DAMN

From the first time I heard it to the most recent, I've always found DAMN noticeably inferior to his earlier two major albums. It reflects the trend of gimmick-driven rap -- I don't know what to call it -- that has infected pop, Kanye, and even Bon Iver. I think it aligns with "melodic rap", trap, and Post Malone. It's a string of gimmicks rather than a continuous creative flow. I remember my disappointment that Bill Evans' "Peri's Scope" solo felt like a string of discontinuous templates, rather than a flow of inspiration. Rap is doing this to an agonizing degree, even the most creative of them. It feels really lazy and usually dumb. That's okay, maybe Kendrick deserves a little laziness -- but it got the Pulitzer, and seemingly vast praise, which I don't really understand, though I love the album in a personal way. Musicians (and likely their audiences) seem incapable of sustaining inspiration, or even attention, so they smash random ideas together and then repeat each ten times to equal a 2.5-minute song. I miss verses that are a couple minutes long and have no identifiable patterns or structure, just rap. I just miss rap.