Musically, Kendrick Lamar co-dominated 2015 along with Drake and Adele, and now he’s showing that he might ascend the to the throne in 2016. He was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night and performed a brand new, never-before-heard song called “Untitled 2,” which you can watch above.
The song is very much in the jazz-influenced and experimental style of his 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly, running through a couple different sections before culminating in a climactic and boisterous end that had Fallon doubled over in impressed laughter as he came out to throw to commercial. Lyrically, the song covers issues of poverty, anxiety, and his career (and a shout-out to Kobe Bryant, one of the most mentioned basketball players in hip-hop history). You can find the song’s annotated lyrics over at Genius.
It would appear that “Untitled 2” is a sort of sequel to “Untitled,” which has only even been publicly heard when Lamar performed it on The Colbert Report in 2014, which leads us to believe it’s very possible that last night’s Fallon performance may be the first and last time we ever hear it. Regarding the first “Untitled,” Lamar previously said that the song will never be released–there isn’t even a master recording of the song–because it was written to be “just a moment.”
Lamar also sat on the couch for an interview with Fallon, where the two talked about this Super Mario Bros. mash-up and the mountain of Grammy nominations that To Pimp A Butterfly received: 11, one short of the number of nominations Michael Jackson received for Thriller.
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HT: Pitchfork
IMAGE: NBC
