On Friday, April 14, Kendrick Lamar dropped his highly-anticipated fourth album, DAMN. This was me and my entire timeline after listening to 55 nonstop minutes of pure, hot fire.
Photo: Giphy
Your boy Kendrick came through for the culture with a graphic narration of today's social, political and cultural landscape. His everyman perspective is a refreshing reprieve from the extreme braggart or conversely self-pitying and generally unrelatable famous people problems that have come to dominate the verses of our faves.
"I’m in a space now where I’m not addressing the problem anymore," Lamar said in a pre-album release interview New York Times Style Magazine. "We’re in a time where we exclude one major component out of this whole thing called life: God. Nobody speaks on it because it’s almost in conflict with what’s going on in the world when you talk about politics and government and the system.” With tracks like "DNA," "LOYALTY," and "GOD," Lamar's delivery on that promise is resonating with audiences.
According to the online platform Metacritic, which aggregates music, game, tv, and movie reviews from the leading critics, DAMN. is now the highest rated album of all time!
His controversial first single, "HUMBLE" debuted at No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100, selling 111,000 downloads and 49.8 million streams, and the first week sells projections of his album hovers at about 450,000. With game-winning stats like these, Lamar proves the value of unadulterated truth in this age of alternative facts.
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