“Kendrick just pulled a Beyoncé.”
I didn’t know what my wife was talking about when she spoke those words to me last Friday morning as she was checking social media. They were delivered with a touch of bewilderment and a tinge of awe, as they were in reference to Kendrick Lamar’s new project, a “surprise” album. There wasn’t any proper rollout or a wave of hype leading out to its release. The Compton rapper’s GNX album just appeared.
Sure, the social media world had been speculating about a new LP from the Pulitzer-winning artist (in fact they’re still speculating). Anticipation and excitement surrounding Kdot’s next LP remained consistently high after he emerged victorious (according to most rap fans, perhaps aside from those who likely inspired the title of GNX’s first track, “Wacced Out Murals”) in his summer beef with Drake and the announcement that he’d be performing the halftime show at Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans on February 9. In the modern era, surprise albums are no longer novel, though the commotion they elicit generates the type of hype, momentum, and interest that helps break through the tremendous glut of music being released daily. In our social media–driven entertainment world, it’s a high bar to establish and sustain interest in a song or an album for more than a few weeks.
But my wife’s words reminded me of December 13, 2013. I was standing in a parking lot in Hollywood with a handful of friends when one of them looked at his phone and, almost in a daze, said, “Beyoncé just released an album.” Indeed, Beyoncé’s eponymous album arrived with no notice, changing the paradigm of how music was released and consumed. As someone who’d been a music journalist for more than a decade at that point, the idea that Beyoncé, one of the most popular artists in music, would release an album out of the blue, was stunning. As someone who’d followed Destiny’s Child since they burst upon the scene in 1997, the idea that the hype machine that led to blockbuster releases on the Billboard charts would be bypassed for purely word-of-mouth hysteria from flabbergasted fans who headed to their DSP of choice as soon possible to check out Bey’s new material seemed unfathomable. It was a game-changing approach, indeed.
This was more dramatic and significant than earlier moves by prominent artists to shift the release dates of their LPs. For instance, I remember several rappers in the 1990s and 2000s releasing their albums a week or two (or even a few days) earlier than planned in order to reduce the impact of bootlegging or mom-and-pop retailers selling the album earlier than they were supposed to. That was in the era of physical products, but as the music industry was becoming more digital-focused, I also recall hearing about Radiohead releasing In Rainbows with less than two week’s notice in 2007.
But what Beyoncé did set a new standard and paved the way for Kendrick’s GNX. All the interest surrounding this new release paradigm would be for naught—or negligible, at least—if the music didn’t resonate with listeners. Beyoncé was certified five-times platinum in August 2022, so the BeyHive clearly swarmed to the LP’s release for years to come. Time will tell how GNX is judged among Kendrick’s discography, but social media was seemingly instantly awash with posters anointing the 12-cut collection as album of the year.
That’s not particularly surprising, given the tendency for superlatives (not to mention recency bias) when it comes to online takes, but GNX certainly contains the type of music that stands among the best rap of this era, even as much of it overtly builds on rap that predates it. “Man of the Garden” builds off Nas’ “One Mic” sonically and stylistically, while “Reincarnated” evokes the music of Tupac’s “Made N****z” and features Kendrick embodying the archetype of a bygone artist who wrestles with selling their soul and drug abuse in the first two verses, respectively, before examining his own rise to superstardom. The resulting song is remarkable.
“Not Like Us,” the smash single Kendrick released this summer, is not included on GNX. But the first half of “TV Off” sounds aurally linked to that track, perhaps an unironic nod to its predecessor. Then there’s “Heart Pt. 6,” the latest installment of Kendrick’s long-running series, which incorporates musical elements found on EPMD’s 1989 song “So Wat Cha Sayin” (EPMD started rap’s first preeminent song series with its 1988 cut “Jane”). “Heart Pt. 6,” which finds Kendrick reflecting on his early rap days, is also clearly a response to Drake’s “The Heart Part 6,” which the Canadian rapper released this year.
By paying homage to rap’s past and fusing it with modern styling and energy, Kendrick Lamar pushes the genre forward again with GNX, from the method of its release to its next-level conceptual execution. At this point, neither is truly a surprise.
