Eps 33: Kendrick Lamar humble (Clean Version)
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Greg Dean
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That opening week, Humble had more digital sales and streams than any single on the Billboard Hot 100; it was only moderate radio airplay during the opening week that kept Kendrick Lamar from debuting at No. With sales of slightly more than 111,000 copies in its first week, Humble became Kendrick Lamars second #1 Digital Songs chart entry, behind Bad Blood. As noted by critics, Humble was designed to restore Kendrick Lamars street cred as a rapper. It is not as though Kendrick Lamar made this one himself -- he did not lean on conventional tricks of boosting a performance with dance-craze appeal or viral stunts to push Humble into the Billboard Hot 100s No.
For the purposes of this list, we are focusing exclusively on songs off of Kendrick Lamars own solo albums, but he boasts plenty of standout performances on others tracks, too. As an artist, he was already leaps and bounds ahead of his competition, rocketing into musics upper echelon and stealing the crown of King of Rap with his sophomore album, 2012s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. Kendrick Lamar quickly left this top-10 moment in rap behind, blasting through era-defining stylistic call-cards to continue his transformation. Soon, he was running wild on tracks from Pusha T and Kanye, or collaborating with visionary peers such as Danny Brown. On his earlier To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick was cerebral on a concoction of free jazz, spiritual funk, and political soul.
With his album Damn, released in April--it feels like Lamar is everywhere. Before he was on the Hot 100, HUMBLE had even earned Kendrick Kennedricks first #1 US single. All this, plus Kendricks characteristically high artistry and intention, combined to not only give Compton artists his most commercially successful song to date, but to make it his most popular song of 2017, making him the first black man to lead Triple Js countdown in the process. His first single off this album, Humble, is still being played relentlessly, and has been lauded heavily as one of the best rap songs of the year.
The songs accompanying music video reinvigorated the song, which hardly qualifies as a major creation by Lamar, yet it ably sets up a sense of intention. Directed by Dave Meyers and The Little Homies, and released on March 30, 2017, through Kendrick Lamars Vevo account, the songs accompanying music video begins with Lamar dressed as a Pope wearing a cape, then shows Lamar dressed all black and laying down on a money table, unknowingly shooting loads of bills out of a cash cannon. What created such an intense dialogue surrounding humble, & Lamars message was the music video. Lamar performed live on April 23, 2017, at Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, performing Humble as the closing act .
Kendrick Lamar gave a poor performance filled with all of the platitudes that cause live music snobs such as myself to roll our eyes in the dark recesses of our eye sockets. Certainly, Lamar did not just hit the hip-hop crowd with his hypnotic melodies and rap fans with his smart lyrics, he hit the entire generation with his intelligent commentary on todays society. It is not simply that Kendrick Lamar offers some of the best music of his time, but it is that he becomes an icon, an anxious consciousness wrestling with a nation that has seen rot nearing swallow him whole early on. One of these days, Kendrick Lamar is going to drop a new album from out of nowhere, and we are going to see what new twists his story takes.
As much as he calls out the competition, Kendricks addressing himself, too, on the blatantly mesmerizing hook. That is why Kendricks doing a song like this, where I am just like, Do not give a s**t, or tell the listener, You cannot screw me. When you look at the song titles on that record, it is all of my emotions, and it is all my expressions of myself as a person. It can be a swipe from Kendricks pen, Kendricks fist, his play , sex.
The songs chorus indeed has the repeating, meme-worthy mantra, Bitch, Be Humble/Sit Down, while Kendrick Lamar at one point even taunts, in code, that My Left Stroke Just Came Viral, almost dared the internet to meme-ify it.
If you could bend the space-time continuum, squeeze the past five years into one flat circle, and put all these K-Dot singles side-by-side, you would probably not even be able to choose Humble from a list of apparent chart-toppers.