Kendrick Lamar has a lot of blunt, direct, intense, and hard bars all over his surprise new album GNX, but some lyrical mentions are a bit more vague. For example, a lot of fans raised their eyebrows at this particular line off of the project's opening track, "wacced out murals." "N***as cackling about [silence] while all of y'all is on trial," he raps on the cut. K.Dot's omission of the name in the song, plus the mention of the trial, got many folks thinking that he's talking about the Diddy scandal. Sadly, though, it could also refer to other criminal proceedings in hip-hop, such as Lil Durk and Young Thug's predicaments.
At the end of the day, this is just a theory, and one that Kendrick Lamar clearly wanted to leave open to interpretation. But most of the other verses on here don't offer listeners that luxury, instead opting for declarative statements that would be hard to misinterpret. For example, he also addressed the Super Bowl halftime show controversy involving Lil Wayne, making it clear that his Weezy fandom doesn't make him feel any less indignant.
Kendrick Lamar's "wacced out murals"
However, there are also some other moments on GNX where Kendrick Lamar gets more personally revealing, such as his remarks on his Black Hippy supergroup with Ab-Soul, Jay Rock, and ScHoolboy Q on TDE. These land on the track "heart pt. 6." "I jog my memory, knowing Black Hippy didn't work because of me / Creatively, I moved on with new concepts in reach," he raps on the song. Of course, that track is also notable for its title, one that Drake already used in his battle with Kendrick earlier this year.
All that's to say that Kendrick Lamar doesn't pull many punches on GNX, but it's understandable why he would want to treat the Diddy situation with caution – if that was really his intention, that is. Either way, he probably knows exactly what he's doing with lines like that, and the impact is sometimes far more important than the intent. We'll see what other curious bars, possible theories, and lyrical interpretations emerge as we continue to dive into this LP.