Kendrick Lamar has delivered a brilliant project with untitled unmastered, and even if this is a collection of "raw form," "unfinished" songs— as KDOT himself explained via social media this morning— it is a genuine gift to fans and music lovers alike.
The spirit of To Pimp A Butterfly isn't just embedded into the DNA of these records; several of them are of those very sessions. Kendrick has secured his place in hip-hop with that album as a true, masterful voice of a generation, not to mention an extremely aware voice about the Black Experience in America. The sentiment is still exceedingly timely and powerful, particularly in light of someone like Donald Drumpf, openly hostile to people of color, in the midst of our current politics.
Pimp-pimp, hooray!
On iTunes the tracks leading sales initially are "untitled 02," a song that talks about Kendrick's conflict between his superstar status and the reality of his home life. For those of you following the social-media hints, one of the hooks, "Get Top on the phone!!" was the very note that Anthony Tiffith had on the TDE dry-erase board next to KDOT's name when they were teasing this release.
Also really selling is "untitled 07," right in line with the self-empowerment themes Kendrick excels at, as he begins to "levitate, levitate, levitate, levitate." The track is also gaining a bit of notoriety because Swizz Beatz has been busy on Instagram, pointing out that Egypt, his five-year-old son with Alicia Keys, produced one of the beats.
But it's the pure funk revival of tracks like "untitled 06," which was produced by A Tribe Called Quest's Ali Shaheed Muhammed and Adrian Younge with Cee-Lo on the vocals, and "untitled 08," also with Cee-Lo, so Funkadelic fantastic, that are so spectacular we're just happy they got put into the world in the first place. Kendrick originally performed the former on Fallon back in early January. And then there was that Grammys performance, which kicked this whole thing off:
Yo @dangerookipawaa after that @kendricklamar Grammy performance , you have to release those untitled tracks asap!!! What's up? Talk to me
— LeBron James (@KingJames) February 23, 2016
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