This focus on vocal experimentation is announced early on.
The now standard post-Rakim ( also jazz-inspired) complexities of syncopation and scattered emphasis sometimes seem to hold only half of Lamar’s interest: even when executing the most familiar boom-bap flows he pushes himself into little growls, whines, laughs, whispers, and rasps yelped ribbons of falsetto sometimes scream out just as his breath seems set to flag. At some point on almost every track, Lamar insists on conceiving of his voice as the instrument of a bandleader, bound only theoretically by meter and key. This isn’t simply a matter of instrumentation (though, to be sure, saxes do bleat and basslines do walk). To listen to “untitled,” so clearly the work of a restless innovator, is to look at hip-hop itself-to be reminded of how young an art form it is, and to be tantalized by how many evolutionary transformations it must have left to undergo.Īs with Lamar’s last album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” jazz-which arrived a while ago at this kind of meta-awakening-figures heavily. Lamar’s music seems increasingly preoccupied with rap, and songcraft generally, as a means of freedom, and as a subject worthy of its own scrutiny. Cézanne’s still-lifes were as much about the act of spreading paint across a canvas as they were about what, for instance, an apple looks like. Given his steady motion, continued on this EP, toward hip-hop’s avant-garde edges, it also reads as evidence of a Post-Impressionist sort of self-awareness. That particular jam session, which lasts for a little more than three minutes, spotlights Lamar’s sense of humor, the process by which he brings his songs into reality, and the importance he places on the pleasure conveyed by his live performance. “This is a fifteen-minute song,” he confides at one point, a smile in his voice.
While he croons in his reedy near-whistle, his friends titter and offer occasional grunts of approval and excitement, feeding Lamar’s own satisfied glee.
He alternates between singing a song that appears earlier on the tape, in much more polished form, as “untitled 04|” (the tracks all share this breezy naming convention), and describing the experience of performing that song. The second half of “untitled 07|2014-2016,” one of the last tracks on Kendrick Lamar’s new, abruptly released EP, “untitled unmastered,” is a scratchy recording of Lamar accompanied by a single electric guitar and obviously surrounded by several friends.