BY: ROBERT HAVELKA

Four months into 2017, Kendrick Lamar decided spring had arrived – he released his newest album Damn and swept away the competition. Almost immediately, Damn topped the Billboard 100 and has remained there since. His album has set records as each individual track has snuck into the Top 100 – with majority breaking the Top 50. It would appear that Kung Fu Kenny has managed to break his way to the top again. Not only has he remained immensely popular since his major label debut in 2012, Lamar has never ceased to raise the bar and live up to high expectations.  At this point, it is just a matter of how long he will remain in the Top 100.

In addition to his record-breaking success, Lamar’s Damn has in one week sold more albums than any other released in 2017 thus far. It is almost impossible to imagine what that actually looks like – but it means that he has managed to sell 100,000 more copies of his album than Drake’s More Life which previously held the honor. All this adds fuel to the long-burning feud between Drake and Lamar, as each continues to outperform the other.

To top all of this off is the fact that Lamar claims that he has more new music coming. As if topping the charts on release wasn’t good enough for the West Coast prodigy, he is already claiming to have even more up his sleeves. It appears that Kendrick Lamar is running the show and we are all just guests in his theatre as he makes history.

Below is a list of rankings of Lamar’s 14 track Damn:

• #1 – “Humble”
• #4 – “DNA” – (All below are debut)
• #14 – “Loyalty” with Rihanna
• #16 – “Element”
• #18 – “Love”
• #32 – “Yah”
• #33 – “XXX”
• #35 – “Feel”
• #37 – “Pride”
• #42 – “Lust”
• #50 – “Fear”
• #54 – “Blood”
• #58 – “God”
• #63 – “Duckworth”

All we can say is that we are excited for whatever else Lamar decides to showcase. He has yet to disappoint – not a small feat, considering his five-year career as a nationally known rapper. Again, he claims to have quite a bit of ‘new’ music in the works and that leads us to believe that it will be just as compelling as Damn was – full of story-telling, fully developed plot points, and an impossible level of depth.  We can’t imagine him releasing it anytime this year – but then again it wouldn’t be the first time he has surprised us.

Sources:

http://thesource.com/2016/06/17/happy-birthday-kendrick-lamar/