Is it good or bad that your fansite has a better Google rank than your official site? We forget…
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[7.00]
Andrew Casillas: Good Lord, I hope this guy stays on a roll. The lyrics veer close to the edge of self-importance too often to call this track perfect, but the wooziness of the beat juxtaposed with Kendrick’s schizophrenic delivery keeps this an easy sell. The whole things just oozes confidence.
[9]
Brad Shoup: Love how Kendrick moves from scene-setting to the gonzo fantasy of the chorus. But I don’t know why his conscience (who can’t rap for beans) shows up, making this track feel like one-and-a-half verses plus a killer chorus. I suppose I should be grateful this dread creeper isn’t set in the AM, and glad for the synth-string figure at the end, short as it may be.
[6]
Anthony Easton: I love when he growls in the lower register, beautiful and a little bit threatening, and I adore the line “I’ve got a pool full of liquor and I dive in,” like some Cole Porter updated for current pleasures. Production is a bit by the numbers, though; it could be stretched out and pushed lower, made to prowl a bit more.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: Here’s conscious rap that’s never condescending and also featuring some fun details (Kendrick Lamar’s different voices highlighted by his inner-Jiminy-Cricket verse, the chorus resembling Friday night in a dorm room). That “Swimming Pools (Drank)” can balance being both an introspective downer and something that would be great to sing along too on a road trip is mighty impressive.
[9]
Will Adams: This mirrors my freshman year experiences so closely that the first listen gave me chills. A swimming pool as a metaphor for drunkenness seems trite because it’s so apt; it’s an unnatural environment that smothers you, but it’s a fascinating new world that offers a novel, if warped, perspective. Kendrick deftly navigates the voices one encounters after a few drinks: the enabling friend, the woozy conscience, and the internal monologue. The production, itself submerged, beckons him further towards the water. We’re left with a jarring white noise stab, not so much the splash of diving into a pool but that of an abandon-free cannonball into a churning sea.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: The most welcome aspect of “Swimming Pools” is the doors it opens — its suggestion that the murky weightlessness trafficked by Drake and his 40-inspired contemporaries contains artistic possibilities not even yet thought of. Lamar’s primary contribution is real rapping prowess, which is not to say that his contemporaries don’t rap well, but that they rarely delve into the technical and conceptual territory introduced here: the Bone Thugs–esque triplets or the eerie squeak Lamar uses for his inner monologue. That these ingredients fail to cohere into more than the sum of their parts keeps “Swimming Pools” short of perfect — I’d hope they could make for something more than a booze-up, even a discomfiting one. But falling short of the otherworldliness of Lil Wayne’s “Dying” still makes for an impressive feat, and, naturally, it sounds even nicer chopped and screwed.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: Matching the downbeat moral miserabilism of Drake with the relentless dumb-chorus bap of Wiz Khalifa might seem like a recipe for self-indulgent stupidity, but Kendrick’s a better rapper and a better storyteller than that; there’s a goofy pleasure in the second verse’s chipmunked-voice conscience, and no matter how repetitive the chorus gets, he’s never boring.
[9]
Alfred Soto: Although the leap from from growled ruminations in the intro verses to the simulation of drunken abandon in the chorus is well done — I hear early Nas in the way in which he projects gravity without being a motormouth — the Slim Shady voice signifying his conscience is corny, in part because the beats are 2000-era Em. Still, points for teaching without preaching.
[6]
Mallory O’Donnell: Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Bottle” re-imagined for the era in which cautionary tales are synonymous with celebratory odes. So this is probably equally useful for drinking oneself to death to or for quitting the booze on. Only one question: do both options have to sound so humorless?
[4]