Kendrick Lamar performs 2017.
Amy Harris/Invision/AP ImagesKendrick Lamar celebrated the 10th anniversary of Section.80 during a deft, tightly coordinated set at the Day N Vegas festival on Friday. The performance marked Lamar’s lone scheduled show of 2021, and his first U.S. concert in two years.
Released in 2011, Section.80 was Lamar’s easy-going yet audacious debut album, which swings from brassy boom bap to R&B in 6/8 time to funky ventures into southern hip-hop. The rapper became a hit-maker and cultural phenomenon on his follow-up, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, in 2012; he’s racked up pretty much every accolade available, from platinum plaques to Pulitzers, in the years since. But he wasn’t always a juggernaut — casting back to Section.80 was a chance for a star to revisit his roots as a scrappy up-and-comer.
And a chance for Lamar to inject some variety into his set by performing songs he’s rarely revisited in the last five years: “F*ck Your Ethnicity,” a quarrelsome, jump-in-place number; “Hol’ Up,” snappy but simmering; “A.D.H.D.”, a tale of substance abuse that ends up surprisingly celebratory in the hands of a festival crowd; “HiiPower,” Lamar’s first official single, a head-nod track in which the rapper invokes the lineage of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
But in truth, the crowd was waiting for juggernaut Lamar. As soon as the organ-like loop that opens “Money Trees” oozed out of the speakers, hip-hop karaoke ensued. (Maybe this preference for the hits was because a festival crowd contains more casual listeners; it might also have to do with the fact that two major stars who preceded Lamar at Day N Vegas on Friday, Roddy Ricch and Polo G, likely weren’t even in high school when Section.80 came out.) The rest of Lamar’s set was a chronological tour of his biggest tracks, a performance as predictable and gratifying as a home run derby.
The rapper frequently stalked the stage alone, clad head to toe in white, with cozy, comfy sweater sleeves extending several inches past his fingertips. Any musicians remained hidden; Lamar’s only accompaniment came in the form of kinetic dancers. First that meant a contingent of more than a dozen men clad in bow ties and maroon blazers, who served as hectic moons orbiting Lamar’s star. They pretended to pray one moment, fake brawled the next, and illuminated the MC in flashlights later. A group of young ballet dancers also joined the fray, and Lamar danced frequently as well. He relied on jerky, robotic movements, or ran in place, or waved his arms like a windmill gone haywire.
Lamar didn’t have to deliver a verse if he didn’t want to — a track like “Alright” has reached the status of a modern standard, and the crowd was content to carry the whole thing. When the rapper briefly queued up “Poetic Justice,” his 2012 Drake collaboration built around a lethal Janet Jackson sample, he just let fans sing to him before moving on.
But more often than not, Lamr rapped with his typically bewildering dexterity, demonstrating a syllable-slinging flair that was mostly absent during other performances from the first day of Day N Vegas. He was especially impressive verbally hot-stepping and slip-sliding around the lacerating guitar in the Isley Brothers-sampling “I.” He was vehement yet agile throughout “Blacker the Berry.” He was a funky drill-sergeant orchestrating a fierce, stiff-spined march during the DJ Quik-like “King Kunta.”
Towards the end of the night, Lamar brought out his cousin Baby Keem to perform several songs — including the martial “Family Ties” and the blurting, bottom heavy “Range Brothers,” which also happen to represent Lamar’s two most recently released verses. (Keem is also set to perform at Day N Vegas on Saturday.)
The set’s energy flagged briefly, but then Lamar grabbed hold of the reins again, double-timing his way through the power ballad “Love,” from his 2017 album DAMN. The crowd knew what to do — they sang every word.
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Paul McCartney welcomed around 50 fortunate fans into Abbey Road Studios on Tuesday, May 5, for an intimate preview of his upcoming album, ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’. During the special listening session, he opened up about the inspiration and memories behind many of the songs featured on the project.
