#1 on the 2024 Bacon Top 31 — Kendrick Lamar

January 31, 2025 by Royal Stuart in Top 31, 2024

There was a noticeable shift in my music listening in 2024. I used to be a dabbler in hip hop and rap, enjoying it from time-to-time but putting it in my speakers infrequently. This year those habits changed. What was a low percentage of my overall listening became a majority, especially in the latter half of the year. I attribute that shift to one man: Kendrick Lamar. No musician — in any genre — commanded my attention more in 2024 than he did. And that shift is carrying into 2025, as we are just over a week out from Lamar’s performance on the Super Bowl LIX stage on February 9, 2024. I couldn’t be more excited.

GNX, Kendrick Lamar’s sixth album, dropped unexpectedly on November 22, 2024. It is a great album, and taken without any of the additional context I’m about to share below, it would likely have been my #1 album of 2024 anyway – but I obviously can’t know for sure. I will dive into the merits of the album from my (decidedly naive, considering it’s hip-hop) perspective in a bit. But first, I must share the additional context.

Prior to the release of GNX, hip hop was already dominating my 2024, thanks in part to Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal, released on Aug 24 (#18) and Tyler, the Creator’s CHROMAKOPIA, released on October 28 (#12), but mostly due to Kendrick, who had a seminal verse on one track and subsequently released five non-album singles between March and September 2024. If we had gotten to the end of the year without an official album from him, I would have been put in the very strange position of having listened to a lot of new music in 2024 by and because of an artist despite them not having released an album. I don’t know what I would have done, because I feel so compelled to capture Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 in my own words, so I can better understand it, and I can pass that understanding on to you (whether you wanted it or not). Here goes nothing.

Where’s The Beef?

You may have heard of The Beef. Not the TV show (although it was enjoyable), but the escalating series of events, the rap feud if you will, between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. It was this feud, the way it played out, the speed at which both artists recorded and released music, and how the feud resolved (or continues to resolve) itself that I found intensely engrossing. Drake, the Canadian rapper very close to being the most popular musician in the world (I believe he is #2 only to Taylor Swift’s #1 all-time streaming record), versus Kendrick Lamar, the Pulitzer-prize winning incendiary West Coast Compton-born rapper.

At its core, the beef is about what makes a rapper legitimate. That, in and of itself, has been a long-time rap staple — if you didn’t grow up in the hood, if you haven’t been somehow related to gang violence or had to successfully avoid it to survive, then you aren’t deserving of any stature in the rap world. Of course this kind of base thinking doesn’t only happen in rap, but I would argue it comes up more prominently here than in any other genre. That is the foundation upon which The Beef is built: that Lamar believes Drake is a poseur, and his unprecedented popularity has taken the rap industry down the wrong path. His hyper-polished, overproduced, and sanitized music, his non-American nationality, and even how he carries himself, do not represent rap how it should be represented in popular music. He has caused the rap industry on the whole to sour, and something needs to be done about it.

And Kendrick is not entirely wrong in this stance, but you have to squint at the numbers to have it make sense. In 2018, hip hop became the streaming world’s #1 genre, thanks to both men, but Drake much more than Kendrick. Since then, it has remained the #1 genre, but until 2024 that buffer that had been built up between hip hop and other genres had been slowly declining. Taylor and her minions likely had a lot to do with that shift away from hip hop. But in 2024, thanks to Kendrick going on the offensive, calling out Drake and the industry on the whole over the course of a year, he drew my and a whole slew of other people’s attention back to (or for the first time to) the genre. Hip hop’s popularity climbed back up to a commanding lead in 2024.¹ Carrying the weight of an entire genre on your shoulders back to greatness is itself a feat to be recognized. Now let’s talk about how he did that.

Where The Beef Began

Drake and Kendrick have a long history together, and it started out on a positive note when Lamar featured on Drake’s “Buried Alive Interlude” in 2011. 2013 saw the first lyrical shots fired between the men, when Kendrick rapped on Big Sean’s “Control” that he had love for Drake and a number of other popular rappers at that time, but he wanted to “murder” them when it came to rap. A couple weeks later, Drake’s response came in an interview when he said “I know good and well that [Lamar]’s not murdering me, at all, in any platform.” Over the next ten or so years, there were various lines that they both delivered in verse and in interviews that, while not overt, were interpreted as “sneak disses.”

