In the video for Kendrick Lamar’s recent single “Humble.,” his hair bursts into flame. Lamar makes music like an artist running out of time. Just about everyone on the planet eventually feels their mortality, but for Lamar, the urgency translates into works of art that burn with purpose, that take the measure of the times and then zoom back to give a broader picture. He asks big questions over lean musical backdrops. How did we get here? What did we lose along the way? And how can this mess be redeemed?
A lot happens in the first two minutes of Lamar’s latest album, “Damn.,” in a spot normally reserved for a throat-clearing introduction. But “Blood.” is something more. “Is it wickedness? Is it weakness?” a choir asks over swooning strings. “Are we gonna live or die?”
Enter Lamar in a confiding voice, as if he were talking to a friend about something that’s troubling him. In the manner of “How Much a Dollar Cost” from his previous album, the acclaimed 2015 release “To Pimp a Butterfly,” “Blood.” is framed like a brief biblical parable involving a wise elder, this time with a shocking resolution. “So I was taking a walk the other day” Lamar raps, and the album unfolds, a series of parables, prayers and critiques, often aimed as much at Lamar himself as the community that shaped him.
The song titles are small words containing multitudes of meaning that sometimes chafe or resonate more deeply in proximity to one another: “Pride.” and “Humble.,” “Lust.” and “Love.,” “Fear.” and “God.”
“Is it wickedness? Is it weakness?” The answer plays out over 14 tracks that suggest that it’s easy to talk about taking the high road, much more difficult to do so when your life is on the line. How does a person of color — a black kid from Compton, Calif. — walk that line in a life defined by its contradictions? “DNA.” elaborates — “I got power, poison, pain and joy inside” — over a minimalist backdrop of subterranean bass and electronic hand claps.
In contrast to the lush landscape of “To Pimp a Butterfly,” which essentially took on a century’s worth of black music, “Damn.” strips down the rhythms to their essence, flavored with the occasional cameo (notably Rihanna and U2). Lamar’s voice does most of the heavy lifting, playing multiple roles and characters. His supple singing complements a variety of rap tones and textures: the way “Feel.” shifts from introspective to raging, the way falsetto soul trades places with rapid-fire eeriness in “Lust.,” the way the perspectives of a scolding parent, a young Kendrick and the adult Kendrick inform “Fear.”
“I’ll prolly die anonymous,” the young Kendrick laments, while his older self acknowledges that “at 27 years old my biggest fear was being judged.” He could mean being judged by his community or his rap peers or, more likely, God. “You have to understand this, man,” the voice of a relative intones, “we are a cursed people.”
That biblical sense of a fallen people shadows each track. Lamar includes himself in their number. He may be a rap star, but he’s tired of rap beefs and the trappings of celebrity.
That faith blooms in “XXX,” in which the narrator tries to dissuade a young gangbanger from repeating the mistakes of his predecessors, then widens the scope. The violence of the streets is just an outgrowth of a greater wrong. “Hail Mary, Jesus and Joseph, the great American flag is wrapped and dragged with explosives,” a line released to the public only hours after the U.S. government dropped the world’s biggest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan. Bono delivers a low-key refrain about answers that may be beyond tangible grasp: “It’s not a place/ This country is to be a sound of drum and bass/ You close your eyes to look around.”
In the final track, “Duckworth.,” named after his father, Lamar explores the nearly fatal encounter between his parent and the man who would eventually sign him to a record contract. Fate intervened to keep Kendrick from becoming an orphan and quite possibly another gang casualty who, like so many of his peers, aspired to escape his personal hell but couldn’t find the ticket out. And then the tape rewinds, and we’re back at the beginning — “So, I was taking a walk the other day .” Sometimes we get another chance to make things right.
