On a snowy night in London, Compton seems as distant as Mars. Twenty-five years ago the Los Angeles suburb was the epicentre of a hip-hop revolution, spawning NWA and hence gangsta rap. Now it is back on the map thanks to 25-year-old Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, whose Good Kid, MAAD City is the most impressive hip-hop album in years. Lamar respects his neighbourhood's illustrious history, not least because he's mentored by an older notable of the city, Dr Dre, but he's no gangsta-come-lately. Billed as "a short film by Kendrick Lamar", Good Kid, MAAD City is a morally complex, sometimes startlingly moving narrative about a young man who tries to do the right thing even as his friends and environment conspire to lead him astray.
It's impossible to replicate an album as finely tuned as this on stage, but what Lamar does instead is equally impressive, crafting a captivating show out of hip-hop's basest elements: an MC and a DJ on a large, bare stage. Often he strips it down even further by instructing the DJ to kill the music so he can finish a song a cappella. Not that he's alone. The crowd seem to know every word, so Lamar can bounce lines back and forth, employing the audience as sidekick MCs. Online mixtape tracks are greeted like time-tested radio hits; big songs such as Backseat Freestyle trigger shuddering roars. This much enthusiasm could go to anybody's head, but just about the only thing Lamar doesn't do is brag. Dressed in top-to-toe black, he mixes inspirational pep talks, rags-to-riches testimony, pantomime humility ("I don't even know if y'all like Good Kid, MAAD City"), flattery, flirtation, jokes and so much gratitude that you might come away thinking he'd be on skid row were it not for the charity of Londoners.
The way Lamar delivers hip-hop's visceral pleasures without resorting to the usual cliches is quite something, so you can't feel too aggrieved that some of his more sophisticated tracks go unplayed or that his vocals lose their melancholy nuances in translation to the stage. Sometimes the gap between the records and their live versions produces intriguing tensions: the nauseous soul-searching of Swimming Pools (Drank) effectively becomes a boozer's anthem when the whole venue is shouting "Drank!" It's a tightrope act that doesn't feel like one. Not since Kanye West's early shows has a major new MC balanced swagger and sensitivity with such aplomb.
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