Re: "easier listen"

I get that. I'm certainly not an "every day rap listener", and given my more in-depth experience with other genres, this may be true for DAMN. in comparison to his other albums. I'm not sure if this factors into my reasons for liking this album so much? I tend to favor rap artists that are able to do more than burn a microphone up or make cool beats, so the pop and r&b flavors strewn throughout these songs, along with the exceptional bridge work, really hit my sweet spot.

Completely agree.

I was coming here to say a version of this. I like the Andre 3000 comparison. I think he gave everybody a commercial album to remind everybody that he can make bangers and hits, too. I think his next album is going to be more artistic, pushing boundaries, taking risks, etc.

I said a few pages ago that this one was more immediate/easy, but now I think this one is just more commercial.

Still in love with DNA and XXX. Yah, Loyalty, Feel, and Fear are great as well.

The whole "artistic vs. commercial" thing is so passé and meaningless in the modern pop/rap climate.

I don't mean it as good/bad or anything like that. It definitely strikes me as his version of a commercial hit record and that's fine. I hope that on repeated listens I find that this album has depth that I think TPAB had. But even if it doesn't this is a thoroughly enjoyable album.

I wasn't talking commercially so much just as a different kind of focus. Kendrick obviously prides himself on being a world class MC and has a high standard for rappers. This album and TPAB were littered with references to him considering a lot of people in the game simply subpar at what they do. So I think after releasing what was a challenging album that alienated some people, there's definitely a focus on A+ level beats and rapping in this one. It's kind of like how many great chefs will have their 3-star restaurant but also the place where you can get drinks and cheap food. He wants to let everyone know he's still the best pure rapper around no matter what happens.

I haven't delved super deep yet, but I think the "HUMBLE." video alone has more sophisticated depth than TPAB. I appreciate that he seems to be becoming more concise and musical with his themes. That interview at the end of TPAB is such an awkward and clumsy way to express his ideas.

I consider everything you said here as an argument for this one being more commercial. It appears to be less challenging. It has the beats, it has the pop songs, and based on early numbers it seems that it's attracted a lot more ears than TPAB, so it's worked. It's let everyone know that not only is he the best but he's also versatile and can you give you some nice songs to bump to that you don't have to think too hard about.

To me that's a description of something being more commercial. I'm not trying to use that term to knock the album, so maybe I should use a different word. So whatever word you want to use, I'm saying that he made an album that would appeal to a wider audience and that I suspect that he won't do that on his next album.

GOD. is really good too. And DUCKWORTH.

There's a lot of really good songs here.

Grating jazz influences do not equal "challenging."

OK.

For all its tripped out/jazz experiments on TPAB, that approach made too many of the songs easily skippable. By taking an instrumental approach on DAMN that is more conventional (though never tired), it makes for a stronger front-to-back listen; compels me to digest more of his vocals and make connections/contrasts between songs; and overall helps deliver a more cohesive album/artistic statement.

TPAB was the sound of his brain and heart exploding with ideas/feelings; DAMN is the sound of his getting his ideas/feelings into one cohesive statement.

Absolutely. TPAB was too tainted by overwrought, highbrow experimentation to be a consistently compelling listening (and artistic) experience for me, whereas this album just soars from front to back.

It's also a thematically appropriate evolution, and actually makes me appreciate the significance of the retro TPAB sound a bit more; that album was bogged down by history and influences and references because he was operating in the shadow of his idols. After realizing that he has surpassed those influences at the end, he now charges ahead, looking forward, creating new sounds to match his new ideas.

Heck ya. TPAB was him grappling with his success vs. his roots; he was revisiting everything he saw growing up and trying to reconcile that with his newfound fortune. DAMN is his acceptance of the crown; he no longer sounds at odds with his "hood roots" (to use a lazy term), but rather like he has fully embraced both his roots and the newfound power he can share with them.

I'm not so sure about this idea that "To Pimp a Butterfly" was received by the public or by Kendrick's fanbase as a particularly challenging or difficult record; it sold over a million copies, about the same as "Good Kid MAAD City," hit number one on multple Billboard charts, and finished top five at least in pretty much every publication that ran such a list. Is there really reason to think he'd have come off that album thinking he needed to do some kind of about-face so as not to "lose" people?

I don't think so, and I don't think that's what this new album represents. There are little musical complexities all over "DAMN" -- multi-part song structures, etc. -- but they're streamlined, whipped into greater servitude of the songs and their message. No doubt, "To Pimp a Butterfly" is the more ambitious work in the sense that it throws more ideas at the listener and aims to occupy a wider musical space, but I don't think that means that a more compactly focused, less idea-dense work can't still be a step forward. "The River" is probably a more "ambitious" work than "Nebraska," but there's no question to me which of these represents the artist functioning at the higher level.

Don't misunderstand me -- I love "TPAB." But I think defaulting to its scope and ambition and "difficulty" as evidence of its comparative greatness is fallacious thinking.

A stylistic change doesn't mean better or worse, it's just a change. This album isn't better or worse than the last one for me, it's just very, very different.

You guys are ret-conning a little bit. Many of his fans were very WTF when TPAB came out. Basing an album largely on two genres that are dead to the majority of the public was very risky. It worked out like gangbusters obviously, but that's because it was great.

And I think the Tupac interview is fantastic. Kendrick has said that he had a dream where he talked to Tupac so hearing an imagining of that was pretty incredible to me.

The interview is great thematically, but it is completely nonmusical, and not something I'm going to sit and listen to. That's what bugs me about it. The best art is always cohesive and sophisticated in its form. I can't imagine Lamar couldn't have come up with a more eloquent way to express if he wanted to.

That's kind of my point -- his stock had never been higher than it was post-"TPAB," regardless of how risky it may have been (though incorporating jazz influences into rap seems the opposite of risky to me, in fact it has been the aesthetic hallmark of smart, "thinking people's" rap for almost three decades) and how many people didn't get it right away (I didn't meet a single person who dared say a bad word about the album, but maybe you're on the Kendrick Lamar RM or something). So why would he make an album with the purpose of proving to the world that he wasn't going to keep flooding it with music they wouldn't "get?" They've gotten it all so far.

I'm really not trying to hammer home the argument of one album being superior to the next, I just think the idea that "TPAB" was a work of vision and this is just a good album to play loud in the car is an inaccurate polar dichotomy. Both albums are closer to a center than that.

Has anyone made that argument, KD? I think LV and I are in agreement that DAMN is a work of great vision. It's just more cohesive that TPAB.

Responding mostly to this:

And this: