The super-powered Black Panther, King T’Challa, rules a people who have evaded the damage of white colonialism and hoarded the wealth under their feet. Wakanda itself—colorful, rich, and lavishly ritualistic—seems to swagger on camera. Hip-hop’s proud, materialist tradition exists for related reasons: getting one’s own, in spite of everything that would stop you. “All my life I want money and power” goes the teen dream of “Backseat Freestyle,” one of many examples of Lamar—temporarily, self-critically—indulging the rush of winning. You can hear similar stunting early on Black Panther: The Album with “X,” both in the twitchy, defiant chorus (“I wore the crown all day”) and in the Soweto artist Saudi rapping in Zulu about stacking Benjamins on Madibas.

As played by Chadwick Boseman, King T’Challa does not swagger, though. He reads as serious and self-reflective, more burdened by his responsibility than enlivened by his power—an apt description of how Lamar often seems in the public eye, too. T’Challa’s ex-flame, the spy Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), advocates that Wakanda use its resources to nourish those in need around the globe. His friend, the tribal leader W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya), wants to intervene in more warlike ways. And T’Challa insists that maintaining the miracle of Wakanda means remaining apart from the world.

Watching T’Challa knot his brows over this debate in the early part of the movie, you might think of Lamar’s “untitled 02 | 06.23.2014.,” in which the rapper tours a landscape of black poverty and frets, “I just got a raise / Spent it all on me.” Or you might think of “u,” a lacerating guilt trip about Lamar leaving behind Compton on the way to stardom. The opening of Black Panther: The Album has him rapping as T’Challa, and it’s the most obviously Kendrick Lamar–ian thing on the soundtrack: a nervous, sparse litany about being torn apart by competing forces, with a swarm of voices dissonantly asking, “What do you stand for? Are you an activist? … Are you an accident? Are you just in the way?”

Those voices of criticism gain furious form in Black Panther via its spellbinding villain Killmonger, a lost scion of Wakanda, raised amid American inequality and made deadly by the American military. He seeks—mild spoiler—to use Wakanda’s resources in the brutal conquest of oppressors of the African diaspora worldwide. Played magnetically by Michael B. Jordan with deftly empathetic writing by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, Killmonger is a rare bad guy with a good point. If his violence and spite read as evil, he’s still advocating for the privileged few to help the unlucky many.

Resentment and rage from the same well as Killmonger’s sometimes surges through—and becomes the subject of—Lamar’s music, to thrilling effect. There’s a hint of Killmonger in the verses of Lamar’s “Blacker the Berry,” a brilliant rant against white mistreatment (which, this being the ever-self-interrogating Lamar, ends up indicting the ranter). Same goes for the middle third of “XXX,” the revenge fantasy that Lamar recently made into a fiery spectacle at the Grammys. The Killmongerian ethos also echoes in the outro of Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly, in which we hear Tupac predict, “next time it’s a riot there’s gonna be bloodshed for real … it’s gonna be like Nat Turner, 1831, up in this muthafucka.”

Killmonger, too, drives many of the most spectacular parts of Black Panther: The Album. As a West Coast city kid (like Lamar himself), the character feels like the inspiration for the album’s more aggressive, streetwise flexes: the pulsing, sirens-streaked clamor of the Bay Area group SOB x RBE on “Paramedic!” or Ab-Soul’s fastidiously crafted kill-or-be-killed explainer on “Bloody Waters.” The tense, bumping lead single “King’s Dead” tips its hand as Killmonger-affiliated even before Lamar erupts in the song’s final moments with a list of fuck yous. “I’ll be blacking out with the purists,” goes one of the chorus’s taunts to some soft, compromising rival.