The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (13 page)

Lamar began writing rhymes at 13, but it wasn’t until he saw 50 Cent’s early mixtape success that he realized he could be recording and releasing his rhymes on his own. His first mixtape made its way to Top Dawg Entertainment; the story of his audition has since come to signify his dedication. The 16-year-old MC stepped into the booth and freestyled for two straight hours, while label founder Anthony “Top” Tiffith pretended to ignore him, to see what Lamar had to prove. The label had signed Jay Rock two weeks prior and the two MCs began recording at the label’s studio house in nearby Carson. Lamar, then barely 17, was a constant presence after school. In 2009, as the Top Dawg roster had expanded to include Ab-Soul and Schoolboy Q, the foursome formed Black Hippy, “the conglomeration so cool it could freeze L.A.” rhymes Lamar on the groups quintessential “Zip That Chop That.”

Jay Rock, who is also in Black Hippy, was similarly stunned the first time he went into the studio with Lamar, shortly after they’d both been signed. “I was working on lyrics, writing, writing, writing on paper. And Kendrick goes in the booth with nothing. I asked him where’s his paper? He’d written it all—the whole song—in his head in about five minutes. That’s when I knew he was crazy. And a genius.” Jay Rock cribs the trademark line about Dick Clark to describe Kendrick’s maturity level at 17 years old: “He was like the world’s oldest teenager.”

The first time Ab-Soul was in the studio with Lamar, he saw that he was working on a totally different level. “[Kendrick] was recording full songs with hooks and bridges and melodies and things to keep a crowd. He was not just interested in being the best rapper, he was making songs that the world could sing.”

Here’s one of the many places where Lamar diverges from the archetype of the “conscious” rapper. He’s not enough of any one thing to be categorizable. Sure, he’s self-aware and shouts out Marcus Garvey, working in tropes of black liberation without being political. He’s got nuanced songs about women with real-life struggles and names, yet plenty of pop-that-pussy cliché. He’s emblematic of the purely-for-the-love-of-the-game underground but is also working on a collaboration with Lady Gaga. He broaches all the street shit with a raw emotionalism that signals he’s been touched by it. (In a recent interview, he was quoted as saying that the scariest thing he’s ever witnessed was someone being shot in the head.) He reanimates narratives about life below the poverty line that we’ve become desensitized to. His appeal is broad but still nuanced.

Lamar isn’t interested in touting himself as moral authority, instead using the story within
Good Kid
as an object lesson that there is another path. Unlike many of hip-hop’s previous survivor’s-tale albums,
Good Kid
recounts the good old-bad old days—a Reagan-baby born amid poverty, gang war and the crack epidemic—without a trace of nostalgia. He doesn’t brandish what he’s been through in order to establish how hard he is or to earn street credentials.

And he doesn’t think other depictions of the streets are less valid. His family hails from Chicago’s 76th Street & Stoney Island, two miles from the O-Block projects where tendentious teen-rap flashpoint Chief Keef grew up. The two are now Interscope labelmates, and the subjects of two of the most sizable bidding wars in recent memory. Keef reportedly pulled down three million, Lamar confirms his deal at 1.7 million. Lamar, who has never met Keef in person, grows emphatic when discussion turns to the moralizing about Keef’s songs.

“You can’t change where you from,” he says. “You can’t take a person out of their zone and expect them to be somebody else now that they in the record industry. It’s gonna take years. Years of traveling. Years of meeting people. Years of seeing the world.” It becomes unclear whether in talking about Keef, Lamar is actually talking about himself. He values Keef’s success on the same terms as his own. By doing music, they represent two dudes who are
not
on the streets. “Maybe he’ll inspire the next generation to want to do music. Convert that energy to a positive instead of a pistol.”

With
Good Kid
, Lamar is also trying to shift how South Central Los Angeles has been portrayed historically on record. “He’s telling his truth—the typical story of a kid growing up in Compton,” explains Top Dawg’s president Terrence “Punch” Henderson. Like everyone around Lamar, Henderson is respectfully mum on what is and isn’t on
Good Kid
, but he is clear about how it’s a departure. “It’s not what you know from N.W.A. It’s not about gangs he’s representing. It’s a classic. The only thing separating him from the greats is time.”