In October, 2023, Drake and J. Cole released “First Person Shooter,” in which J. Cole states that he, Drake, and Kendrick are the “Big Three” greatest rappers in modern hip-hop. This was apparently the start of the end for Kendrick, who disliked being lumped together with the other two as “the greatest” – not only because he considered himself, alone, to be the sole title holder for “greatest,” which I feel he has a legitimate claim to, but also because J. Cole had the audacity to claim that Cole and Drake were “the greatest” in any capacity. Kendrick’s official response came five months later, with a verse on his, Future, and Metro Boomin’s single “Like That,” in which Kendrick raps “Motherfuck the big three, n****, it’s just big me,” elevating himself above Drake and Cole. Innocent enough as a diss, but knowing the history behind it and Lamar’s intent to not only boost himself but to also cut down Drake is key.²

Full-blown Diss Tracks

Drake took the bait, creating the first complete song in The Beef whose sole focus was to take down the other man. “Push Ups” first leaked online on April 13, with Drake claiming many artists are better than Kendrick, including 21 Savage, Travis Scott, and SZA. On top of that, he made fun of Lamar’s physical presence, saying, “How the fuck you big-steppin’ with a size-seven men’s on?” and calling him “your little midget ass.” Lamar is only 5' 5", and I’m sorry, it’s all fun and games until you make fun of something out of a person’s control, like their height. That’s below the belt, and believe that likely went a long way to push Kendrick over the edge. But Drake felt he had the upper hand, looking down from his mountain, so he took the shot. “And that fuckin’ song y’all got did not start the beef with us. This shit been brewin’ in a pot, now I’m heatin’ up.”

Six days later, the official version of “Push Ups” came out, along with a second song, “Taylor Made Freestyle.” The latter song featured unauthorized AI versions of Tupac and Snoop Dogg dissing Kendrick, as well as a diss on Kendrick’s ties to the music industry in general, claiming that those ties were keeping Kendrick from responding to the leaked “Push Ups” because he didn’t want to interfere with the concurrent release of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, which also came out on April 19 (hence the “Taylor” in the name of the song). Tupac’s estate threatened to sue Drake, stating their support for Kendrick in their response: “The unauthorized, equally dismaying use of Tupac’s voice against Kendrick Lamar… who has given nothing but respect to Tupac and his legacy publicly and privately, compounds the insult.” Drake took the song down from streaming services a week later.

After two unanswered songs calling him out, Kendrick finally responded in full on April 30, with “Euphoria.” At 1,400 words, the 6+ minute track is non-stop hit-after-hit on Drake. Lamar calls Drake a bad father, raising his son poorly. And that his abs are fake. But more importantly, he makes the first real dig at Drake’s legitimacy in the rap business. “How many more fairytale stories ’bout your life ’til we had enough? How many more black features ’til you finally feel that you’re black enough? I like Drake with the melodies, I don’t like Drake when he act tough.” He goes on, “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress… I even hate when you say the word “n****,” but that's just me, I guess.” The song ends with a repeated refrain “We don’t wanna hear you say ‘n****’ no more.”

Five Songs Across Five Days

From there, with Kendrick having released a verse, Drake two songs, and then Kendrick with one song over the span of just over a month, the creative output and nastiness of the disses kicked into high gear. Over the next five days, Drake released two more songs, and Kendrick three, volleying back and forth with deeper, more scathing digs without sacrificing musical quality (at least on Kendrick’s part, but I’m biased by this point). On May 3, Kendrick followed up “Euphoria” with “6:16 in LA” – mocking a common Drake song-title structure – non-coincidentally produced by none other than Jack Antonoff (one of Taylor Swift’s lead producers). The instagram-only track is not as overt as “Euphoria,” instead choosing to target Drake’s OVO Records crew and Drake’s penchant for internet memes as more fodder for why he’s not street enough.

14 hours after “6:16,” Drake released “Family Matters” and proceeded to go ballistic. At 1,700 words and 7.5 minute in length, the song is the longest, most dense track in The Beef. Drake not only calls out Lamar, he lashes out at many other well-known artists like Future, Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, Kanye West, producers Metro Boomin’ and Pharrell Williams, and singer the Weeknd. He pushed things further into chaos by claiming Kendrick was a domestic abuser against his wife, Whitney Alford. “On some Bobby shit, I wanna know what Whitney need,” comparing Lamar to Bobby Brown attacking Whitney Houston. He claimed one of Kendrick’s kids may actually be fathered by producer and filmmaker Dave Free (a point which becomes more relevant later on).

20 minutes later, Kendrick’s “meet the grahams” hit YouTube. Drake’s last name is Graham, so you can see where this is going. Less song and more spoken-word poem, it starts “Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that that man is your father,” Lamar makes it very personal by speaking directly to Drake’s son. “I look at him and wish your grandpa woulda wore a condom. I’m sorry that you gotta grow up and then stand behind him.” Then he addresses Drake’s parents, Sandra and Dennis. “You raised a horrible fuckin’ person, the nerve of you, Dennis. Sandra, sit down, what I’m about to say is heavy, now listen. Mm-mh, your son’s a sick man with sick thoughts, I think n****s like him should die. Him and Weinstein should get fucked up in a cell for the rest they life.” Just brutal.

He goes on, claiming Drake has a secret daughter. In the final verse, addressed directly at Drake, Lamar explains why he’s cutting so deep. “This supposed to be a good exhibition within the game. But you fucked up the moment you called out my family's name. Why you had to stoop so low to discredit some decent people? Guess integrity is lost when the metaphors don't reach you.”

The Death Blow

The next morning, roughly 14 hours after the previous song, Lamar releases the piece de resistance, “Not Like Us.” A classic right out of the gate, the song famously features production by Mustard (whose birth name is Dijon McFarlane – get it?). It became the song of the summer, and was hands down my favorite song of 2024. It is four minutes and 33 seconds of straight-up bliss.

The song picks up the story where “meet the grahams” left off, diving further into filth. He calls Drake a pedophile, rapping “Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young. You better not ever go to cell block one.” and “Why you trollin’ like a bitch? Ain’t you tired? Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minorrrrrr.” (I cannot wait for that line to be sung by literally everyone at the Super Bowl.) Not stopping there, he raps “And Baka got a weird case, why is he around? Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles” – naming Baka, a member of Drake’s security team who had been, according to Wikipedia, legitimately arrested and charged with sex trafficking, assault, and robbery of a 22-year-old woman he allegedly forced into prostitution in 2014 (but was only convicted of assault and a weapons charge), and name dropping Drake’s Lover Boy album.

He then refers back to a line Drake had in “Family Matters” where Drake said “Always rappin’ like you ’bout to get the slaves freed,” flipping it around. He accuses Drake of exploiting Atlanta-based artists for his own gain, akin to slavery. He runs through a litany of Atlanta stars who have guest appeared on Drake’s songs, including Future, 21 Savage, and 2 Chainz. The final verse ends with “You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars. No, you not a colleague, you a fuckin’ colonizer.”

After that pinnacle of a song, Drake followed up the next day with the lackluster effort “The Heart Part 6” – mimicking Lamar’s “The Heart” song series titling. In the song, Drake goes fully on the defensive, denying he’s a pedophile a handful of times, and that he doesn’t have a hidden daughter, giving legitimacy to lines that were clearly not realistic when they were first rapped by Lamar, but now elevated to new heights by having been acknowledged by Drake. He should have left well enough alone, or picked new roads to go down. Instead, Drake continued attacking Lamar with the domestic violence and illegitimate fatherhood notes from previous songs.

Not only had Kendrick released the phenomenal “Not Like Us” just 24 hours earlier, “The Heart Part 6” was widely panned, hitting an ignominious 1 million dislikes achievement on YouTube. The general consensus is that this is where Drake unequivocally lost The Beef. Kendrick had proven his lyrical and musical prowess, and Drake had to move on. Of course things didn’t really end there, and it has yet to prove if it has had any material affect on Drake’s popularity, but it has certainly helped Kendrick achieve greater heights. And he is not letting anyone forget it.

Begin the Victory Laps

Kendrick hosted a concert on Juneteenth – another indirect slavery dig at Drake – called “The Pop Out: Ken & Friends.” The concert lasted over three hours, and featured over 25 West Coast artists, including Tyler, the Creator. It was split into three “& Friends” sets, with DJ Hed leading the first set: a showcase of up-and-coming LA rappers. Act II was led by Mustard and featured a long set of Mustard-produced tracks with special guests singing their own songs. Act III was Kendrick’s time to shine. He opened with “Euphoria” with some new lyrics dissing Drake, and proceeded to play other Drake diss tracks “Like That” and “6:16 in LA.” After 15 songs, with Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, and ScHoolboy Q all making appearances, Kendrick brought Dr. Dre out on stage to perform “Still D.R.E” and “California Love,” which Dre had performed originally with 2Pac. Dr. Dre then got the crowd to quiet down, and whispered the opening line to “Not Like Us” – “Psst, I see dead people.” Which led to Kendrick performing “Not Like Us“ five times back to back, each with a little bit different set of flair.

On the 4th of July, Kendrick released the music video for “Not Like Us,” which featured at the beginning of it a snippet of a then-unknown song, later to be revealed as the fantastic “Squabble Up” from GNX, shown in the video at the top of this post. The “Not Like Us” video notably celebrates West Coast and LA rappers. It closes the door on the accusations made by Drake across a few of his diss tracks by showing Kendrick’s entire family happily dancing together in the video, and having the video co-directed by none other than Dave Free.

