WorstSongs of the Year 2016 Countdown
#1. Kendrick Lamar "untitled 07 | 2014 - 2016"
Kendrick Lamar has always been his own worst enemy. While many see him as one of the most essential, searing, powerful voices in hip hop today, heâs forever had someone holding him back, keeping him from being truly great, limiting his true potential, and that personâs name is Kendrick Lamar. Lamar's penchant to include everything on his albums, and throw away nothing, to never ever kill a darling, has always given his music a perplexing quality, because while much of it is good, all of it suffers from the question of how good it could have been, if only heâd had a lighter touch, if only heâd done even a tiny amount of paring. Any form of art, be it music, book, or film, cannot suffer under the weight of all its ideasâin writing, a piece of work thatâs nothing but ideas is called a âvomit draft,â where everything is gotten out before the best bits are chosen, the rest jettisoned, the art all the better for its control, for its brevity, for it being the best expression of itself.
Kendrick stops himself from ever achieving this. On his album good kid, m.A.A.d city, he killed his own momentum every song, by putting completely nonintegral, nonmusical, uninteresting, unrevealing, pointless âcinematicâ interludes after every song. From lurking creepers to rowdy bangers, every song came to a screeching halt with these mood-killers, and severely reduced the albumâs replay value. Why bother including them? What do they actually reveal? What do they add? Why are they on every track? Why didnât someoneâanyone!âtell Kendrick no, for the sake of your own album, for the sake of your own art, cut this shit out. Slack stitches weaken the overall tapestry, making what could have been a great album into an experience that resembles traffic-jam driving, those few moments you think youâre out of it and accelerate forward doomed by the brake lights ahead.
Lamar did a similar self-sabotage on his third album, To Pimp a Butterfly. Again, gigantic album, full of ideas, many of them good, many of them that should have been cut. ButâŠagain, none of them were cut. Everything is in full, the entire vision, and the entire vision is a mess. Thereâs good art in the mess, absolutely, so why hide it? And why is the artist himself ruining his own best material? Itâs especially obnoxious on this LP, as he repeats himself, the same poem used as a coda once, twice, three times, more⊠Heâs living ADHD, splashing India ink on his oil paintings and carrying on, making beauty then smirching it, repeat ad infinitum. This is not a good thing, and it murders replay value. Worst of all on To Pimp a Butterfly is his treatment of âi,â the clear standout track and first single. Itâs a spectacular song, but instead of letting it just be, he interrupts it halfway to give a tired, hackneyed speech on race relations. Good god, manâplay the fucking song! The speech is fine, thatâs not the pointâthe point is it interrupts a great song! Stop interrupting yourself, Kendrick! The speech is like a lesion on a dimepiece, like the word âShutterstockâ on a lovely image. Heâs a DJ who wonât stop interrupting the music with his hypetalk crowdwork, only while heâs playing his own music! Again, Kendrick Lamar is Kendrick Lamarâs worst enemy. He infects himself. Imagine if Usain Bolt decided to stop running towards the finish line and ran to the crowds. You get the idea: Itâs a self-defeating prerogative.
So this year Kendrick released untitled unmastered, a collection of extra songs, other songs, B sides as so forth, but much like Radiohead with Amnesiac, Kendrick released the thing as an album. Yes, this is an album, being championed by many as one of the best albums of the year, being heralded and fellated and heaped with garlands and accolades. Like all of his albums, much of untitled unmastered finds Kendrick at his best, with fusillade rhymes, head raps, switch-ups, doubletime, and overall, just interesting wordplay, notable, like all the best art, for being an earnest exploration of his psyche. And most of the albumâs songs are fine; some work better than others, sure, but none stand out too much above the pack.
There is, however, another song on untitled unmastered. A song that sticks out the other way, lying in a big gelatinous puddle below the rest of the songs. And that is âuntitled 07 | 2014 â 2016â (henceforth â07â). First and foremost, and most importantly, â07â instantly disqualifies Lamar from any year-end best-of list, because with it as part of the album, the album must be judged accordingly, and the curve of the entire project goes way down. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch, especially if itâs the largest apple.
In attempting to find an illustrative YouTube video for â07â to include with this post, I was stymied again and again by videos that only wanted to show the âLevitateâ single edit, the first two minutes of an eight-minute song. No one had posted the full version of the songâthe true, real, unabridged, unadulterated, untitled unmastered versionâthe version Kendrick intended. Imagine! A major artist, who many call the greatest living rapper and treat as the Second Coming of Hip Hop, with a song that canât be Googled! If the song is so essential, why isnât it available to anyone, instantly?! Why isnât it the first possible search result, and the second, and the third, and so forth?