That potential is what drew the attention of hip-hop legend Dr. Dre, who signed Lamar to Aftermath after being turned on to a K.Dot mixtape by Eminem’s manager (Lamar’s Interscope deal also included a label deal for Top Dawg). Dre is one of
Good Kid
’s executive producers and is featured heavily on the album’s Twin Sister-sampling lead single “The Recipe” (Lamar also has worked on several tracks for Dre’s eternally delayed
Detox
). Lamar smiles broadly when talking about Dre, a fellow graduate of Compton’s Centennial High School, who he alternately refers to as his “big homey.”

While much has been said (including by Lamar himself) about picking up where his hero Tupac Shakur left off, Dre’s patronage cements the extension of that classic ’90s West Coast legacy. It’s worth noting that the last time Dre ushered a young rapper into the mainstream with such support it was Eminem. So, is the world ready for this next evolution? Kendrick Lamar, the emotionally sober non-gangster? One that doesn’t luxuriate in copious consumption or lobster bisque for breakfast? Can you go to the top of the
Billboard
chart with nary a rooster in a ’rari? What if there is no ’rari at all?

Ab-Soul believes that what’s on
Good Kid
is universal: “It’s Kendrick’s story, but it’s my story; it’s not just an L.A. album. Everyone will get an understanding of why my generation is acting the way they are: violence, vulgarity, anguish, and resentment, rebelliousness, and eff the police. He puts it all in perspective. Not just ‘black-on-black crime,’ telling the whole story of homies we all had.”

While
Good Kid
is pure autobiography, like much of Lamar’s work, it’s allegorical. While he is rapping about himself, his songs are heavy on experiences and feelings that are universal and easily relatable. It’s hard to imagine him ever dropping a song about his jewelry or creeping towards itemized receipt rap. The closest archetype is, perhaps, Jay-Z: the swaggering good guy, the kid that got out. Lamar is separate, peerless in his ability (he never rides the beat the same way twice) and also in the space that he occupies; he’s different from previous rap saviors—he’s not a scold and his hooks are tantamount to the message. Though, more than all of this is, what defines Lamar is that he’s wholly ghosted by what might have been; he cannot shake the proximity of Compton.

Lamar is aware of the power of his influence, but says he’s not out to change the world. “The idea of me sparking change; it’s got to come from within. I couldn’t be saying I want Compton to change. You know, Compton is a beautiful place. You just gotta keep your eyes open.”

CALIFORNIA DEMISE: TYLER, THE CREATOR AND EMA FEEL THE BAD VIBES

Village Voice
Pazz and Jop Critics Poll, 2011

Tyler, The Creator is stuck inside “Yonkers” with those California hate-fuck blues again. Don’t ask him what the matter is—you’ll get an album-length spleening in response. He’s rap’s nouveau old-model bad boy, showing the kids that “breaking rules is cool again,” rhyming impolitely about his problems with, well, everything. Many spent the year trying to gauge the murder-minded messiah MC. On
Goblin
, he came across as so ferociously indifferent, it was hard to imagine he could give a shit about anyone at all—including himself.

He’s unlike all the other cool California kids of recent memory, who’re writing songs that pick up where David Crosby’s sailboat docked. They’re obsessed with the various qualities of sand, sunshine, friendship and/or the waves, and they’re too high to take a position on much else. Last year’s chillwave wave was the latest iteration of California’s musical posi-vibe, all bright smiles highlighted by a deep tan. Chillwave’s methodology of easy hooks submerged in reverb and delay served as a constant reminder of being distant and of singers floating in their own worlds.

With decades of this cheery jangle as a cultural inheritance, it’s easy to see why Tyler’s Wolf Gang wants to kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out (and then kill God) or why EMA came blazing for “California” with nothing but middle fingers and lick shots for the left coast. Can you blame them? The thrill of popping that bubble is undeniable. Tyler’s most (or only, depending on whom you ask) obvious talent is antagonism, a puerile needling that knows to go for the jugular—to say the exact thing you don’t want to hear, flippant and cruel in equal measure. Although plenty of Californian MCs have paired rage with ridicule, Tyler’s effusively macho posturing is less
Straight Outta Compton
and more like that of the man who made it his trademark: Henry Rollins. (This time around, Syd’s got the 10 1/2.)

