and solemn mid-2000s Roots albums." Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker finds its use of "smooth" music as a backdrop for "rough" scenarios to be analogous to Dr. Dre's G-funk during the early 1990s, but adds that "Lamar often sounds like Drake ... whose various dreamy styles have very little to do with the legacy of the West." Okayplayer's Marcus Moore writes that its "expansive and brooding" instrumentals eschew "California's glossy West Coast funk" for a "Dungeon Family aesthetic." Lyrically, the album chronicles Lamar's experiences in his native Compton and its harsh realities, in a nonlinear narrative. The songs address issues such as economic disenfranchisement, retributive gang violence and downtrodden women, while analyzing their residual effects on individuals and families. Lamar introduces various characters and internal conflicts, including the contrast of his homesickness and love for Compton with the city's plagued condition. Del F. Cowie of Exclaim! observes a "transformation" by Lamar's character "from a boisterous, impressionable, girl-craving teenager to more spiritual, hard-fought adulthood, irrevocably shaped by the neighbourhood and familial bonds of his precarious environment." Slant Magazines Mark Collett writes that Lamar executes the character's transition by "tempering the hedonistic urges of West Coast hip hop with the self-reflective impulses of the East Coast." David Amidon of PopMatters views that the album provides a "sort of semi-autobiographical character arc", while MSN Musics Robert Christgau writes that Lamar "softspokenly" enacts a "rap-versus-real dichotomy". The album features naturalistic, vérité-like skits that dramatize the characters' limitations. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times finds them to be a part of the album's "narrative strategy", with "prayers and conversations and different voices and recollections and interludes, all in service of one overarching story: Mr. Lamar's tale of ducking Compton's rougher corners to find himself artistically." Pitchforks Jayson Greene feels that they reinforce the album's theme of "the grounding power of family", interpreting "family and faith" to be "the fraying tethers holding Lamar back from the chasm of gang violence that threatens to consume him." Lamar exhibits a tempered delivery on the album and raps with dense narratives, internal rhyme, double and triple time flow and multiple voices for different characters. Music journalist Jody Rosen characterizes him as "a storyteller, not a braggart or punch-line rapper, setting spiritual yearnings and moral dilemmas against a backdrop of gang violence and police brutality." The song "Now or Never" was also chosen by LeBron James to be