On September 11, Kendrick released an untitled, Instagram-exclusive song that has come to be known as “Watch the Party Die.” In it, he references The Beef, but does not overtly diss Drake, concentrating instead on the cultural relevance of influencers, materialism, and celebrity culture on the hip hop industry in general. It was posted at 8pm, just when the 2024 Video Music Awards were starting, likely intentionally calling out the award ceremony.

And that is Kendrick Lamar’s 2024, up to the release of GNX on November 22. But first, to give full consideration of The Beef up to current day: Drake is not ready to give up. On November 25, Drake filed a petition against Universal Music Group and Spotify, claiming they had conspired to artificially inflate the popularity of “Not Like Us.” A day later, Drake filed a 2nd petition against UMG, claiming defamation for them not having stopped the release of a song falsely accusing him of being a sex offender, as well as UMG creating an illegal payola scheme with iHeartRadio. On January 14 of this year, Drake dropped the petition against UMG and Spotify, but the defamation claim remains. A day later, Drake filed a formal lawsuit against UMG, “the music company that decided to publish, promote, exploit, and monetize allegations (in “Not Like Us”) that it understood were not only false, but dangerous.” It is not likely the active lawsuit will keep Lamar from playing the song at the Super Bowl, but it does make the upcoming experience a little bit contentious and exciting.

What Were We Talking About? Oh Yeah, GNX.

On the morning of November 22, around 8:30am PST, Lamar released “GNX,” a one-minute video without any description, and ending in a simple white-on-black treatment of the letters “GNX.” The snippet of song in the video has not appeared in any other recording from Lamar, giving clear indication that there is still more to come (maybe before the Super Bowl?). Thirty minutes after the release of the video, the album GNX hit streaming services, and within 20 minutes of the release I’d seen a notification somewhere and was downloading the album to immediately put in my ears. Having watched all of The Beef happen in near real time, I was more than primed for the album’s majesty, and it did not disappoint.

From my untrained ears, GNX is more approachable, and simpler, than Lamar’s past efforts. Aside from the names mentioned elsewhere in this novel of a post, GNX was mainly produced by Sounwave and Jack Antonoff (he’s everywhere), to great affect. I didn’t have Lamar’s first two albums (2011 and 2012) on the Top 31. All of his other albums have made an appearance, from To Pimp a Butterfly at #29 in 2015, DAMN. at #22 in 2017, Black Panther: The Album at #21 in 2018, and finally Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers at #16 in 2022. All of them are masterpieces in their own way, but none of them have been a mainstay in my daily listening like GNX has been.

It is a perfectly sequenced album. The first track “wacced out murals,” references The Beef a few times, but chooses to rise above the direct attacks on Drake, choosing instead to put everyone to task. “It used to be ’Fuck that n****,’ but now it’s plural. Fuck everybody.” He gets straight to the point, intentionally. “This is not for lyricists, I swear it’s not the sentiments. Fuck a double entendre, I wan’t ya’ll to feel this shit.” No more beating around the bush.

From there, Kendrick goes into the bouncy “squabble up,” which starts with the fantastic line “Woke up lookin’ for the broccoli, high-key, keep a horn on me, that Kamasi,” referencing Kamasi Washington, an American jazz saxophonist who also has production credits on the album. Rhyming “broccoli” with “Kamasi,” how can you not smile? The third song, “luther” is a beautiful, slow duet with SZA (#7 in 2022³), evoking similar feelings to “All the Stars,” their duet on the Black Panther Soundtrack.

“Man at the garden” is the fourth song from the album. It’s a slower, downbeat song that Lamar uses to give a complete and thorough description of why he is deserving of any and all accolades that are directed at him. He refers to The Beef, ending the song with a very impassioned “Tell me why you think you deserve the greatest of all time, motherfucker.” Song 5, “hey now (feat. Dody6)” gives me my favorite guest appearance of the album. The song starts with Kendrick rapping in the low register. Over the song he slowly gains volume and energy, climbing an octave and driving more anxiety as he does it. When Dody6, an up-and-coming West Coast LA rapper, joins the fray, his delivery is entirely unique. There’s a laid-back Snoop quality to his bars, but with an urgency underlying it all that is all his own. I will be looking out for more work by him.

The sixth song, “reincarnated,” is the heart of the album. In it, Kendrick draws connections to past extreme rises in fame paired with self-destruction, telling the stories of (without naming) John Lee Hooker and Billie Holiday before turning the magnifying glass on himself, all in an attempt to keep his own extracurriculars in check. The song culminates in a crazy back and forth where Kendrick is talking to God, voiced by himself. “tv off (feat. Lefty Gunplay)” is a high energy song that gave the world “MUSTAAAAARRRRD,” that I’m sure you’ve heard many times by now.

