At the time the Fox segment aired, Lamar told TMZ, “How can you take a song that’s about hope and turn it into hatred? The overall message is ‘we’re gonna be alright.’ It’s not the message of ‘I wanna kill people.’” In “Blood,” the Fox sample comes after a spoken-word tale about Lamar going to help a blind woman in the street only to be shot by her. In the very first track, “Blood,” Lamar puts a clip of Fox News recoiling at the “Alright” line “we hate popo, wanna kill us dead in the street fo' sho'”-“Oh please, ugh, I don’t like it,” we hear the pundit Kimberly Guilfoyle saying. Lamar’s pushback to conservative commentators and his Donald Trump references should, but likely won’t, be evaluated in the context of the rapper’s larger message about human nature. As listeners pick apart the album over the weekend, the first round of fighting in the broader media landscape may be about the overt politics of the album. He’s here to indict America, himself, his community, and more than anything, human sinfulness (possible thesis quote: “I feel like I'm boxin' demons, monsters, false prophets, schemin' sponsors, industry promises, niggas, bitches, honkies, crackers, Compton, Church, religion, token blacks, and bondage, lawsuit visits, subpoena served in concert, fuck your feelings, I mean this for imposters”). The Loss I Didn’t Have Words For Lindsay Turner Some of these choruses, especially one from Rihanna and one from the singer Zacari, seem written with an ear for radio play-a rarity in Lamar’s career. Washed-out ’70s soul textures provide atmosphere, but many of the beats drive and whir with the tense energy of vogueish trap music. The newsman’s voice threads through the roiling chorus for the tracklist’s first proper banger “DNA,” and then Lamar lays it out: “You mothafuckas can't tell me nothin' / I'd rather die than to listen to you / My DNA not for imitation / Your DNA an abomination.”ĭamn is the blazingly talented rapper’s fourth proper album, following up the sprawling jazz catharsis of 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly with a set of songs that, as hinted by its terse title and no-fuss artwork, makes a virtue of straightforwardness. Now Lamar has a reply, and he doesn’t so much debunk Rivera’s dubious statement as use it for kindling on his explosive new album Damn. He was commenting at the time on Kendrick Lamar’s performance of his protest song “Alright” atop a police car at that year’s BET Awards. “Hip hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years,” the Fox news pundit Geraldo Rivera said in 2015.