Bonnaroo: Kendrick Lamar and Rappers With Vocal Bite June 8, 2012, 1:28 pm Qualifications for rappers at Bonnaroo 2012: technique, inclusiveness, vocal bite, stage presence. Thursday night brought three in a row to the This Tent for a deluge of multiply rhymed lines and polysyllabic precision: Danny Brown, Yelawolf and Kendrick Lamar. More are due in the next days, both well-qualified on those fronts: GZA and Ludacris. But their shticks were different, and in my earnest way I prefer Kendrick Lamar, who equally earnestly presents pleasures-booze and sex-as ways to "ease the pain" of a deprived upbringing and a competitive adult life. Bonnaroo Jon Pareles reports from the music festival in Manchester, Tenn. Mr. Lamar hails from gangsta rap central: Compton, Calif. But instead of directing his anger at the police, women or outsiders, he criticizes himself and his environment, and he projects far more ambition than victimization. One song, "She Needs Me," praised a career woman-a rare creature in hip-hop. Mr. Lamar uses hip-hop's love of raunch and brand names (especially fashion labels and upscale alcohol) as teaching tools. Both, for him, are incidental to tales of striving, self-improvement and overcoming a rough past, delivered with a cutting rasp and fast, complicated meter shifts. Yelawolf had a rasp, too, putting an edge on boasts and defensiveness; he's a white rapper, still an uncomfortable position even though he is signed to the label of another white rapper, Eminem. He battles any doubts with self-assertion and defiance, as his raps often toggle into doubletime to insist on his virtuosity. But his set was padded with a DJ showcase and cover songs, including a tribute to Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. Mr. Brown has two voices-a stentorian bark and a nasal, cartoonish whine-for raps about sex and death. He switches between them, over sparse, booming tracks, as his rhymes switch between wildly imaginative imagery and boasts about his potency. The raunch has plenty of singalong lines, and the Bonnaroo audience shouted them all with him.