“Dodger blue (feat. Wallie the Senset, Siete7x, and Roddy Ricch)” slows things down again, with a 90s-esque R&B slide beat that will have you boppin. “peekaboo (feat. AzChike)” is an odd outlier that is deceivingly simple, repeating “What they talkin’ ’bout? They ain’t talkin’ ’bout nothin’” over and over again, with a few other lines that start with the word “peekaboo.” Still, it is an addictive listen.

“Heart pt. 6” (where Kendrick reclaims the title of the song back from Drake), marks the first time he includes a song from the series of The Heart songs on a proper full-length album. It is beautiful. The next song, the title song, featuring Hitta J3, YoungThreat, & Peysoh, is carried by a back-masked beat that drives the song quietly forward while the lesser-named kids take a chance at the rhymes. The twelfth, and last, song on the album, “gloria,” is another duet with SZA. The two of them have such clear chemistry musically, and this song is no different.

It’s been announced that SZA will be appearing in the Super Bowl Halftime show with Kendrick, as well as double-billing with him on their summertime stadium tour. I cannot wait to see what else the future holds for Kendrick Lamar that we’ll get to enjoy. It’s all but a given that there’s another album coming this year. And seeing he and SZA live on stage in May here in Seattle is going to be huge. Maybe something more will come from Drake’s lawsuits, who knows. But one thing is for sure, I’m now a fully committed Kendrick Lamar fan, and I’m here for whatever he brings next. Thanks for reading along.

^{1. I’m sorry I can’t point you to the exact data points I’m referencing – I swear I read exactly what I’m reporting here recently, but I can’t for the life of me find that reference now. Nonetheless, it makes for a good story, so I’m sticking with it.↩}
^{2. On April 5, J. Cole was the first to respond to Lamar’s dig, on his own “7 Minute Drill.” In it, Cole blasts Kendrick’s album To Pimp a Butterfly, among other things. But two days later, Cole publicly apologized onstage for releasing the song and removed it from streaming services, effectively removing himself from the building melee. ↩}
^{3. On December 20, SZA released a new deluxe version of her stellar 2022 album SOS, called LANA, featuring 15 new tracks added to the front of the album, and including a duet with Kendrick Lamar.↩}

__________________________________________

Subscribe to the Top 31 playlists!

Full Albums
All albums in their entirety

Radio Station
The best song pulled from each album

View all previous years’ Top 31s

#4 on the 2024 Bacon Top 31 — Beyoncé

January 28, 2025 by Royal Stuart in Top 31, 2024

Cowboy Carter by Beyoncé

If you know my family, then you knew Beyoncé was going to make the Top 31. Both my wife and daughter love her, and more importantly in the case of this blog, I do as well. So prevalent she is in our lives, in mid-December when I was talking with my friend Pete about the albums that had potential to show up on the upcoming Top 31, he said “Oh I know you’re a Beyoncé family,” and I responded “Beyoncé’s album was last year.” As a family, we’d not stopped listening to Beyoncé for two-and-a-half years: her fantastic #2 album Renaissance had come out on July 23, 2022, and that had blended right into the release of the phenomenal Cowboy Carter. It didn’t help that we’d seen her on the Renaissance World Tour in September 2023, either. Consequently, I had mistakenly remembered Cowboy Carter coming out in 2023, and not on March 24, 2024.

Few artists have been as consistently great as Beyoncé has. I personally was pretty late to the party, having only fallen for her on her groundbreaking album Lemonade (#6 in 2016), when she’d already been 16 years (!) into her singing career (including her Destiny’s Child work, which began in 1998). Beyoncé has been on a meteoric climb for as long as I can remember, but it was Kanye West’s outburst at the 2009 VMAs¹ that serves as a good demarcation line for the careers of both Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. From that fateful day, the two women have been battling each other to command the most eyes and ears of the ever-widening consumer public. Who is in the lead at any given point depends on by which metric you’re measuring (note Taylor’s 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department will not be appearing on the Top 31), but there are no other artists in contention for that top spot, nor have there been for the last few years.

Cowboy Carter is Beyonce’s eighth solo album, and fifteenth album overall when considering her work with Destiny’s Child and others. The album is the second of an announced trilogy that began with 2022’s Renaissance. These two albums, along with the apparent third yet to be released, were started in 2019 and then recorded during the pandemic. Cowboy Carter was supposed to be “Act I,” but Beyoncé swapped the order due to the pandemic still going strong in 2022 (she knew we all needed to dance). While Renaissance is unequivocally a dance / R&B album, Cowboy Carter blends many genres and is widely considered Beyoncés country album. By everyone except Beyoncé, that is. “I hope this music is an experience, creating another journey where you can close your eyes, start from the beginning and never stop,“ Beyoncé said in an Instagram Story just before the album’s release in March. “This ain't a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.”

