monks in a mosh pit

     Kendrick Lamar released his last studio album, DAMN.,  when I was in seventh grade. In the 1855 days since then, I have grown up. I went to high school. I learned that I loved to speak. I started dating a girl. I am going to college. And the world has changed too. Economies collapsed and a pandemic raged. Cities burned and were invaded. The influence of social media is more pervasive than ever, and polarization is worse than ever. The world has gotten more complicated, which places a heavy burden on Kendrick, as someone who must now juggle being a 34-year-old with a fiancee and two kids with discussing a range of societal issues in his work.     But luckily, Kendrick delivers, remaining just as introspective and forward-thinking as he always is.  His albums have always raised the stakes by complicating the topics they bring up and introducing additional perspectives—you never finish a Kendrick Lamar album feeling a sense of clarity, only more unce...

I have counted the less busy half of my summer through Kanye's Donda listening parties. Since the first event on July 22nd, watching in concern as a clearly upset Ye wandered aimlessly around an empty field playing unfinished concepts of songs, my weekends have been spent wondering whether his long-anticipated tenth album would release. And finally, it has, with Universal dropping the lengthy 100+ minute affair on Sunday morning without Kanye's permission.  But for all the hype and crazy speculation that surrounded the adventure of Donda's  drawn-out release, from the shock of hearing a heavenly Young Thug feature or the drama of Kanye levitating out of the stage, repeated listens to the album have failed to inspire me in the way that Kanye's other work does. While Donda often produces beautiful, classic Kanye instrumentals , energized verses, and harmonic bliss, it is a mess as an album. Apart from a few standouts, Donda  feels empty: a shell of the bravado, the passio...

         For Playboi Carti fans, 2020 can probably be summed up in two words: down bad. In the past year and a half following Carti’s promise of a new album coming “soon,” fans listened to snippets of Carti repeating “Homicide” for thirty seconds, simped over Iggy Azalea, and asked such existential questions like “Do you think Carti touches himself?” while impatiently waiting for a man who acted more like a legendary Pokémon to drop another album. False hope and crazed theories trying to crack the code of Carti’s tweets defined a wait that felt much longer than it was, thanks to Carti’s cryptic messaging and Kanye-esque refusal to be clear. But finally, Carti’s Instagram post of “Album.TuRneD iN.” in November felt like a breath of fresh air, some relief especially after such an objectively terrible year. And when the album finally dropped on a rainy Christmas day, I dropped my xbox controller and screamed in joy and relief, prompting my confused mother to ask if...