Certified Boogeyman

In 1983, an emcee named Captain Rapp recorded and released ‘Bad Times (I Can’t Stand It)’, one of the West Coast’s first rap hits. The seven-minute song, which reached number 23 in the Billboard Dance charts, is an epic list of social ills – including gang violence, inflation, hurricanes, Aids, the threat of nuclear war, the civil war in El Salvador and child abuse – orated over synthy electro-funk. Rapp, aka Larry Earl Glenn, was an air force veteran living in Long Beach, California. On the track he is a griot reciting over four-to-the-floor drums at 121 beats per minute, a tempo for furious times; the singer Kimberly Ball trills on the chorus, keening over a bop co-produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, recently expelled by Prince from The Time.

The song’s title is a reference to Chic’s disco hit ‘Good Times’, which was sampled by the Sugar Hill Gang for ‘Rapper’s Delight’; ‘Bad Times’ was the West Coast’s answer to ‘The Message’, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s sociopolitical anthem. ‘You better wake up to what’s going down,’ Captain Rapp begins, ‘Your eyes are closed but your ears hear the sound/That cries in the wind/The thought makes you cringe/He’s dead and gone, you lost another friend.’ The song is is a supremely danceable downer: Rich Cason’s synths undulate like rising tensions – only a two-step can tamp them down.

There’s a hypnotic video from 1989 of steppers moving to the song on The New Dance Show, a Detroit showcase for local dancers and regional remixes of electro-funk, techno and hip-hop, a Motown incarnation of Soul Train. Dancers writhe, pop, lock and shuffle to an instrumental version of ‘Bad Times’. The hard-nosed rap doesn’t appear, but it seems to animate the action; if you know the lyrics, there’s something unnerving about the cheerful, non-stop movement. The show featured a man called JB, unseen in this segment, who slithered through the club wearing a black cape. ‘People didn’t know if he was James Brown or Dracula,’ Lawanda Grey, one of The New Dance Show’s stars, later recalled. ‘He was coming on as James Brown, because he would slide across the floor, but that cape, people said: “OK, that’s the Dracula guy.”’

Kendrick Lamar, who calls himself a ‘certified boogeyman’, is a contemporary Dracula guy, wending his way onto the dance floor; he’s someone who ‘wiggled through that sentence’, as he puts it in one of his new songs, then into your subconscious. Lamar’s latest album, GNX, released unexpectedly on Friday, 22 November, is both a music box and a jack-in-the-box in the tradition of ‘Bad Times’: a forum for groovy, spooky, electro-influenced West Coast sensibilities and a meditation on ego death, false humility and braggadocio.

The first solo voice you hear on GNX belongs to the mariachi singer Deyra Barrera. She has said that Lamar saw her perform a tribute to her friend Fernando Valenzuela before the World Series and asked her to contribute to the record. Her voice is a haunting throughline of the album, like a line of votive candles at a streetside memorial, her tremolo quivering like a flickering flame. This is night music.

The album is named for the rare Buick muscle car that was produced in 1987, the year Lamar was born – and in which, as legend has it, he was transported as a newborn home from the hospital. This is riding music. Or, maybe it’s something else. According to Lamar on the symphonic ‘tv off’, it’s something more ephemeral: ‘This is not a song, it’s a revelation how to get a nigga gone.’ On ‘wacced out murals’, Lamar says he’s ‘possessed by a spirit’ and reflects on ‘ducking strays’ when, as a teenager, he took part in rap battles at the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts.

The question ‘where you from?’ is a challenge to perceived outsiders or neighbourhood interlopers. But in some of the more upbeat tracks here, Lamar turns such parochial queries into call-and-response chants and dance-floor directions, reinscribing threats with propulsive power, making a case for the importance of local sounds as well as self-knowledge. On ‘wacced out murals’ Lamar calls himself an ‘old soul’ who ‘probably built them pyramids’. This is the culture of greater LA, which is sometimes marginalised in favour of more simplistic depictions: of the Black nationalist Organization US, whose founder created Kwanzaa; the LA Rebellion cinema movement; Ben Caldwell’s KAOS Network; the Underground Museum; the Egyptian Lover and the Arabian Prince; the ‘hieroglyph prototype architecture’ of Lauren Halsey’s Roof Garden Commission at the Met.