Personally, I wish she’d stayed more on the dance side of the spectrum. The country-esque songs are fantastic, and the inclusion of legends Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and Linda Martell on the album speaks to the reach Beyoncé has achieved. And even if country isn’t Beyoncé’s strong suit, her country songs are still the current best in the genre. But it’s the power of her dance songs, like my favorite song on the album, “Ya Ya,” featured in the video above, that really makes this album a stand-out.

Beyoncé didn’t tour in 2024, and her Renaissance world tour ended in October, 2023. She had exactly one live performance, and she invented a new way to get in front of as many eyes as possible: the “Beyonce Bowl.” The NFL Christmas Game Day broadcast featured two games, to be broadcast on Netflix, who had no experience broadcasting football games to date. By connecting the games with Beyoncé, Netflix was bringing the big guns.

Overall, the viewership hit 27 million during Beyoncé’s performance, drawing the biggest Christmas Day NFL game audience since at least 2001. Beyoncé and Jay Z’s daughter Blue Ivy (12) even made an appearance (as she did when I saw her at Lumen Field in Sept. 2023, as well, when she was only 11), dancing alongside her superstar mother to an audience of 27 mil. It will be interesting to see where she goes over the next few years.

Beyoncé was set to have a big announcement on January 14, 2025, but she postponed due to the devastating wildfires ravaging LA at the time. New album? New documentary? New tour? All of the above, probably? We’ll know soon enough. We won’t know exactly what the overarching theme of Beyoncé’s trilogy is until we get the third album, but it seems a safe bet to expect something in yet another genre. Maybe we’ll get a folk or rock n’ roll album. Or maybe a jazz album that invokes Billie Holiday. Whatever she gives us, I’ll be first in line. It’s bound to be stellar.

^{1. This was the incident where Kanye West ran on stage unexpectedly to interrupt Taylor Swift’s Best Female Video acceptance speech. “Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you, I'mma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!” referring to “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” which itself ended up taking “Video of the Year,” rendering his entire interruption pointless.↩}

__________________________________________

Subscribe to the Top 31 playlists!

Full Albums
All albums in their entirety

Radio Station
The best song pulled from each album

View all previous years’ Top 31s

#16 on the 2022 Bacon Top 31 — Kendrick Lamar

January 16, 2023 by Royal Stuart in Top 31

Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers by Kendrick Lamar

Despite it being called the best album of 2015 by Rolling Stone, Billboard, Pitchfork, and almost every other popular-music–ranking service, Kendrick Lamar’s How to Pimp a Butterfly barely made the Bacon Top 31, sneaking in at #29 that year. I ended my review of the album saying “I can’t say I love it, and I doubt I’ll listen to it a lot going forward.” Oh how very wrong I was.

What I didn’t understand then was that my taste in music was still maturing, still growing. I wasn’t ready for Kendrick Lamar in 2015, but it laid the groundwork for my love of Frank Ocean’s Blonde, (#4 in 2016). I still couldn’t find the right groove for Lamar’s next album, 2017’s DAMN. which came in at #22 that year, but he opened the door wide with his stellar Black Panther: The Album. My love for the form continued to grow in 2020 with Run the Jewels (#6 in 2020). And that’s how we get to today, with my and Kendrick’s relationship in much better shape.

I listened to Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers more than I have to any other Kendrick Lamar album, and I would have listened even more if it didn’t conflict with my family’s musical tastes. (There has to be a limit somewhere on the amount of cursing I can tolerate around my five year old, right?) The double album, 1 hour and 19 minutes in length, is fantastic. But that doesn’t mean the music is free of difficulty and controversy. For instance, “We Cry Together,” towards the end of the first half, is an abrasive, spoken-word, emotionally violent duet between Lamar and actress Taylour Paige. The couple in the song is arguing angrily, devolving into a yelled chorus: “fuck you n****, nah, fuck you bitch” back and forth. It’s brutal to listen to, but the video (NSFW at the very end) is highly compelling to watch because it is extremely well acted by the two.

Don’t miss the video for “The Heart Part 5” shown above. While Lamar lip-syncs the rap while standing in front of a deep-red background, the one-take video uses deepfake technology from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s studio Deep Voodoo to transform him into six other famous black men: O. J. Simpson, Kanye West, Jussie Smollett, Will Smith, Kobe Bryant, and Nipsey Hussle. The overall effect is mesmerizing. Each verse of the song as sung by the alter egos is written from their perspective, adding an additional meta layer to the song. “Heart” is technically not from Morale, but instead was released just prior to the album coming out as a teaser. It is included here because why the hell not.