Historically, California punk has had its share of teen loathers with suicidal tendencies. Rollins is Tyler’s clearest primogenitor (Eminem be damned!)—the myopic focus on bad feelings, a hangover of confused, adolescent tumult tangling hard with violent solutions. Tyler’s sober indifference isolates him from the other California girls and boys, and the intensity with which he doesn’t give a fuck belies just how much he actually does. It’s the most un-L.A. thing he could possibly do.

So much is the same for Erika Anderson—known on-record as EMA—even though she is, in essence, Tyler’s inverse. Born-and-bred Midwestern riot-grrrl rides west in search of new liberation in noise, gets grown, and explodes her heart and head open on
Past Life Martyred Saints
. It’s a brute-force real-girl reveal: She’s done with the archetypes and instead has an album full of blood and “20 kisses with a butterfly knife.” Self-preservation is not a principal interest—she is gutting her guts and blunt about the trauma she has known instead of engaging in the apathetic yearning that typifies indie rock’s notion of a “confessional.” Like on
Goblin
, the volatility and capriciousness is unsettling—it makes you believe she’s howling her truth.

When Anderson faces her audience, foot up on the monitor in confident, rock-star repose, and begins noosing herself with the mic cable, her methodical calm is what shocks. Her seemingly easy acquaintance with violence makes her shows seem less like performance and more like a visceral expression of how little (or much) she cares. She’s a spectacular songwriter, coaxing howls from her half-stack, a tall, beautiful blonde calmly cooing, “I used to carry the gun / The gun, the gun, the gun.” In the underground, she’s as much of a “walking paradox” as Tyler.

Both artists goad unease for different reasons (EMA’s violence is directed inward; Tyler’s viciousness is often directed toward queers and women), but discomfort is crucial fuel for their spectacle. The placement of “Yonkers” and “California” in this year’s poll offers evidence that listeners are taking them up on the vicarious thrill of their Cali-kid violence—regardless of whether it delights or disgusts.

WILL THE STINK OF SUCCESS RUIN THE SMELL?

LA Weekly
, February 2009

The story of The Smell—an all-ages venue that’s the wellspring for the young idea here in Los Angeles—on the surface, isn’t exactly spectacular. Like most clubs, it’s a depot of questionable haircuts and bombastic bands. Yet, The Smell is different than the rest: it’s a no-booze, not-for-profit operation that is staffed most entirely by teenage volunteers. The recent success of some of the exciting bands it fostered—namely No Age—has made The Smell a point of focus for the worldwide underground, a place delivering on punk’s unfulfilled promises of DIY community and inclusion.

***

The way people talk about Jim Smith, you’d think he was sanctified and risen. The story of every Smell band, every volunteer’s gee-whiz excitement, always hinges on Smith, who opened the venue eleven years ago. A labor union organizer by day and dutiful scene facilitator by night, Smith is taciturn and humble. He’s got an old fashioned gallantry to him; he dresses in working man’s clothes and decries little. He has the gravitas of a man living by a code. Smith closes up at The Smell at 1 or 2 a.m. then goes to work at 6 a.m., night after night. Without complaint or even the slightest sense that this unpaid toil brings him anything other than gratification.

If Smith is The Smell’s heart, No Age are its arteries. The story of L.A.’s zeitgeist, noise-pop duo is braided with the venue’s genesis. Given the amount of press and hype the band has garnered in the last year and a half, it’s become part of their mythic tale: The Smell as the house No Age built. This is objectively true; talking to guitarist Randy Randall in early October, he lamented that though he and drummer Dean Spunt helped break concrete for the construction of The Smell’s second bathroom, No Age was on tour during its completion.

No Age might very well be the coolest band in America right now, and it’s easy to understand why. Being a No Age fan feels like more than mere fandom, which is fitting since No Age feel like more than just another band. They stand for hope and big ideas as well as simple ones: have fun, include everyone, be positive, do good work. It’s an active rejection of adult cynicism. You could call it anti-capitalist, but there’s no indication anyone involved has given it that much thought. These are the same principals that The Smell seems to impart on everyone who passes through its piss-soaked doorway.