Kendrick Lamar shot straight to #1 on the Billboard 200 last week, with his new EP “untitled unmastered.”!
Now I’m not the biggest Kendrick fan, but I have a great deal of respect for him as a performer and an artist. His style and substance are leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of Rap right now. He even far over-shadows Kanye, who has taken some bad and weird steps backwards as an artist as of late. Kendrick is definitely the best thing going on in Rap right now, which unfortunately isn’t saying much when pretty much everyone wants to sound like Future or something. I really miss when Rap was FUN and not all of this droning on, bland, boring mush.
I liked and respected Kendrick’s last album, “To Pimp a Butterfly” and of the Grammy nominees, it should have definitely won Album of the Year. Certainly over Taylor Swift’s predictable “ear-poop” album “1989”. I didn’t quite get ALL of the hype for “TPAB” since about two thirds to half of the songs on the album were bland-ish filler. Certainly the very talented Kendrick could do better. One of my friends doesn’t get how I can be critical of “TPAB”, but I hear half of the songs on “TPAB” plus a bunch from his previous album “good kid, m.A.A.d city” and know he can do even better. My favorite song from the album is by far “King Kunta” by the way.
Now just over a week ago Kendrick dropped his aptly named “untitled unmastered.” EP of some unfinished, unmastered and untitled songs from the “To Pimp a Butterfly” sessions. Low and behold, here are the songs that were missing from “TPAB”, instead sidelined by the filler. If he had included at least 4 of these 8 songs on “TPAB”, I would have enjoyed it even more and gotten all of the hype. And that’s just what I did. I removed the songs I felt were filler and replaced them with the best songs from “untitled unmastered.” Below is a Spotify playlist I made of this leaner meaner album. This is what it could have been and should have been from the beginning.
In closing, don’t get mad at me for being critical of Kendrick, because I like him. He can just be even better if he fine tuned just a little bit. I’m not quite sure how, I’m not the genius like Kendrick., but I’m sure he’ll figure it out. By the way, congrats on your new #1 album, Kendrick!
Volume 11 