There have been other videos from the album released: “N95,” “Rich Spirit,” and “Count Me Out,” (which features Helen Mirren, of all people). Lamar’s video output proves he’s a master of both sound and visuals. He took his myriad talents to the top of the mountain back on on October 1, when he performed three songs from the album on Saturday Night Live. He managed to pull off a feat I don’t know that I’ve seen before on SNL – he made the live performances have an element of music-video-ness to them. See the fantastic shadow-play in “Rich Spirit + N95 - live on SNL,” and watch the walls literally move in on him in “Father Time (feat. Sampha) - live on SNL.”

The steady progression of Lamar-produced albums moving up in the ranks of the Top 31 is more an expression of my changing musical tastes than his changing production. I don’t see myself leaving behind the usual dad-rock and indie-pop albums and artists I enjoy. It just makes for a more diverse list, a wider variety of music to tap into when the mood strikes. It also makes me more excited to hear what comes next.

__________________________________________

17. Inside Problems by Andrew Bird
18. Laurel Hell by Mitski
19. Full Moon Project by Phosphorescent
20. Skinty Fia by Fontaines D.C.
21. I Love You Jennifer B by Jockstrap
22. Too Much to Ask by Cheekface
23. Dripfield by Goose
24. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Big Thief
25. And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow by Weyes Blood
26. NOT TiGHT by DOMi & JD BECK
27. Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain
28. Live at KEXP, vol. 10 by Various Artists
29. All You Need Is Time by Daisy the Great
30. Cool It Down by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
31. CAPRISONGS by FKA twigs

There are many ways to listen to the 2022 Bacon Top 31. Subscribe now and enjoy the new albums / songs as they are revealed on the countdown!

Full Album
All albums in their entirety.

Radio Station
A single song selection pulled from each album.

View all previous Bacon Top 31s

#2 on the 2021 Bacon Top 31 — Big Red Machine

January 30, 2022 by Royal Stuart

How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last? by Big Red Machine

Every year there’s the big obvious acts that continually appear on the Top 31. At the top of that list are both The National and Bon Iver, both of whom have had #1 albums (2010 and 2016) along with three additional, separate appearances on the Top 31 each. In fact, I haven’t done the math, but I’m confident in saying that Aaron Dessner (20% of The National) and Justin Vernon (99% of Bon Iver), combined, have been responsible for the largest percentage of all music I’ve listened to in the last 15 years.

The two of them have done many things together, arguably the most prominent being the work they’ve done together as Big Red Machine. Their first foray into a partnership was a collaborative song called “Big Red Machine” on the Dessner-produced Dark Was the Night compilation in 2009 (#10 that inaugural Top 31 year). According to wikipedia, Dessner reached out to Vernon via MySpace, and they collaborated on the song remotely, and didn’t meet in person until a follow-on performance for the collaboration was hosted later that year. They continued to work together while producing and creating with their respective bands. They formed a record label, 37d03d, which released the first full Big Red Machine album in 2018 (self-titled, #13 that year). In addition to Dessner and Vernon, that album also features Phoebe Bridgers, Dessner’s brother Bryce and Bryan Devendorf from The National, and multi-instrumentalist Richard Parry from Arcade Fire, among many others.

Then they turned their attention to Taylor Swift, or many she turned her attention to them. The two albums that came out of their collaboration had a big impact on my 2020 Top 31, coming in collectively at #4 last year. But Swift is not the only Dessner/Vernon produced artist I’ve enjoyed. From the very first Top 31 in 2009, with the aforementioned Dark Was the Night compilation and Bon Iver’s Blood Bank EP, there have been only two years (2014 and 2015) that one or both Vernon and Dessner did not appear on the Top 31 as performer or producer. Sharon van Etten, Local Natives, Frightened Rabbit, Taylor Swift, Kanye West — they’ve all benefited from the magic touch of Aaron Dessner and/or Justin Vernon in the last 15 years.

There were also a couple of Big Red Machine singles to come out in 2020 that haven’t appeared on any albums: “No Time For Love Like Now” with Michael Stipe, and a get-out-the-vote in Wisconsin cover of Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” featuring 4 of out 5 members of The National and others.

