Consumer Guide Album

Kendrick Lamar: GNX [PGLang/Interscope, 2024]
Blessed for decades now with near total disinterest in Drake—aesthetic disinterest especially, although I do sometimes wonder how his Canadianness inflects his Blackness and always wondered why hopeful females once found him a model of politesse when he was at least as doggish as most males in his line of work—I studiously ignored Lamar's feud or whatever I'm supposed to call it with the Toronto interloper. Instead I just took this album for what I thought it was—on its impressive surface, a musically virtuosic tour de force. Only then it was time to bear down on the rhymes, where it is my disillusioned duty to report I found predictably braggadocious autobio that was barely virtuosic at all. A-