“Good Kid M.a.a.d City” — A Story Told Through Hip-Hop
“Lord god, I come to you a sinner, and I humbly repent for my sins,” begins Kendrick Lamar’s
Good Kid M.a.a.d City, his major studio debut album. It’s the first line off of the first track the listener is treated to, “Sherane, a.k.a Master Splinter’s Daughter,” and it sets the tone for one of my favorite hip-hop albums of 2012.
It’s immediately apparent that Good Kid Ma.a.d City (or GKMC) isn't a simple album about the gang life in Compton, LA — it’s a deconstruction of it, told through 12 tracks and one hour and eight minutes. There’s a non-linear narrative woven through the record, which tells the story of a self-inserted Kendrick Lamar’s experience with life and death, and his eventual decision to rise above the violence endemic to his surroundings.
The genius of the album comes not from the narrative alone, but in the way Lamar integrates story and song to create a cohesive story. For the most part, each song tells a tale that fits somewhere in the timeline of the record’s events. For example, “Swimming Pools (Drank),” the ninth track on GKMC takes place right after Kendrick’s friends help him recover from a mugging — chronologically near the beginning of the story.
The genius of the album comes not from the narrative alone, but in the way Lamar integrates story and song to create a cohesive story.
Though GKMC is a concept album that tells a story, each track is engrossing enough to stand on its own, which I think is a reason why the album is so successful at telling a narrative. The innovation here is arranging the story in a non-linear fashion, which then frees up each individual song to go in different stylistic directions. “Swimming Pools,” a radio single, is completely different in style compared to “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” but they fit together on the record because GKMC’s non-linear structure accommodates it.
Good Kid M.a.a.d City could be considered a modern classic, but it straddles a weird line: is it pure hip-hop? Is it a hip-hop opera, in the same sense that The Who’s Tommy is a rock one? Either way, one thing that is clear is that it’s a fantastic example of story-telling through song.
