"DAMN." by Kendrick Lamar may be the finest piece of literature Hip-Hop has ever produced. This is not an uncontroversial statement, Kendrick himself called it his best work when it came out and his opinion still challenges the canon to this day. The 2017 Pulitzer-winning album riddled with a cryptic tracklist, ambiguous phrases that keep repeating throughout the project, and occasional fragments of music played in reverse, "DAMN." does not work only on the dimension of words and music, on the content level, but transcends it and plays with the classic format of the 14-track LP as a way to convey its subliminal story-telling in a way no other musician had ever done.

It was during a rare episodic moment in Kendrick's life, between 27 and 29 years old, in which he could momentarily break free from the inertia of his career, and look back at the trajectory of his life: at the effect his art had had on the world, and yet at how it still remained ultimately and profoundly flawed, that gave birth to his most philosophical project to date. He breaks free from his increasing tendency towards explicit storytelling and linear narrative arcs to adopt instead an approach more similar to a series of glimpses into the state of his own soul as it progresses through time. It is utterly introspective.

"DAMN." seems to stand for two things: one, for the simple feeling of awe that such a high level of expertise with lyricism and music production causes us to say "damn." once we have finished going through the album, but most importantly, it teases at the project's secret meaning, encrypted to the public's ear: damnation, the biblical idea of humans being a cursed species. Beings that, through the power of free will, exercise the ultimate choice of following God's commandments or that, cursed by temptation, choose to willingly ignore them. The tracklist opens with the song "BLOOD.", in which we listen to Kendrick getting shot and dying while helping a blind woman, as a narrator reads the key lines for deciphering the project:

"Is it wickedness?
Is it weakness?
You decide
Are we gonna live or die?"

Kendrick suggests that damnation is essentially a choice that rests on the shoulders of the individual: choosing to live either through wickedness or weakness. Another one of the repeating motifs, "What happens on Earth, stays on Earth" (the original title of "DAMN."), also implies that we shall not fear going to hell, but that hell is right here, on Earth, depending on your decision. On top of that, seeing how we are living in an increasingly sinful and neglective world, something that he mentions repeatedly — and on the premise that humanity will be nothing more or less than the sum of its individual members' actions — he preaches that we, as a species, have collectively made the wrong choice, have misinterpreted the meaning of life and are living blindly, unconsequentially, doomed to eventually meet God's wrath when all of humanity's evil will be unveiled: apocalypse, originally meaning "the uncovering".

"I feel like this gotta be the feelin' where Pac was
The feelin' of an apocalypse happenin'
But nothin' is awkward"

Throughout the entire project we listen to a much more serious and somber Kendrick than usual, as if in the aftermath of his success he has come to confirm his suspicion that no amount of worldly success can lift the burden of this decision from his shoulders. The choice can't be put off any longer, as the opening lines of the closing track "DUCKWORTH." — named after his surname from his father's side — state:

"It was always me versus the world
Until I found it's me versus me"

The keyword for this album is duality, just as it is for its author — a recurring theme throughout his discography that he fully develops in "DAMN.". Kendrick was born on July 17th, making him a Gemini, the zodiac sign that reflects this profound shattering of his personality into this neat dichotomy of wickedness and weakness. Him being the king of an artistic movement, an artist out for blood, willing to see his convictions through to the end, the "wickedness", and at the same time of being a prophet, a deeply traumatized child who, through their circumstantial misfortunes, was able to develop an acute sensibility to the impressions of the world and is able to reformulate them into meaning, the "weakness".

He was born in 1987, the year his native city of Compton was deemed the deadliest city in the United States, and in an imperfect world in which wickedness — this hardening of the character — seemed the only way to survive, it was actually the weakness, the act of melting this layer away and allowing himself to be vulnerable which allowed him to create art and transcend this worldly state.

So Kendrick, as "Hip-Hop's rhyme saviour", sets "DAMN." as the stage for these two facets of his "duality personality" to battle it out, and flips the concept of wickedness and weakness on its head. He makes us question which concept actually represents strength. The album's narrative revolves around this single choice, the main character of the story being Kendrick himself — an allegory for humanity as a whole — and his character arc of escaping damnation by going from wickedness to weakness.

The album is designed in a way so that the motifs of weakness and wickedness are physically intertwined within the tracklist, so that one song which explores his weakness transitions into another where his wickedness is at full force. At the end there are fourteen tracks divided into two sets of seven, one for each motif, that fight one another as they alternate back and forth, with the weakness eventually slowly winning over Kendrick and him escaping the gunshot from the first song. Going from "PRIDE." to "HUMBLE.", from "LUST." to "LOVE.", until we arrive at the closing song of the album, where Kendrick takes us back in time and revisits the story of his life, of how he came to be: a mere "coincidence".

In an interesting twist of fate, Kendrick's father — Kenneth Duckworth — already knew the boss of the music label that discovered and nursed Kendrick to greatness, Antony "Top Dawg" Tiffith. They recognized each other when they met during one of Kendrick's studio sessions. When Antony was still a gangster, gathering the money that would eventually found the TDE music label, he intended to rob the KFC where "Ducky" worked, but chose to spare his life. It was a series of decisions between these two opposing father figures that raised him, the archetype of the weak and the wicked, that allowed Kendrick Lamar to exist. This is the incident that inspired the story of "DAMN.", and that inserts a literal plot-twist in the story:

"That one decision changed both of they lives, one curse at a time
Reverse the manifest and good karma, and I'll tell you why:
You take two strangers and put 'em in random predicaments
Give 'em a soul, so they can make their own choices and live with it

(…)

Then you start remindin' them about that chicken incident
Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence?
Because if Anthony killed Ducky, Top Dawg could be servin' life
While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight"

The gunshot from the first track kicks in, and the entire album starts playing again, but in reverse, because "DAMN." by Kendrick Lamar tells two different stories depending on the order in which you listen to it. It either tells the story of Kendrick being brought into this world and escaping damnation, as he did in real life, choosing weakness over wickedness, or you can listen to it from the last to first track — the order of the "Collector's Edition" — in which Antony did indeed choose to kill Duckworth and Kendrick grew up without a father, without the music label, and from this state of weakness grows increasingly into wickedness. He goes from "HUMBLE." to "PRIDE.", "LOVE." to "LUST.", until in one last gesture of kindness before his full transformation, he willingly runs into what could be presumed to be Lady Justice, proverbially known to be blind, and gets shot and dies in "BLOOD.".

Kendrick rests the power of the ultimate choice of damnation in the hands of the listener. You decide the order in which you want to listen to the album. You decide if we are going to live or die.

Indeed… damn!