The album welcomes some South African rappers and singers, and there are brief glimpses of South African rhythms its most cheerfully upbeat song, “Redemption,” features the South African singer Babes Wodumo riding the South African club beat called gqom. Paak share “Bloody Waters,” matter-of-factly describing growing up around, and perpetuating, endless lethal gang rivalries: “It’s warfare. “Paramedic!” is a showcase for the Sacramento group SOB X RBE, boasting about being “heavy in the streets” over plinking percussion. Most of them appear as California figures, flaunting fancy cars and thinking about street-level battles. The album’s many guests don’t try as hard to connect with the movie. Lamar’s refusal on his albums to accept oversimplified roles like spokesman or generational conscience. Lamar announces “All hail King Killmonger” in “King’s Dead,” after a litany of repudiation and denial - “Not your baby, not your equal/Not the title y’all want me under” - that may sum up Killmonger’s negativity. Later in the track, with an almost conspiratorial voice, he asks, “What do you stand for? Are you an activist?” Lamar is also quite insistently “King Kendrick”: “King of the answer, king of the problem, king of the forsaken,” he raps over a nagging, dissonant loop. Yet in the track “Black Panther,” which ends with the words, “I am T’Challa,” Mr. Lamar dips into the roles of both T’Challa, the African king of the fictitious Wakanda who is also the Black Panther, and Erik Killmonger, his tenacious adversary. From the songs, it would be easy to believe the movie was set in California, although there are bits of African input tucked in. The album’s broader strategy is to hint at the movie’s story while concentrating on tales of struggle and swagger much closer to home. Lamar and Anthony Tiffith executive produced the “Black Panther” soundtrack. But the song’s release as a single has been marred by complaints that its video clip imitates, without credit, the imagery of a Liberian-British artist, Lina Iris Viktor. Lamar raps about conflict between hopeful choruses from SZA. “Black Panther” does include the mandatory action-film pop anthems. He’s superbly abetted by his frequent collaborator Sounwave (Mark Spears), the producer or co-producer on almost every track, who shifts the atmosphere constantly - often within a single song - deploying ratchety trap percussion, menacing electronics, blurry pitch-shifted samples, and even a rock guitar.

“Black Panther the Album” is very nearly as densely packed - with ideas, allusions and ambitions - as one of Mr. Lamar is this moment’s pre-eminent rapper: furiously inventive, thoughtful, virtuosic, self-conscious, musically adventurous and driven. That’s a loose enough rubric to give the album’s executive producers, Kendrick Lamar and the CEO of his label, Anthony Tiffith, known as Top Dawg, the leeway to build a coherent album that juggles multiple missions.Īfter four studio albums and many other releases, Mr. All the symbolic weight attached to “Black Panther” - as a major Hollywood blockbuster with an African superhero, an African-American director, a majority-black cast and a vision of a highly advanced, self-sufficient, colonialism-free African kingdom - extends to “Black Panther the Album,” a collection of songs “from and inspired by” the film.

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