And now we’re finally up to the present, with How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?, the supergroup’s 2nd full-length album under the Big Red Machine name. The album features a daunting list of guest appearances: Taylor Swift on two songs, James Krivchenia of Big Thief, Anaïs Mitchell on three songs, Ilsey (a prolific singer/songwriter who has written for and sung with a dizzying number of artists you’ve heard of), Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Naeem (otherwise known as rapper Spank Rock), a song called “Hutch,” dedicated to the lost-too-soon lead singer of Frightened Rabbit, Scott Hutchison, featuring Sharon van Etten, Lisa Hannigan, and Shara Nova (lead singer of My Brightest Diamond), La Force (aka Ariel Engle of Broken Social Scene), Ben Howard, and This is the Kit (Kate Stables).

Whew.

There are many highlights to this album (as there should be for a #2 album of the year). The Robin Pecknold / Anaïs Mitchell sung “Phoenix,” shown in the lyric video above, is my personal favorite (mostly because it’s the favorite of 4-year-old, who demanded I play that song over and over again throughout the summer of 2021). But even the most stripped down songs, such as the two where Aaron Dessner finally takes the spotlight all by himself, playing guitar and singing on “The Ghost of Cincinnati” and “Magnolia” in what can only be described as his best Elliott Smith impersonation. The Taylor Swift collaboration “Renegade” is a poppy, Swiftian jaunt you’ll love – it could have easily been created for Swift’s 2020 albums folklore or evermore.

It’s hard not to look at How Long as the capper of one hell of a musical decade for Dessner and Vernon. There’s no way that either of them is done making music. But if you look at the arc of U2, R.E.M., or The Stones, now is about the time in their respective careers that the drive to create something new and different clashes with the desire to slow down, spend more time with family, and rely heavily on the income from previous hits rather than create something new and earth shattering. Selfishly, I hope they choose a different path and continue to give us everything they’ve got. We’ll find out soon enough – 2022 is a new year, and maybe there’ll be another Bon Iver or National album, or some new Dessner- or Vernon-produced project that will simply blow us all away. I can’t wait.

__________________________________________

3. Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast
4. A Way Forward by Nation of Language
5. Things Take Time, Take Time by Courtney Barnett
6. Little Oblivions by Julien Baker
7. Valentine by Snail Mail
8. sketchy. by tUnE-yArDs
9. A Very Lonely Solstice by Fleet Foxes
10. Hey What by Low
11. Local Valley by José González
12. Head of Roses by Flock of Dimes
13. The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows by Damon Albarn
14. Collapsed in Sunbeams by Arlo Parks
15. Loving In Stereo by Jungle
16. Flying Dream 1 by Elbow
17. Screen Violence by Chvrches
18. Blue Weekend by Wolf Alice
19. Mainly Gestalt Pornography by Pearly Gate Music
20. Peace Or Love by Kings of Convenience
21. These 13 by Jimbo Mathus & Andrew Bird
22. Mr. Corman: Season 1 by Nathan Johnson
23. Home Video by Lucy Dacus
24. I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico by Various Artists
25. Siamese Dream by Fruit Bats
26. NINE by Sault
27. Observatory by Aeon Station
28. The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania by Damien Jurado
29. A Beginner’s Mind by Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine
30. Where the End Begins by Knathan Ryan
31. Private Space by Durand Jones & The Indications

There are many ways to listen to the 2021 Bacon Top 31. Subscribe now and enjoy the new albums / songs as the countdown is completed!

Full Album
All albums in their entirety.

Radio Station
A single song selection pulled from each album.

View all previous Bacon Top 31s

#21 on the 2016 Bacon Top 31

December 11, 2016 by Royal Stuart

Farewell, Starlite! by Francis and the Lights

I didn’t discover this album until five days ago, even though it came out in September. I’d had a different album for this spot until I realized it was disqualified due to it having come out in November (putting it into the time frame for next year’s Top 31). So I was glad that this album came along, and I’m glad it’s powerful enough to show up here, at #21.

Francis and the Lights is a man who had his name legally changed to Francis Farewell Starlite. While Starlite has been performing as Francis and the Lights in front of as well as behind the mic since 2007, Farewell, Starlite! is his debut album. And it’s full of auto-tuned goodness. It’s dancey and poppy and makes me feel good inside. There’s not much more I can say about it.

Be sure to watch the video above, for the song “Friends.” It features Kanye West and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, along with Starlite, who dances like an idiot before joining in lockstep with Vernon in a jokey little choreographed routine. It’s brilliant in it’s silliness.

__________________________________________

22. This Unruly Mess I’ve Made by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
23. LNZNDRF by LNZNDRF
24. Puberty 2 by Mitski
25. Light Upon the Lake by Whitney
26. A Corpse Wired for Sound by Merchandise
27. Away by Okkervil River
28. case/lang/veirs by case/lang/veirs
29. Love Letter for Fire by Sam Beam & Jesca Hoop
30. Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future by Underworld
31. Preoccupations by Preoccupations