Itâs none of these and this is all the vindication I need, inherent commiseration from the Internet itself that not a soul is actually suffering through this whole blah. Who could? No one, thatâs who. You shouldnât. Go ahead and fast-forward through the latter half of the song. Does the one-minute outtake after âLevitateâ come to anything? Does anything ever happen beyond tedious guitar plucking and soundcheck studio murmurs? Is there anything else than an unedited recording of dicking around in the soundbooth? Nope. Try to scrub ahead to the bit where anything happens. There isnât one. Yes, everyone treats â07â like a dirty secret, best left undiscussed. Unfortunately, itâs a very big part of a very small album.
Iâll give Kendrick this: If â07â was the last track, Iâd forgive it, though itâs still fraught with needlessness and makes untitled unmastered a tiny, throwaway EP. But! It is not the last track. Hell, Frank Ocean released a big, dumb, needlessly long crapsong on this yearâs Blonde. But he had the decency and the foresight to place it at the very end of the album, after the music had finished, with a pause between, more or less recommending that you turn off the record. It was the aural equivalent of the credits reel, only there for those who really, really want to know who the best boy is. Or think back to, say, The Polyphonic Spreeâs first album The Beginning Stages ofâŠ, which they ended with a 36-minute drone called âA Long Dayâ (the UK version wisely and hilariously cuts this down to a minute and 45 seconds). âA Long Dayâ was long, it was very long, it was 36 minutes long, and it was a drone. Probably no one, Tim DeLaughter included, has listened to the whole thing in its entirety once. But Iâll tell you what: He put that motherfucker at the end. He didnât put a song after it. Could you imagine? Or going back to Frank, what if âFutura Freeâ (the full version with the end interviews) was thrown right in the middle, the way his nine-minute âPyramidsâ was on Channel Orange? Itâd be unthinkable.
Unfortunately, nothing is unthinkable for Kendrick Lamar. Everything is thinkable, everything is admissible. Heâs like a five-year-old prince everyone has to humor because he has the power to execute people. The way Lamar places â07â on the album, he intends there to be more to come, meaning that this utter mess is meant to be listened to in full in order to have the truest album experience. And who would ever want to dilute Kendrickâs vision? In a just world, an editor would have stepped in either in preproduction, production, or postproduction, and happily trimmed â07â down to a tidy two minutes of murky mood-rapping. Instead, with full creative control, we get eight minutes and sixteen seconds of pure endurance.
untitled unmastered has a third adjective, and thatâs unedited. Oh, how it needs an edit! Full creative control, without any editors, is often championed as the only path to true artistry, the only way to earnestly reach an artistic catharsis. But in reality, itâs rarely a good thing, and more often the undoing of an otherwise promising artist: Thomas Pynchon enjoyed a total lack of creative control for years, and it led him to produce the widely, correctly despised Against the Day. Itâs an 1100-page slog, and shows the sign of no editor at any point. And even among those who liked The Fountain, Darren Aronofskyâs least edited movie, few denied that the scale of ambition exceeded the capacity of the film. How many people felt that Lars von Trierâs Nymphomaniac needed to be split into two two-hour movies? Kendrickâs albums are also infamously long long long, but the others are at least (over)packed with ideas. The problem with untitled unmastered, released, again, as an album and not a fan-club-only grab-bag of drawing-room scrapings, is that itâs actually less concentrated than its longer counterparts.
This is why "07" is #1, the worst of the Worst. No one is putting The Taylor Girlz on their year-end best-of lists. No one really gives a shit about The Federal Empire, though they suck a dick the size of two dicks. No, the world is watching Kendrickâs every move, and this is a move they want to ignore and forget. But there it is, the big, glaring, eight-minute mistake on the middle of the throwaway odds-and-sods he chose to call an album and release this year. This is the WorstSong. Itâs an injustice, mostly to Lamar himself, at the hands of Lamar himself.
In the spirit of the song, I've left this review unedited. I've included every sentence without cutting down the unnecessary or redundant ones. Don't you get tired of hearing me repeat myself? Doesn't it make your skin crawl to read and re-read the same passages? Wouldn't it have been so much better if someone would have [EDIT]