Kendrick Lamar
“Swimming Pool (Drank)”
good kid m.A.A.d city (Top Dog)
I must admit that I can’t tell exactly what drank LA-based MC Kendrick Lamar is talking about dranking here. At first I thought he was talking about alcohol, but I’ve drank a fair bit in my life, and no booze has ever made a disembodied voice talk to me. I tried lean one time in college, but that didn’t make me this nervous. It just made me want to lay around, nap, and listen to screwed up Fat Pat tapes, so probably not that either. Maybe it’s got bath salts in it. Whatever it is, it totally fucks you up.
This, the second single from Lamar’s major label debut, is a perfect example of why so many people I know fucking love this dude. His music has the unique ability to totally engulf the listener in the world he creates, and this track’s anxious, woozy backbeat combined with Lamar’s paranoid, tense flow creates a perfectly inebriated atmosphere. Chuck D famously referred to hip-hop as the black CNN, meaning the genre’s duty is to report what was going on in the black community, but the Black Hippies (Lamar, Ab Soul, Schoolboy Q, and Jay Rock) take it a step further. They want the listener to physically feel the weight of their reality, as drugged-out and disquieting as it is.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/52698465″ iframe=”true” /]
