GNX

The guests are memorable, too, though Kendrick doesn’t cede enough ground to them. After g-funk synths enter the picture halfway through “hey now,” Kendrick and Dody6 engage in a jittery back and forth. Kendrick is so magnetic that the forgettable Drake shade sticks out: “Ayy, shit get spooky, every day in October,” he raps, with the syllable playfulness of E-40. On “peekaboo,” his Drakeo imitation (maybe a little Young Slo-be in there, too) is shakier than before, but AzChike’s lighthearted menace steals the show. Kendrick is a good host when all the street rappers gather to talk their shit on the posse cut “gnx”: Peysoh is smooth with it, YoungThreat sounds like a ghostly spirit.

Coming on the heels of the beef, though, the regionality of the album seems more like an elaborate gotcha to Drake rather than a musical pivot sparked out of passion. That missing spirit is in the production, too clean and synthetic. The way-too-neat funky basslines of “squabble up” should be so fat that they rumble like an old muffler, like P-Lo’s Mac Dre homage does on LaRussell’s Majorly Independent. Mustard’s backside of “tv off” is drowned out by these cheesy blaring horns that feel made to go dumb in Nike commercials. Kendrick reps L.A. hard on the mellow “dodger blue,” shouting out local high schools to hammer home the granularity. But he wastes Wallie the Sensei and Roddy Ricch by having them harmonize on chillwave synths, a sin when you have access to basically every g-funk producer alive or dead. He could have at least dialed one or two of the coolest (non-Mustard) L.A. producers of the last decade, like RonRon or JoogSZN or Low the Great. Instead the two producers credited on almost every track are Sounwave (expected) and star whisperer Jack Antonoff.

Elsewhere, buried in between the L.A. treadmill anthems, are softer melodic joints that could have been on DAMN and a few creative writing exercises. Fine enough is “luther,” a lullaby with SZA that is innocuously sweet and easy to listen to, punched-up by a Luther Vandross sample that melts into the orchestral flourishes. Unlistenable is “reincarnated,” a homage to Tupac at his most paranoid and disoriented, where Kendrick writes from the perspective of old-time artistic influences. These writerly songs he’s prone to, like this one or TPAB’s “Mortal Man,” have always been more technically impressive than anything else. It doesn’t help that “reincarnated” also feels like it exists to spite Drake for making that AI Tupac song that I forgot ever existed.

Viscerally engaging is “wacced out murals,” where you can overlook the overly glossy thumping beat because the salty raps have so much genuine hunger behind them. Unfortunately he’s not worked up about anything worth caring about: He’s mad at Snoop for finding Drake’s AI Tupac song funny. (Again, I only remember this because Kendrick keeps bringing it up.) He’s mad at Lil Wayne for feeling snubbed that the Super Bowl didn’t go to him. He’s mad at the entire rap world because nobody congratulated him on booking the halftime show except Nas. Riveting. I’m all for airing out petty grievances in your raps, but when you’re also chatting about saving the essence of hip-hop there has to be something deeper at the root. Instead, it’s the usual dick-swinging of the hip-hop elite. Acting as if the genre hinges on Kendrick’s personal journey to Black excellence: Is that the life of a hip-hop outlaw? Is that watching the party die? My man, the party might be at your crib now.

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