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The Vibe Shift Was Real After All
2022: The Year in Review
Just past midnight as May 12 flipped to May 13, I put on my earbuds and opened up Spotify. I lay in bed next to my sleeping partner. My mind whirred with anticipation. I knew sleep would be far off; I was going to just lay back and enjoy this.
Enjoy what?
C’mon, you already know … Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers. The night of release with that new tracklist smell. I pressed play. Track One; “United in Grief.” There’d be no skips.
It’d be no stretch for me to speculate that I’ve listened to Kendrick Lamar more in the past decade than any other musical artist. Spotify all but says so — he regularly appears in my year-end Wrapped Top-Five artists even in his lean years with no new releases.
When DAMN. arrived in April 2017, I listened to the album front-to-back no fewer than 26 times on a long weekend in New York, including slipping the DJ $50 to play it on repeat at the Crocodile Lounge in the East Village until just shy of 3 a.m. [If there were other patrons in the bar beside my friend and me, I sure as hell don’t remember them. I blame the fernet.]
From 2012 to 2018, I saw Kendrick Lamar annually in concert, including multiple SXSWs and the early-career statement set at FADER Fort that introduced me to…
