Kendrick Lamar - Humble

DAMN. came to erase every doubt on who is the king of rap at this moment. But one thing is acknowledging the grandeur of your achievements (see Beyoncé's "I can get your song played on the radio station") and use that power to build new paths for music (Arcade Fire, Radiohead keep pushing the boundaries of their own styles), and other very different thing is being a douche that talks much more than what you can produce.

There was a time when Kanye West was the biggest voice in rap music, nobody is going to dispute that, but he let his ego to be bigger than his music, so if people tolerated his rants while he produced beauties of the size of My Black Dark Twisted Fantasy, the arrival of Kendrick Lamar and the fact that The Life of Pablo (and even Yeezuz) is not even remotely close to the grandiosity of To Pimp a Butterfly, and he kept talking as if he was God incarnated, has left him in the pop culture collective memory, not as a great musician but as a joke, the second biggest ego in the world after Donald Trump, so when they met, it seemed like an orchestration of a circus instead of a meeting of influential people.

So when in his new single, Kendrick Lamar keeps repeating "Sit down, be humble", the image that immediately comes to our mind is the one of Kanye standing up to interrupt Taylor Swift's speech. I know that Kendrick and Kanye are good friends, but even if he didn't addressed the lyrics intentionally towards him, they fit perfect. Kendrick is humiliating every single rapper who keeps attached to this retrograde attitude of being sexist show-offs not only with his lyrics, but by producing the finest rap music nowadays, tackling issues of race like nobody else and being the one that is moving the genre onwards with the best avant-garde experimentations.

In Humble, the verses accompany mad piano keys, courtesy of Mike Will Made-It, and offers scattered ideas that go from his modest times, to comparing sex to a Tetris game, to demand the media showing asses with stretch marks. It's three minutes of pure lunacy, he keeps showing us that he can combine his social consciousness with having (and giving us) a good time, because what he is doing it's totally out of this planet.