GNX” is easily the most disciplined and direct music Kendrick Lamar has ever made, and if you really let yourself feel it, it might also be his most profound.

Kendrick Lamar starts his exhilarating new album by complaining that someone vandalized a mural depicting his face — a mural depicting his face in triplicate, in fact — on the side of a Honduran restaurant in his Compton hometown.

Midway through his snarling Drake diss, “Not Like Us,” Kendrick Lamar issued a succinct, but forceful personal mandate: “Sometimes you gotta pop out and show n—as.” It was both a plan of action and a self-fulfilling mandate. Since then ...