Top 100 10s: 91. KENDRICK LAMAR - "King Kunta" (Patreon)

At some point Spotify did a deal with Genius (formerly RapGenius) to feed snippets of into about songs onto your screen while they played, a kind of streaming music equivalent of the DVD commentary track. These are always banal and annoying, except in the one case of “King Kunta”, where I watched the whole thing goggling at the references - samples, borrowings, lyrical nods - Lamar was layering the song with for my app to glibly unpack.

Kendrick Lamar makes extremely dense music which only sometimes sounds that way - “King Kunta” is my favourite song by him partly because it wears its density more lightly than most; everything in the track is subordinate to its striding rhythm, this determined march across decades of black American culture and funk history - Roots, Bootsy, Michael Jackson, and dozens of others crowding into the groove. Lamar is the tour guide but also the destination. Even if you don’t take in every point, the pride in the walk is unmistakable. And intoxicating.