Good Kid, Maad City – Kendrick Lamar (2012)
Best Song: Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst
Worst: Are you serious? Every song on here is flawless
GOOD LORD. When I tell y’all I could write 3 pages just about THIS ALBUM… If you are following my writing, you know that I am a gigantic Kendrick fan (2nd favorite rapper of all time, and that is a list that will be revealed later), and this basically started that love for him. What do I say? This is one of the best albums of the 2010s for a reason. What is very notable is the fact that Kendrick made an album in an era dominated by hits and singles. This is something where it feels incomplete without listening to the whole album, and it makes you want to listen to it over and over. Let’s talk about storytelling. Kendrick gives a fantastic connecting story through not only the lyrics, but the skits in between. From “Sherane”, discussing this girl Kendrick is messing with, only to get set up, while at the very end of the song, Kendrick’s mom is leaving him a voicemail telling him to bring her van back so they can eat, and it just doesn’t stop from there. The best song and one of the best of the whole decade is “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”. I almost don’t want to talk about this in-depth in case people who are reading this haven’t heard the album yet (if you haven’t, then stop reading, listen to it, come back to me and say, “I’m sorry that I avoided this blessing.”) This is one of the best songs I have ever heard. “Sing About Me” has 3 verses about death and I love the techniques it uses. The first verse talking about the brother of Kendrick’s friend. The brother who got killed in the last song. And when those gunshots come in at the end of the verse… haunting. Something not as discussed is the second verse. The second is written through the perspective of Keisha’s (Keisha’s Song) sister, who is also a prostitute, and the end with her voice fading away can be taken in two ways. It can be taken as Kendrick walking away from a conversation that has died, but I also see it as a slow death. It can be that she possibly got HIV, and that fading is her slowly dying, in contrast to the first verse/. “Dying of Thirst” is fantastic, as the boys are pissed and thirsty for avenging the death of the homie’s brother, and then realizing that the thirst that needed to be quenched was a thirst for Holy Water. I could go on and on and do an entire lyric breakdown on each song, but there’s 3 more ahead of it. Why? Well, the top 5 I all see as #1 in a way, but I think that these other three albums just hit a little different.
