Album Of The Week: Kendrick Lamar Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City

As little as five days ago, I was worried about this album, and I had plenty of cause to be. Rappers, for the most part, don't make great major-label debuts anymore, and nobody much expects them to. They might make great mixtapes, but the actual album-release is where label expectations start to come into play, where bald crossover attempts are encouraged, where everyone understands that someone needs to make money. When Wiz Khalifa makes multiple featherweight dance-pop tunes with Scandinavian studio wizards, we've all come to understand that it's just part of the game, like Mitt Romney changing policy positions as the election season wears on and not even acting ashamed about it. Romney's trying to get elected, Wiz is trying to get that Bing commercial money, and that's just the way things work. The only real exceptions are things like Waka Flocka's Flockaveli, albums that happen when an artist is smart enough to realize that he can't play that radio-rap game and he should just focus on what he's good at (gut-stomp adrenaline) instead. That's great for hard, single-minded focus, but it's not a route for someone as expansive and ambitious as Kendrick. When we learned that Kendrick had recorded a song called "Partynauseous" with Lady Gaga, I was pretty sure he'd straight-up B.O.B. himself on his first-ever major label debut. And Kendrick is exactly the sort of rapper who might do that. He's a frighteningly talented young rapper who, on past records, has shown an occasional lack of focus, the sort of thing that leads him into wincey territory like that whole "what if I fucked the stewardess" riff from Section.80. He's certainly always been capable of making a great album, but cultural forces and market forces and diminished new-rapper expectations seemed aligned against it. But Kendrick didn't just exceed expectations on his major-label debut; he made an album that absolutely obliterates everything around it, that reminds us what a thoughtful rap album can be capable of.