On his previous albums, Lamar wrestled with himself, his past and present-day contradictions; here he’s more assured, though no less tense, and lays claim to LA’s g-funk legacy while doing a victory lap after his triumph in his rap battle with Drake earlier this year. The strings of the Spanish guitar that recur throughout the album may remind a synaesthetic mind of curlicued cursive tattooed on shimmering skin, or the airbrushed flower stems, decals and outlines on lowriders. On GNX, Los Angeles is a mottled and mystical landscape, surveyed by a self-righteous guy in a badass black car, like a sonic remake of the 1980s TV show Knight Rider, with its electro score – GNX is what you’d get if Michael Knight wasn’t a reborn LAPD cop but a man surveilled by the police.

In Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism, Russell A. Potter situates early West Coast rap in the context of LA’s gangs, including its increasingly rogue police force. The police chief, Daryl Gates, organised a raid on a group of apartment blocks in South Los Angeles in 1988. The LAPD tagged its own graffiti across the buildings, including the phrase ‘the LAPD Rules’. Like the Manson Family’s ‘Helter Skelter’ tagging, this is vandalism that tells on itself. In ‘wacced out murals’ Lamar refers to a defaced portrait of himself, seeing the mark-up as evidence of ‘love and hate’. (‘Got war and peace inside my DNA,’ he rapped in 2017; ‘We ain’t gotta get personal, this a friendly fade,’ he dissed Drake on ‘Euphoria’ a few months ago.)

This is music about backsliding through beautiful and blighted blocks, contemplating personal development and urban renewal over sinister chord changes. On ‘reincarnated’, Lamar imagines past musical lives, first as a bluesman (‘with my guitar up on my hip … I was head of rhythm and blues’ but ‘died with my money, gluttony was too attractive’) and then as a singer like Billie Holiday (‘my voice was angelic straight from heaven’ but ‘I died with syringes pinched in me’); ‘my present life is Kendrick Lamar’. The more things change, he suggests, the more they stay the same. ‘Life goes on,’ he raps on ‘squabble up’. So it goes.

GNX isn’t all doom and gloom. Or, like ‘Bad Times’, it’s as fun as it is fearsome. On ‘squabble up’ (the album’s first single), Lamar gets at this double-mindedness: ‘Bounce out, know he spook town, eyes dilated/I got the money and the power, both gyrating.’ There’s a mix of emotion here. As his associate Lefty Gunplay puts it on ‘tv off’, ‘shit gets crazy, scary, spooky, hilarious’. Like JB slinking across the floor on The New Dance Show, Lamar is also a reincarnation of James Brown (‘King Kunta’ sampled ‘The Payback’). He is both petty and prophetic, transcendent and grounded. Rigid and ecstatic. Out for retribution and heavenly rescue. His rap battle with Drake was both a fight for the soul of hip-hop and a squabble over personal slights.

The video for ‘squabble up’ is a diorama with a changing tableau of gangsters, peacemakers and giddy girls out for a good time; it’s a shoebox history of show money stowed in Nike boxes. It’s slate of changing references, including David Hammons’s African American flag, the movie Menace II Society and Isaac Hayes’s double album Black Moses. In one scene, women pose in front of a dance club’s backdrop, having their photos taken, as in The New Dance Show, while on the other side of the stage there’s a Soul Train scramble board; Lamar stands in the middle holding a sign that says ‘Jesus saves gangsters too!’ Distorted vocals play over the images, the audio matching the visual puzzle. Is this back-masking, or obscuring in the hopes that people listen and look closer?

The LA of ‘squabble up’, which samples Debbie Deb’s 1984 freestyle jam ‘When I Hear Music’, is in part the LA of ‘Bad Times’, which cites Lamar’s mentor, Dr Dre (as D.J. André), on its original vinyl label, and the LA of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, which Dre belonged to. If LA is both buoyant and blue (and red), Lamar is happy to send listeners scavenger-hunting among the rhythmic ruins. Less humble and vulnerable than on previous offerings, on GNX Lamar has done a 180 – and makes an about-face look like a bit of choreography. Kendrick Lamar can’t stand it, and he can’t stand Drake, and he can’t stand the music business, but he’ll make do. To be true to his name, a boogeyman has got to know how to move.