"I am a sinner / Who's prolly gonna sin again / Lord forgive me, Lord forgive me / Things I don't understand / Sometimes I need to be alone"
good kid, m.A.A.d city (or, as i'm going to abbreviate it, GKMC) is a weird one. in the best ways possible, mind you i think it's by far the biggest outlier when it comes to kendrick's "Big Four" albums in the sense that it's not exactly an "album" in the traditional sense. it's a collection of music released under a single label onto a playable medium, sure, but it's more than just that. it's a story. it's a movie in song form, and while it's a bit rough around the edges it manages to work that basic idea into an incredibly well-produced and enjoyable hip-hop opus.
GKMC's main theme is, of course, hood life more generally and gang life more specifically. it's an album laying out the truth behind living in a city like compton: it's rough, it's violent, it's tragic, sure, but it's also filled with camaraderie and brotherhood. it's a city where you're forced to grow up quickly. brothers get shot, stores get robbed, drugs get sold and abused, and that destroys families—but these conditions also lay the foundations for the strong family dynamic that carried kendrick forwards.
while it's definitely rough around the edges and very much more of a proof of concept than anything, it lays some very important foundations for what comes after it and manages to tell an incredibly engaging story by mixing skits and compelling musical narratives. it's a DAMN.-lite in many ways, but it also manages to carve out its own position in kendrick's discography as arguably his most accessible and understandable concept album. i appreciate that. GKMC gets a very solid
