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The title “Next Big Rapper” has been a curse as often as a blessing. But on the major-label debut by Dr. Dre protégé Kendrick Lamar, the Compton, California, MC wears it lightly, like a favorite hoodie. The album opens as if in midsentence, in brisk conversational mode – “I met her at the house party on El Segundo and Central” – and never slows, gusting through dense narratives and thickets of internal rhymes. Lamar is an unlikely star: a storyteller, not a braggart or punch-line rapper, setting spiritual yearnings and moral dilemmas against a backdrop of gang violence and police brutality.
read Jody Rosen's full review at Rolling Stone