I’ll take this time now to apologize for my excessive framing of the album, but it’s necessary as “untitled unmastered.” has practically no context for us. The smoky, 1950s, jazz club meets DJ Khalil aesthetic brings the listener into a part of Lamar’s conscious that is both unmastered and insatiable. “untitled unmastered.” provides the listener with one of the more unique listening experiences of 2016. It’s frightening that Lamar is putting these tracks out for public consumption as songs that didn’t even make it on what was widely regarded as the best album in all of popular music last year. While it would be incredibly easy to write off “untitled unmastered.” as, solely, K-Dot’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” B-sides, as I did upon first hearing about the album’s release, “untitled unmastered.” comes together as an apocalyptic, anxious and theistic plea for answers. Lamar’s new compilation of unreleased, untitled and unrestricted songs cannot be summarized for so many reasons, yet one of these reasons is not the collection’s lack of cogency. While not entirely evident in this quotation, Brooks’ essential argument is that a piece of art – a poem specifically – cannot be synopsized as this synopsis would omit the essential elements of the work, which often contrast and are antagonistic to one another.

It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme”. At the risk of sounding like a total asshole, know-it-all college student, Kendrick Lamar’s surprise release “untitled unmastered.” can be understood best in the context of Cleanth Brooks’ seminal essay, “The Heresy of the Paraphrase”: “It is a pattern of resolved stresses… the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition.

Untitled unmastered review