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Music

We Apologize but Here's Kendrick Lamar Doing Spoken Word on a New U2 Song

If it's any consolation, you only have to listen to it for 30 seconds.

U2 loves a good, powerful spoken word segment. From "Bullet the Blue Sky" to "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World," nothing seems to get the band honked up more than having Bono recite stuff. In 2017, the idea of having Bono recite stuff is kind of played out, so what's a stadium rock group to do? You apparently get the greatest rapper alive to appear uncredited on a new song, as though that's not a big deal or anything.

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Some context: U2 is gearing up to release Songs of Experience, the companion piece to their infamously mandatory-for-iPhone-users album Songs of Innocence. They just put out two new songs, "Get Out of Your Own Way," and "The Blackout," with Kendrick featuring in a brief outro on the former. The two disparate artists last collaborated on DAMN.'s "XXX," which was momentarily dreaded before being gratefully revealed to be the album's scariest, toughest song. "Get Out of Your Own Way" is… not that.

Again, it's an extremely brief portion and Kendrick just basically booms out some pseudo-Biblical statements ("blessed are the etc, etc.") for the song's final 30 seconds. But Kendrick does keep doing features like this, and we're lucky that he's a talented and tasteful enough artist to not fully submit to stereotypical "conscious rap" self-seriousness at all times. However, because of that talent, you must now endure this U2 song below. Funny how that works out.