Even as the board attempted to integrate hip-hop into a cultural field characterized by experimental, abstract rigor, it instantiated a general tendency for critics to reduce black music to a mere reflection of black experience. This contradiction suggests that the most persistent frame of reference that culturally white institutions have for black artistic production is as the realist representation of authentic experiences.
This is especially disconcerting in the case of Damn, which explicitly announces itself as a fever dream. The album opens with a skit in which Lamar narrates his own death after an encounter with a mysterious blind woman. Soon after, Lamar thrusts us into a kaleidoscopic exploration of original sin and the impact of personal choice in a world where black people’s material and political conditions often seem to foreclose the very possibility of choice. Even for Lamar, the album is highly unstable, with songs that rarely allow the listener to listen comfortably. Discordance is the album’s unifying aesthetic logic. Tracks like “DNA” And “XXX” feature jarring changes in beat and tempo that keep listeners on their toes. On “Yah,” a laidback tempo presents a pleasant façade, only for what sounds like a bassoon sample to ripple through the track at odd intervals and unsettle the whole affair. Throughout all 55 minutes, a cacophonic set of sampled voices—from Geraldo Rivera to Rick James—interpenetrates with Lamar’s, so that the album is constantly producing a dizzying sense of unstable perspective.a