Black Hippy crew - Kendrick, ScHoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, Jay Rock

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
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I'm in the camp of Humble needing to be where it is to benefit the album overall. It's a splash of cold water that brings me back in. Pride is great, but there's a sleepiness that could set in if were placed back to back with Lust.

DAMN isn't as good as TPAB, but virtually nothing is. This new one is head and shoulders above all but a handful of albums to come out this year and I'm astonished by its ambition and consistency. There's so much great lyricism and meaning here that gets overlooked because Kendrick doesn't spell it out the way he did on TPAB.
 
Humble has grown on me a lot as well, to the point that I can't get it out of my head now. Still feeling XXX as the best track - those piano stabs are amazing, as are all of the transitions.
 
I've got like three mates who hate TPAB. It takes all my strength and willpower not to completely eviscerate them on the spot. Fucking idiots


Been known that you need to get some new friends.

A friend of mine ruptured his Achilles last month and he can't drive so I've been driving him back and forth from Northridge to North Hollywood after class. It's been a good opportunity to introduce him to newer rap albums. He loved Piñata when I played it for him, but listening to DAMN was the best. It turned into a discussion not unlike what we're having in this thread. It was also nice to hear from a non-U2 fan that the feature was a big success.

The day after DAMN dropped, I went to a poetry reading another friend of mine was part of and all he wanted to talk about was the album. He wanted and tried to read over DNA but it was such a cringeworthy, unmitigated disaster that he dumped the idea.

Point is: friends with good taste in music are fun. Granted, it's easy to find Kendrick fans in Los Angeles.
 
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This should make Laz happy, as Mike Will talks about U2 on XXX:

Kendrick’s “HUMBLE.” Beat Was Originally for Gucci Mane, Mike WiLL Says | Pitchfork

Also, as a general question, when hip-hop artists talk about "beats," are they referring just to the rhythm, or to the entire instrumental?

It's still confusing. Both seem to acknowledge Bono as a separate entity from the whole band, but then he said "put U2 on it". We still don't have any clarification as to what, if any, contribution the other members had, or why they would all be credited if only Bono participated.

I wonder if we'll ever learn the whole story.
 
"Beat" pretty strictly refers to the samples/melody/rhythm of the instrumental in a hip hop context, but "production" is the real head-scratcher. The two terms overlap so frequently in casual conversation that they've almost come to meet the same thing, but matters of engineering/sonics/dynamic range come up a little more often when people describe hip hop production. Only a little though.
 
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It's still confusing. Both seem to acknowledge Bono as a separate entity from the whole band, but then he said "put U2 on it". We still don't have any clarification as to what, if any, contribution the other members had, or why they would all be credited if only Bono participated.

I wonder if we'll ever learn the whole story.

I think the first 2:30 do not involve U2. At around the 2:30 mark it switches and I think it's then that Larry (with a killer drum beat), Adam, Edge (on piano), and of course Bono come in.

Just my educated guess.
 
This was disputed in a previous interview a week ago from someone in Kendrick's crew if I'm not mistaken; that Bono sang over something they provided. But at this point I'm not believing anything until I hear someone from the band discuss their involvement.
 
In the Zane Lowe interview, Lamar was asked if the end of the album was the beginning of the story and the beginning the end of the story. Lamar laughed and refused to answer because he didn't want to give it away.

I've wondered about that, too. Some people interpret the sound of the album rewinding at the end of Duckworth as very telling. If you listen to the album in reverse, the stories almost have a different meaning, as if this is what Lamar imagines his life would be like if his father had been killed.
http://pitchfork.com/news/kendrick-lamar-says-damn-was-designed-to-be-played-backwards/
 
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