“Squabble Up,” the second song you hear when embarking on a front-to-back listen of Kendrick Lamar’s surprise-dropped GNX project, now has a video.
Monday, Kendrick rolled out the song’s official video, directed by Calmatic. See it above. For a rundown of credits and features for the album, which arrived without warning last Friday, see here.
Tucked into the video are a tribute to the late Nate Dogg, a nod to Ice-T’s Power album, and a book hilariously titled How to Be More Like Kendrick for Dummies. Expect a closer dissection of the video in the minutes and hours ahead, as is customary with anything Kendrick-related. Notably, a banner unfurls at the end. It reads, perhaps as a sign that Kendrick has something special planned for the holiday season, “Compton Christmas Parade.”
Other references spotted in the immediate aftermath of the “Squabble Up” video reveal include (but are not limited to): Menace II Society, Soul Train, and Isaac Hayes’ Black Moses. The setting of the video, meanwhile, appears to take inspiration from The Roots' “The Next Movement.”
Kendrick and Dave Free are credited as executive producers on the video, which features choreography by Charm La’Donna.
Lyrically, “Squabble Up,” first teased in the video for “Not Like Us,” sees Kendrick referencing two songs off his 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city. At the end of the first verse, Kendrick raps that he has “the money and the power both gyratin.’” This, of course, calls to mind that album’s “Backseat Freestyle,” in which Kendrick raps “All my life, I want money and power” in the chorus. The second verse in “Squabble Up” makes mention of “a money tree,” calling to mind both a certain line from Drake amid their historic back-and-forth and the 2012 single “Money Trees.”
“Not Like Us,” in fact, stands to add several more Grammys to Kendrick’s name in February.
