CAR...AND YOU GET A CAR!”, where we’re all the beneficiaries of an extremely rich person’s idea of altruism, to spare no expense in a show of faith to the customer. And that really gets the point across when you share “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” with your partner—“me time” is this languid, this indulgent and this luxurious. When “sometimes I need to be alone” is expressed that way, those are things anyone can understand. —Ian Cohen

Kendrick Lamar: "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe"