Kendrick Lamar is seemingly everywhere these days, and deservedly so.  Everything Lamar touches turns to hip-hop art.  This week featured a couple of fantastic new cameos by Lamar that added immensely to strong showings from the main attractions.

First, Atlanta’s Jeezy celebrated the release this week of his new album, Seen It All: The Autobiography.  Jeezy’s enlisted the help of some dude named Jay Z on the album’s title track, but now he’s brought the heat in a remix of Holy Ghost featuring the all-time energy and intelligence of Kendrick Lamar (who enters hard at 2:48).  Check it out below.  Dang.

Illustration by Shintaro Kago

The second cameo comes via Flying Lotus, who has been streaming through our consciousness since at least 2010, after which we gave him credit in our Best Albums (Cosmogramma) and Best Songs (And the World Laughs With You) of 2010.  But we acknowledge being simpleton, lyric-centric music-lovers and admit to becoming distracted and missing a lot of great instrumental music, including FlyLo’s.  But we quickly snap back to attention when words are added to the FlyLo mix (along with more musical aggression).  And when those words are aggressively provided by the great Kendrick Lamar, we are all-in.  Check out below the new FlyLo track Never Catch Me, featuring the luminous Mr. Lamar.  The track starts out briefly woozy, but the drums kick it up quickly and at 0:13, Kendrick enters and it’s off to the races “with hope inside of my bones.”  Superb.