In late August 2016, Kendrick and his creative team were in New York City looking for artistic inspiration. There, they clicked play on singer Frank Ocean’s newly released studio album, Blonde, and were taken by the vocalist’s vulnerability and the stark way in which he presented his art. Blonde, unlike Ocean’s previous album, channel ORANGE, was almost entirely piano and voice; the recessive soundtrack allowed his vocals to shine through, giving us an unbridled glimpse into his life. Like Kendrick, Frank Ocean had become a star in 2012 with his major-label debut. Kendrick and the team played Blonde nonstop for a whole day, then they had a jam session that Sounwave and the producer DJ Dahi—who last worked with Kendrick on good kid, m.A.A.d city—convened. They cut a song, a woozy, surreal number—that eventually became “YAH.,” where Kendrick namechecks Geraldo Rivera and Fox News for misrepresenting the “Alright” performance and takes the temperature of a ravenous public that wishes to know more and more about the increasingly reclusive musician. Wrote Kendrick, “Fox News wanna use my name for percentage… / Somebody tell Geraldo this nigga got some ambition.”
Not long after the election, Kendrick wrote a verse for a then-untitled song that pointed the finger at the current state of America: the war it initiated with other countries, the borders that Donald Trump was obsessed with, the murder allowed by its leaders, and the capitalism that kept us divided by class. “The great American flag is wrapped and dragged with explosives,” he wrote. “Donald Trump’s in office / We lost Barack and promised to never doubt him again / But is America honest, or do we bask in sin?” The verse became the last on a song called “XXX.,” which would arise near the end of his next album, the directly titled DAMN. The LP was meant to be a victory lap of sorts, a grand coronation for the Greatest Rapper Alive who might very well be the Greatest Rapper of All Time. But it wouldn’t be a Kendrick album without complicated themes to wade through, so while he wanted the LP to feel sharper than anything he’d done as a mainstream MC, he also wanted to give listeners food for thought that could be unpacked decades down the road. DAMN. needed to have the same intensity as To Pimp a Butterfly. If his previous records presented his neighborhood and race to music aficionados and crate diggers, Kendrick’s next work was meant for nightclubs and street ciphers. “We wanted to make it for all arenas—car, we want you to be in the club, or just flying listening to it and just vibing to it,” he once told Big Boy on his radio show. “That whole approach was from the jump. At the same time, we wanted to have something in the lyrical content where it connects, where it’s not just lyrics, but it’s something you can actually feel. It’s stories that you can feel, emotions you can feel, and emotions you can relate to.” For a while, the album was going to be titled What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth, but was switched to DAMN. to capture the record’s true energy. It’s probably the loudest album Kendrick had released to that point, and with all its aggressive music, the LP just screams “DAMN” when assessing it. Then, with all the contradictory feelings woven throughout the LP, the phrase “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t” began to surface. The phrase spoke to how Kendrick was feeling those days. The opening song, “DNA,” is where he sheds his old skin, unpacking the dichotomy of past and present lives in a hail of a never-ending flow. This was a new, meditative Kendrick, but don’t get it twisted: that Zen could still snap at the drop of a dime, and the days of poverty made him more eager to dominate music. Simply put: he’d been broke before and he wasn’t going back to that.
He was a student of the rappers who had come before him, and through his vocal nuances, one could hear links to Eazy-E, the fire-breathing cofounder of N.W.A, whose crass, autobiographical style of rap influenced a new generation of equally audacious lyricists. So Kendrick needed someone from that era, someone like Kid Capri, a legend who in the early nineties was the resident DJ for Russell Simmons’s Def Comedy Jam on the cable network HBO. “He called to ask me if I’d work with him,” Capri told the Recording Academy in 2017. “He told me the direction of the album being God and spirituality, but he already knew what he had in his head and he came up with a lot of what I needed to say.” Capri is the narrator of DAMN., his unmistakable voice making the record feel like an old-school mixtape. “I wanted it to feel like just the raw elements of hip-hop, whether I’m using 808s or boom-bap drums,” Kendrick told Beats 1 radio host Zane Lowe. “The initial thought was having [Kid Capri] on some real trap 808 shit. Something I’ve never heard from him.” Not only did DAMN. feel vintage, it felt intense, as it ran through various beats and ideas at a breakneck pace. On “LUST.,” the rapper once again treks through the recent election, as if to rationalize what he’d just seen: “We all woke up,
