Review: If ‘GNX’ isn’t Kendrick Lamar’s best album, it’s close

“Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” Is that really what the risen Jesus Christ told Mary Magdalene? I thought it was, “Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years.” Or maybe, “U can’t touch this.” Either way, Kendrick Lamar is back with a new album, and if it isn’t his best, it’s close.

The resurrection has always been a heavy trope in rap music, from the Geto Boys and Common dropping respective “Resurrection” albums in the mid-’90s, to the era-defining success of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Life After Death” circa 1997, all the way up to Lamar sporting a foreshadowy crown of thorns on the cover of his meticulous 2022 album, “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers.” On the cover of this record, “GNX,” Lamar is leaning against a titular vintage Buick, wearing his fitted baseball cap turned backward, reborn as a rapper who’s ready to get to the point. Mere minutes into the proceedings, he shoos away all the analysts, etymologists and code breakers who habitually crowd around his lyricism with their unseemly oohing and ahhing: “F--- a double entendre, I want y’all to feel this s---/Old soul. B----, I probably built them pyramids.”

Good prompt. Music isn’t some puzzle for us to solve. It is a mystery that we engage with body and mind. Even when it involves Lamar rapping in scrupulously crafted, densely detailed, multilayered metaphors, a song’s ultimate meaning isn’t something we suddenly uncover by stripping back the wallpaper. There’s no conclusive eureka, no omega aha. So, please, put away your whiteboard while you listen to “GNX.” This is easily the most disciplined and direct music Lamar has ever made, and if you really let yourself feel it, it might also be his most profound.

His angriest, for sure. Off the rip, Lamar is annoyed by society, annoyed by the music industry, annoyed by his public image (contemplative good guy, Pulitzer Prize winner, voice of a generation), and, perhaps most consequentially, still annoyed by Drake, the superstar rapper he feuded with in song earlier this year. Never had a rap beef been more breathlessly hyped, but Lamar made the most of it, redirecting the frothing social media spectacle toward his creative reawakening. As a rapper, he sounded newly spiteful, no question, but also more tenacious, more alert, more energized, more engaged - a transformation that culminated in “Not Like Us,” a highly danceable, absolutely lethal diss track that ruled the summer, topped the Billboard Hot 100 and helped Lamar secure his halftime performance slot at next year’s Super Bowl.

And while the conspicuous absence of “Not Like Us” on “GNX” ultimately reads as cold-blooded, Lamar’s capillaries are still boiling here. On the album opener, “Wacced Out Murals,” he talks about building those pyramids in a previous life, but he also explains how his animosities have become “plural,” his poison syllables oozing through clenched teeth. That indignation spills over into metaphysical realms on “Reincarnated,” where Lamar channels the late 2Pac’s exuberant phrasing, but narrates from the perspective of a dead R&B guitarist, then a Chitlin’ Circuit singer defeated by addiction. When he finally breaks into the first person - “My present life is Kendrick Lamar, a rapper looking at the lyrics to keep you in awe” - it sounds like a brag out of the ‘80s, making time feel even wobblier. From there, he spirals into a rhyming dialogue with God, who reveals that musicians are angels cast out of heaven, with Lamar repenting in conclusion: “I rewrote the devil’s story just to take our power back.”

Let’s not get too distracted by all these Lucifers and stones being rolled from tombs, though. This is an album about rolling tires. It’s named after a car, and that’s where it was meant to be heard, windows down, volume up. The bass on this album - much of it produced by Lamar’s go-to producer, Sounwave - detonates in all kinds of exquisite ways, reminding us that Lamar’s Los Angeles is both the cradle of American gangsta rap and the driving capital of the planet. We should probably also take this opportunity to note that Lamar is now 37 years old, the same age as Bruce Springsteen when he recorded 1987′s “Tunnel of Love,” an album whose cover features the Boss propped up against an old Cadillac. Is leaning on an old car a sign that a great American songwriter has reached a midlife crisis? Or a new plateau of expression? It isn’t too hard to connect the dots between “Here’s the car I always wanted to own” and “Here’s the album I always wanted to make.”

This album’s title track is the kind you have to want to make - a deeply strange, entirely purposeful off-kilter posse cut where Lamar sounds reinvigorated by his young collaborators, Hitta J3, YoungThreat and Peysoh. “Peekaboo” generates a similarly playful-slash-sinister mood, with Lamar pantomiming the twitchy flows of fellow South Central rap icon the late Drakeo the Ruler. “Squabble Up” samples Debbie Deb’s 1983 freestyle-electro classic “When I Hear Music,” with Lamar using the opportunity to shout out Los Angeles jazz hero Kamasi Washington (“High key, keep a horn on me, that Kamasi”). Rapped in urgent timbres, these songs instantly rank among the hardest tracks in his songbook, and they all feel so profoundly L.A. He knows where he’s from, and like he said, he wants us to feel it.

Thank you, Drake? As it continues to shrink in the rearview, maybe this springtime beef wasn’t with Drake so much as with Drake-ness - that is, the perverse desire for cultural ubiquity and a misplaced faith in rap music as something that should cater to all. Not everything should be for everybody. “Know you a God even when they say you ain’t,” Lamar raps early on this album, adding a caveat, “Understand everybody ain’t gon’ like you.” That mention of godliness nudges him back toward his repentant sinner posture, but the real dichotomy Lamar is navigating throughout “GNX” is between Kendrick the introvert and Kendrick the altruist. As he fumes his truth, he ultimately reclaims rap music as outsider music, an art form designed to sneer at society’s injustices, the sound of people who feel alone trying to come together. Next time you’re stuck in the isolating togetherness of gridlock traffic, wondering what kind of God would allow all the wrong in this world, cue up “GNX,” crank the bass all the way and see if an answer shakes loose.