AFTER a summer spent burying fellow rapper Drake in one of the most high-profile rap beefs this century, Kendrick Lamar has now wrapped up his domination of 2024 by dropping GNX, a surprise album that not even label Universal Music Group knew was coming.
The sixth studio album in Lamar’s prolific arsenal comes off the back from a venomous barrage of singles launched at Drake’s OVO camp almost seven months ago but it shows no signs of him turning on the safety on his metaphorical gun.
Named after the 1987 Buick GNX, which at release was the fastest car in the world that beat every Lamborghini, Ferrari and Porsche, Lamar’s GNX is very much a vehicle for his 2024 victory lap.
Racing past rivals
Album opener Wacced Out Murals has Lamar displaying there will be no rules of engagement on the album over aggressive staccato strings as he takes aim at his own heroes, such as Snoop Dogg who posted Drake’s AI-generated Taylor Made diss track on his Instagram.
This trend of calling out anything Drake-related without explicitly naming him is consistent for the entire album, such as Reincarnated. An obvious jab at Drake’s aforementioned Taylor Made, in which he used artificial intelligence to generate Tupac Shakur’s voice, Reincarnated uses a sample of Shakur’s Made N***** with Lamar’s own voice contorted to fit Shakur’s iconic delivery.
GNX also follows the route of the produced-for-clubs Not Like Us, the final diss track Lamar released at the end of the beef, leading to a much more accessible album compared with Lamar’s heavy and introspective Mr Morale & the Big Steppers from 2022.
To that end, the album features an eclectic array of tracks that is a cross-pollination of his earlier albums Damn, To Pimp a Butterfly and Good Kid, M.A.A.D City.
