With Black Panther, Kendrick Lamar adds a great soundtrack to his résumé

Here’s a best-case scenario confirmed: The Black Panther soundtrack is also one of the best rap albums of this young year, at once an expressive and cohesive addition to Kendrick Lamar’s oeuvre and a thoughtful mixtape from some of R&B and hip-hop’s best. Of course it comes from Top Dawg Entertainment, which has overcome its very bad name to become the most exciting label in popular music right now. Even if you remove Kendrick Lamar’s string of world-dominating instant classics from the roster, you’d still have megahits like SZA’s Ctrl, this year’s coolly audacious November from Sir, some tormented scorchers from Schoolboy Q, and a duo of low-key Southern-rap classics from Isaiah Rashad. Plus several albums from Ab-Soul, who is crazy. The label is on a hot streak for the record books, a hip-hop seal of quality unlike any since the glory days of Rawkus or Def Jux.
But you can’t really remove Kendrick from TDE. The TDE sound, for all its variety, is held together by the figure of Kendrick Lamar, hip-hop’s current hegemon, and the Black Panther soundtrack serves as another jewel in his crown. The story goes that he was only going to do a few songs for the movie until director Ryan Coogler showed him a chunk of it, at which point he got so fired up that he decided to handle the whole soundtrack himself. Pieced together while on last year’s Damn tour, the credits list commingles TDE and Lamar regulars (Sounwave, Zacari), likeminded superstars (Future, Travis Scott), West Coast shit-starters (Mozzy, SOB X RBE), and South African artists (Yugen Blakrok, Saudi), often rapping in Zulu. There is not a single performer here who doesn’t step up for the moment, whether it’s Swae Lee floating in on the early highlight “The Ways” or Vince Staples, one of the medium’s tightest technicians, laying waste to “Opps.” In the midst of a late-album cool-down, Mozzy rips another weary, emotional verse out of his torso; Ab-Soul pops up to share his thoughts on the electoral college.