American rapper Kendrick Lamar has hit number one on the official UK albums chart with “GNX” a surprise album released last Friday as a digital only album. The album is his sixth album and marks his second number one album in the UK.
Kendrick Lamar is a 37 year old, American rapper from Compton, California. With a career beginning in high school, he signed with Top Dawg Entertainment where he founded a group called Black Hippy in 2008. Following a successful album, he then signed with Interscope and Aftermath Entertainment, a company created by Dr Dre. He rose to prominence in 2012 with the release of his second album “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City”. He was ranked as the 9th greatest rapper of all time by Billboard in 2015, and then he was ranked at number two by Billboard in an updated list in 2023. In 2018 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Music, making him the first in his genre to do so.
Kendrick Lamar’s first album entry in the UK charts was the 2015 release “To Pimp a Butterfly”. He also has five top ten albums with another making it to the top 40. Though he has yet to receive a UK number one single, he has ten top ten entries and 25 top 40 entries, including the 2015 collaboration “Bad Blood” with Taylor Swift and collaborations with the WEEKND, Sia, Beyonce, and Maroon 5. His songs “Euphoria” and “Not Like Us” reached number 4 and 11 respectively.
His newest album release “GNX” was an unpromoted, surprise album released last Friday, charting at number 1 on the chart on 29 November. Three songs from the album occupy spots 4, 5 and 6 on the official single charts for the period 29 November – 5 December. These songs are ‘Squabble Up’ (4), ‘Luther’ (5) and ‘TV On’ (6), topped only by a top three that have each been in the chart for over a month already. The album is a West Coast hip-hop album that seamlessly blends multiple genres, including both classical and contemporary hip hop as well as g-funk, R&B vocals and soul.
After a year full of diss tracks and conflict with Drake (a conflict which resulted in the release of Lamar’s track “Not Like Us”) Kendrick Lamar released an album that NME said “showed the world that he would die for his pride in the scathing battle, igniting the fearless insolence that seeps into his latest album”. NME, who also called Lamar this year’s rap MVP, rating the album five stars, said “Lamar channels what could be interpreted as hate and negativity into a teachable moment, leading you to draw upon the purest emotion known to man: love. In a year that started with so much venom, Kendrick Lamar shares the antidote on ‘GNX’.”
Others have compared the album to the cultural phenomenon of an episode of Game of Thrones, saying, “a cultural moment of reception, that stopped the world for an hour or so.”, with The Guardian ranking the album a four out of five, and The New York Times adding comments such as “It all makes “GNX” less a coherent statement of purpose than a collection of approaches, a burning off of loose energy before something much more focused and contemplative. Call it the storm before the quiet.”
No matter what, the one thing that all reviews seem to have in common is that “GNX” is a statement, one that Lamar didn’t feel the need to promote because he simply knew the world would listen – all of the reviews and his standings on the chart are a testament to that.
