DAMN. was released on Good Friday, April 14, 2017, with a stark, no-frills cover that was in exact contrast to the rapper’s previous album sleeves. Compared with the Polaroid images of good kid, and the White House photoshop of To Pimp a Butterfly, the cover of DAMN. centered Kendrick against a red-brick wall and white T-shirt, his head cocked to the side and his eyes in a dead gaze. On purpose, the rapper looked tired and dejected. Released after Trump had already taken office, Kendrick’s face epitomized what the rest of us were feeling: we were all tired, scared, and fearful of what the world was going to look like soon. Yet when the cover was revealed, it caught a few fans off-guard. It wasn’t artful, and the title was perplexing. Perhaps DAMN. is an acronym for something? It must have some deeper meaning; it’s not just DAMN. is it? Kendrick’s graphic designer, Vlad Sepetov, wanted the DAMN. cover to be loud and abrasive, to start a conversation with a simple image. “I sort of bucked a lot of what my teachers taught me,” Sepetov tweeted three days before the album dropped. “It’s not uber political like tpab but it has energy.”
Then there was this conspiracy theory: the chatter that Kendrick was going to release a companion album that Sunday—Easter Sunday—called NATION., making his 2017 record a double disc ultimately called DAMN.NATION. Kendrick later laughed at that theory, saying that DAMN. was it (though a companion album released on Easter Sunday would’ve been amazing). But that spoke to the ravenous nature of Kendrick’s fan base and just how much they demanded of the rapper. To Pimp a Butterfly had made such an impact on culture that they wanted as much music as possible from him. Critics ate it up, too, pointing directly to the album’s concluding song, “DUCKWORTH.,” which unpacks a wild story about a chance encounter between Kendrick’s father, Kenny, and a guy named Anthony from Watts, who twenty years later would give Kenny’s son a record deal and shepherd him to the top of the music industry.
This is where Kendrick flexes his storytelling ability, and over a shape-shifting four minutes, he weaves in and out of producer 9th Wonder’s beats with keen precision. Long before Anthony Tiffith became “Top Dawg” the music mogul, he was in the streets. One day, he walks into a local Kentucky Fried Chicken, where he sees “a light-skinned nigga that talked a lot / With a curly top and a gap in his teeth.” That was Kendrick’s dad, Ducky; he was working the window at the KFC that day. Tiffith was planning to rob that KFC and stood in Ducky’s line to demand cash. Ducky knew that Tiffith had robbed and shot up this same KFC before (“back in ’84,” Kendrick rapped; Ducky gave him free chicken and two extra biscuits to stay on his good side. As the story goes, Tiffith liked him so much that he didn’t shoot him when he robbed the joint. Who knew that, years later, they’d be connected through Kendrick and laugh about the KFC incident in the studio. “My pops came to the studio after I’d been locked in with him for a minute,” Kendrick told Beats 1 DJ Zane Lowe. “He heard I was dealing with Top Dawg, but my pops personally don’t know him as ‘Top Dawg,’ so when he walked in that room and he seen that Top Dawg was this guy, he flipped. Still till this day they laugh… and they trip out and they tell the same story over and over to each other.”
As a whole, DAMN. outlined the personal battle between Kendrick’s id, ego, and superego, and how the real strife he’d been facing was within this entire time. It wasn’t that the world wasn’t praying for him or that people were out to get him, it’s that he still had work to do on himself as a man. He was still fighting to stay righteous, struggling to balance the trappings of fame with an enlightened path away from the spotlight. Over its fourteen songs, Kendrick pivoted between darkness and light, wrestled with the end of the world as he saw it, and the urgency to make amends with himself and God before it was too late. In many ways, DAMN. was the culmination of Section.80, good kid, m.A.A.d city, and To Pimp a Butterfly, and was the most fully realized dissection of spirituality that he’d released. Before DAMN., Kendrick was still in the world, still very much a rap star forging his path. With this album, he became something else, almost a mythical being or a supernova. No, he wasn’t perfect and, yes, he was still very much a flawed human being. But he radiated a different energy. It was almost regal.
DAMN. marked the first time that Kendrick introduced an alter ego for his music. Kung Fu Kenny was based on actor Don Cheadle’s character in the action comedy film Rush Hour 2; there, Cheadle’s character studies martial arts and owns a Chinese restaurant. The two starred together in Kendrick’s “DNA.” video, and afterward, the rapper invited Cheadle to Coachella, where he was debuting a short kung fu movie starring himself. Later that night, Cheadle logged into Twitter and saw that somebody had written,
