6:30 PMIt doesn’t matter whether you think Kendrick Lamar is the so-called best rapper on earth. It doesn’t particularly matter if you like his music. It also doesn’t really matter if you even claim to care about hip-hop. From a creative output standpoint, KDot is doing something that this game has never seen. At the height of his powers, he is a solo artist who is outputting at his most effective level, with the world watching and eagerly waiting.

We do not usually get this in the rap game. For whatever reason, things get shortchanged. Sometimes it’s death. Sometimes it’s petty crew battles that screw up careers or whatever music industry nonsense du jour that just plain prevents rappers from doing the most. Lamar is doing it, and doing it better than everyone.

There’s no need to take a superlong-lens look at the history of rap to understand this. Kung Fu Kenny is not just in a zone. He’s making the type of art that forces you to re-evaluate what you’re doing with yourself. The tracks make people eagerly want to hear them in public spaces. The videos have you grabbing your phone to contact people you care deeply about to talk to them about it.

His latest, “DNA,” is a complete masterpiece. Let’s just start with the fact that Don Cheadle is in it. Let’s then think about the fact that Cheadle then TRADES BARS with Kendrick, showing off his 52-year-old rap hands with flawless execution. “Two first names, the f— is up with that?” might be the best line I’ve heard in all of 2017. After all that, we can get to what actually goes on in the rest of this gem, which ends with a blunt-smoking Schoolboy Q punching a camera.

https://twitter.com/overlyxclusive/status/854438188370337793

I’ve been a hip-hop fan all my life. There’s never been a world I’ve lived in where it wasn’t the main life force of my creative mind. Same goes for most of my friends. The rubric that Kenny has created is sophisticated, elegant, rugged, whimsical, scary, fun, dark and joyous all at once. I can’t process anything he puts out fully until digesting it at least three times. The closest person I can even think of at that level of psychological immersion is Andre 3000, and even still, he will always have the probably unfair distinction of being part of a group. In short, I can’t handle it. I’m a grown man. I love it.

His entire oeuvre has moved from “Things I make sure I am a part of” to “Canon that I will force my future kids to listen to and recite back to me” levels. As my friend put it to me, his work affects you “in the best [way], makes me want to be better at my creativity every day” kind of way. If you’re an artist who’s anywhere near his lane, or even not, you’ve got to be afraid of looking like a complete basic in a world that Lamar is living, recording and shifting paradigms in.

If you truly paid attention to @kendricklamar on #HUMBLE he dropped several "mental gems" towards living a productive life.

— Darnell Clark Jones (@RealClarkJones_) April 18, 2017

The specific topics of his lyrics are obviously worth mentioning, too. There are quite a few people who believe that he’s a dressed-up hotep with a zany mind and some rap skills. Part of that is true. The discussion around his video for Humble is an example. By dropping the super problematic line of “I’m so f—king sick and tired of the Photoshop, show me something natural like Afros on Richard Pryor,” he quickly became the target of perfectly legitimate criticism of himself as a misogynist.

I don’t have the time or the inclination to break down rap’s relationship with that right now, but that must be said to point out that Kendrick is still an artist of his time. In this generational iteration of hip-hop, the foremost star in the game is not some fully formed feminist. But Lamar is an example of exactly where the genre is at its apex when blackness is not relegated to being a secondary element of presentation.

His latest Coachella is already the stuff of legend, and his upcoming interview with Zane Lowe is one of the most anticipated music sitdowns in recent history. There are pockets of the internet that believed he was going to drop a second album to complement DAMN on Easter Sunday, meaning people are mentioning his name in the same sentence as Jesus Christ, not even said in vain. It’s not even really about his popularity.

Once I saw him live. It was in Los Angeles at a private show, and even a short set was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. Before that point, I’d very publicly praised Lamar for “good kid, m.A.A.d city” but didn’t honestly feel the full fervor of his energy. That night, I did.

After today’s drop though, I’m changed.