After attendees handed over their phones, they were guided into the iconic Studio Two, the same room where The Beatles famously recorded much of their catalogue. Before the event officially began, McCartney’s voice could already be heard from the control room as fans looked around hoping to spot the music legend. He later walked downstairs into the studio, where a cosy set designed like a personal living room had been arranged with vinyl records, framed pictures, and decorative pieces, including a street sign displaying the album’s title.
“Hello, welcome to Abbey Road,” McCartney greeted the audience as he settled into his chair. “I’m going to play the new album for you and try and think of stuff to say about it.” Over the next hour and a half, he reflected on moments from his childhood in Liverpool and the earliest years of his bond with his Beatles bandmates.
He explained that the album includes “quite a few” tracks that revisit earlier parts of his life and shared why he often finds himself writing about the past. “It occurred to me that that’s where your big bank of information is,” he said. “If you’re Charles Dickens, you’re gonna write about how your dad was in prison or something. [The past] is a very rich field of information.”
One of those reflective tracks is ‘Down South’, an acoustic driven song that recalls McCartney hitchhiking with George Harrison when the pair first became close. “It would be me who’d suggest to John [Lennon] and George, ‘Let’s go hitchhiking’,” he remembered. “I can’t see John doing that, or George. It was my thing.” He then jokingly exaggerated his Liverpool accent while recreating the moment, before sharing a story about getting a ride on a milk float with Harrison, who ended up sitting on the battery and burning himself when the zip on his jeans touched it.
“Memories are a weird thing,” he said while wrapping up the story. “I was talking to Olivia [Harrison, George’s widow] and she said, ‘Oh yeah, George told me about that and how you got the zip burn!’ I swear it was George!”
‘Days We Left Behind’, the first single from ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’, includes references to Lennon, who McCartney admitted he still gets “emotional talking about” to this day. Another track, ‘Home To Us’, reflects on life growing up in Liverpool and the working class neighbourhoods McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr came from. “The three of us were raised in quite poor conditions,” he told fans, laughing that when he describes the housing estates to Americans, “it sounds like Downton Abbey”. “No matter how rough it was, it was home to us.”
The song also features Starr on drums and vocals, with the two musicians trading lines throughout the track. McCartney explained that Starr originally recorded the drum parts at producer Andrew Watt’s Los Angeles studio, though the drummer became frustrated after not hearing the recording appear anywhere. McCartney later asked Watt to replay the session and described the performance as “really good – very Ringo”, which motivated him to complete the song and send it back to Starr, telling him, “‘Here you are, this is what you wanted’”.
Paul McCartney credit: Sonny McCartney / MPL Communications
When McCartney later invited Starr to contribute vocals, the drummer only returned chorus parts, leaving McCartney unsure how he felt about the song. “I thought, ‘He must hate it!’” he admitted. After speaking directly with Starr, the pair eventually understood each other properly and completed what McCartney described as the first “Paul-Ringo duet”.
Elsewhere on the album, McCartney revealed that ‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’ includes the first song he has ever written about his parents, ‘Salesman Saint’, which centres on perseverance through difficult periods “because they had to”. Other songs include ‘Mountaintop’, inspired by the “hippy mood” surrounding Glastonbury, and ‘Ripples In A Pond’, written as a love song dedicated to his wife Nancy.
Throughout the listening session, McCartney enthusiastically mouthed the lyrics, pretended to play drums and guitar along with the music, and occasionally grabbed an acoustic guitar to demonstrate certain melodies for the crowd. While discussing ‘Life Can Be Hard’, he played the main guitar riff live. After accidentally hitting the wrong note, he laughed and admitted, “I haven’t been practising. You’d think if you knew you were doing this, then you’d have practised.” Smiling afterward, he added: “But I don’t care!”
‘The Boys Of Dungeon Lane’ arrives on May 29 and was produced by Watt across sessions in Los Angeles and East Sussex.
Just hours after the playback event ended, it was also revealed that McCartney will appear as a guest on The Rolling Stones’ forthcoming album, ‘Foreign Tongues’. The collaboration follows his contribution to the band’s previous release, ‘Hackney Diamonds’.
