Trolls Be Damned: Kendrick Lamar Deserves to Be Silly
With a new album cooking for a late 2021 push, rap savant Kendrick Lamar is primed to enter a particularly noisy—if stale—mainstream hip-hop arena.
Since the Compton-bred rapper announced that his next body of work will be the final act in his run with record label TDE, he’s been featured on two tracks alongside Baby Keem. These two aren’t just linked by blood (Baby Keem is Lamar’s cousin), but also through their multipurpose media boutique pgLang, which they founded last year with former TDE president Dave Free. It’s always news when one of hip-hop’s most virtuosic and enigmatic artists closes a chapter on one era to start another.
It’s unclear just how Lamar’s role might shift over the next few years, as he evolves from rap’s moral conscience to media mastermind. If these new musical collabs—“family ties” and “range brothers,” both on Baby Keem’s new album The Melodic Blue—are any indication, one of the genre’s most intense rhymers is loosening up. Kendrick Lamar is freeing his inner goofball.
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