Revisiting untitled unmastered.: Kendrick Lamar’s Most Overlooked Masterpiece

Benjamin Kenyon

Rap/Hip-Hop Journalist

Over the last few weeks, the world has witnessed Kendrick Lamar wrap up his nearly year-long beef with Drake with a victory lap for the ages. In the span of a week, Kendrick racked up five Grammys for the inescapable diss track “Not Like Us”, and, accompanied by SZA, put on one of the best Super Bowl halftime performances to date. Post-halftime performance, Kendrick has broken a plethora of music streaming records, including but not limited to being the first rapper to have three albums appear simultaneously in the top 10 of Billboard’s Top 200 Album Charts, and being the first rapper to achieve the milestone of having 100 million monthly listeners on Spotify. All that to say Kendrick has entered a new stratosphere commercially. However, he is far from a fresh face, having now released music since the tail end of the aughts.

Sandwiched in between two critically acclaimed RIAA platinum certified albums, To Pimp A Butterfly (2015) and DAMN (2017), comes the undeservedly overlooked untitled unmastered. Released in 2016. The album did reach number one on the Billboard Album Charts upon its release but failed to stick in the cultural zeitgeist the way these surrounding albums did. The album’s relative lack of commercial success is likely due to it being rather unconventional, a collection of B-sides recorded during the making of To Pimp A Butterfly. While many b-side releases come across as label-crafted commercial fodder, untitled unmastered stands on its own as a collection of music and is far-and-away Kendrick’s most underappreciated project. Aptly titled, the album’s songs are untitled and unmastered. Some of the tracks feel more fleshed out simply cut from “To Pimp A Butterfly” for thematic reasons or track list bloat, others feeling more stripped back, demos not brought to complete fruition. As with To Pimp A Butterfly, untitled unmastered seamlessly bounces back and forth between samples and loops, and jazz and funk instrumentation.

The project opens with “Untitled 01 | 08.19.2014.”, a track whose lyrics, like much of the project’s songs, read as a modern parable to Revelations, Kendrick’s verse on the track beginning with the recalling of a vision, “I seen it vividly, jogging my brain memory, life no longer infinity, this was the final calling.” Lamar paints a hellish picture of a world gone awry, fueled by institutional failings and false prophets, common themes. Built around a sample of Mass Production’s 1976 song, “Galaxy” and a thumping bassline, the instrumental amplifies the themes of the song, dark, foreboding and like much of “UU’s” production, intoxicatingly hypnotic.

“Untitled 04 |08.14.2014.” plays as an answer to the turmoil that plagues Kendrick on “01”, the tracks notably recorded within the same week according to their respective titles. The refrain that the song is centered around, “Head is the answer, head is the future,” sung by then-labelmate SZA and punctuated by a whispering Kendrick trying to spew wisdom before being cut off, sounds at first like simple innuendo, but is rather a call to action in which Kendrick encourages his listeners to use their intellect and expel outside noise that may stand in the way of self-actualization and enlightenment about the true nature of the systems holding them back. “04” gives way to the album’s best song, “Untitled 05 | 09.21.2014.” The instrumental, featuring a sprawling bassline played by frequent Lamar collaborator Thundercat, and a mesmerizing drum loop. The masterful backing track allows Kendrick to once again voice his frustration with the modern world, as well as his own personal inner turmoil regarding his faith.

“UU” serves as a fascinating time capsule of Kendrick Lamar’s career, not only through gifting listeners more of the universe illustrated in “TPAB”, but also through the sneak peeks of what would become the sound Kendrick adopted in the DAMN. era given on “Untitled 02 | 06.23.2014.” and “Untitled 07 | 2013-2016”. When an artist of Kendrick’s caliber sustains and somehow consistently heightens their dual critical-commercial success for as long as he has, projects are bound to slip through the cracks. While it seems like “UU” has somewhat fallen victim to this, the work stands as one of if not Kendrick’s most potent artistic statements.