Kendrick Lamar has recently partnered with Reebok to produce this powerful video of Kendrick and the youth of Compton, LA. The video captures Kendrick in his element, rapping the word of his hometown. Kendrick inspires his youth audience with a voice that is revolutionary, familiar to a black experience, and very loving all at once. He spits bars in the video like:
"That boy remind me of a young Martin Luther the way he picks up troopers and rounds up shooters like Malcolm X did"
After seeing the video, I was struck with the desire to look deeper into what Kendrick was about in his music, and decided to write this piece.
Now I've been listening to Kendrick since Look Out for Detox. Check it out.
Quite the introduction.
For me, to listen to Kendrick is to tune into a conflict familiar to myself and anyone else of the black male experience . And that is the conflict between a deep rooted violence and a great understanding and consciousness of the cycle of violence. Its the conflict between a good kid and a mad city. Kendrick captures that conflict in the acronym m.a.a.d. which according to Kendrick means either " my angry adolescence divided", or "my angel's on angel dust". The mad or m.a.a.d. city has an angel, and the angel on angel dust. Does the mad city have Kendrick's "angry adolescence divided"? Is that a division of violence and understanding? As I listen to Kendrick's songs I find my answers there. Kendrick brings violence to his music, without losing that understanding that makes his music so deep. For Kendrick Lamar:
"It was really about . . . getting to that success level when you can go back to your neighborhood and people feel like, you know, they look up to you."
Listen to Kendrick's To Pimp a Butterfly (TPAB). Kendrick reminds his audience right off that "Every nigga is a star" bringing a warm love to his lyricism. And in the same song:
"When I get signed, homie, I'ma buy a strap, straight from the CIA set it on my lap, take a few M16's to the hood, pass 'em all out on the block, what's good?" Even in these 2 bars violence is complemented by an understanding that has Kendrick getting his strap from the CIA and handing weapons to people in the hood, complicated by describing a violence of reciprocation and justice. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers passed out weapons to people in the hood. Yea, the violence in Kendrick Lamar's music complicates his messages, from his tendency to misogyny such as his bar in Money Trees, "I fucked Sherane, and went to tell my bros", or his threat to those who betray their loyalties "shooters go out to Judas". The violence comes from both his personal experience such as the tales he tells of house burglary with his "homies" in his song The Art of Peer Pressure, or retorts to enemies, real or imaginary. No illusions of goodness in his music. Yet, listening to the stories Kendrick shares in his music, I hear a message delivered along with all the criminality, violence, and anxious consciousness, and in my opinion is one of the greatest messages a role model can ever deliver. "I love myself". Yaas baby.
Kendrick delivers this message in the video product of his partnership with Reebok in an excerpt from his song I am (Interlude), as he shows off the talent of di Compton yute. A Mass Appeal interview of Kendrick Lamar has Pharrell Williams describing Kendrick's King Kunta as "unapologetically black". I get that message from Kendrick's music. Typically of Kendrick to complicate, in response to the question asked of him in the same interview: does he believe that TPAB resonates "more with black people", Kendrick says that the album is "not only for blacks", "I don't think it only resonates with blacks, but with people all around the world". Kendrick is just your average joe, answering the question "who is K. Dot" as he makes his music and weaves in its messages, as he asks in the song by the same aforementioned title Average Joe. Kendrick is the role model that anyone can identify with. Get hip to it. In process of becoming that role model, Kendrick addresses stereotypes of black males as drug users, offering a counter-role and identifying himself as someone who doesn't smoke in his song H.O.C.
Yes Kendrick.
His message to those who believe that this is "some high shit" that he wrote:
"I 'ont even smoke".
I hear the self-love in messages like this, and though Kendrick has no specific audience, he reaches everyone in a personal place as if talking directly to them.
Although he stresses that his messages in music don't appeal to any specific group, Kendrick does have concerns for the black community. Addressing High Tech High School students at an assembly Kendrick says:
“If we’re talking about the most urgent and immediate reasons that hip-hop is important now, I think it’s because of the fact that as a country, nation and society, we haven’t internalized that black lives matter. And the reason that this became a movement and a hashtag, and we’ve seen this coming up in the news over and over again, you know, ‘the unarmed black man being killed,’ it speaks to the nature of institutional racism, and hip-hop can be an incredibly powerful tool to address some of those systemic problems that still exist.”
And that's a message that Kendrick brings to everyone in his hip hop music, black or otherwise: "black lives matter". Whether conscious of it or not, people listening to Kendrick identify with an American black man role model. Kendrick has burglarized houses, shot and been shot at, smoked, made love, loved money and women, and still he loves himself in a country that doesn't, and his audience cannot help but love the Kendrick message. Kendrick can slip in a discussion of alcoholism into a favorite party banger.
"Okay, now open your mind up and listen me, Kendrick I am your conscience, if you do not hear me, then you will be history, KendrickI know that you're nauseous right now and I'm hopin' to lead you to victory, Kendrick, If I take another one down, I'ma drown in some poison, abusin' my limit"
Smooth Kendrick. Its true, Kendrick is smart and in Kendrick's own words: "I'm bright like Thomas Edison but Gucci Mane hood". And Kendrick takes his brightness from the hood and gives it with love in his soulful music. The message Kendrick delivers doesn't come out more for me than in his latest album TPAB. Check out one of my favorite songs on the album: King Kunta.
The video for the song was shot in the parking lot of the very cool Compton Fashion Center, or otherwise known as the Compton Swap Meet, and is the same site where Dr. Dre and Tupac shot the video for California Love (I can't see the resemblance, but I'll leave it to you to compare). When I first read the title of the album To Pimp A Butterfly, I immediately thought it a commentary on the exploitation of black people, and then I read Kendrick's interview with Mass Appeal and his break down of the meaning and realized that it was about pimping out a butterfly, to make a butterfly even more beautiful in a pimped out way, to "pimp out something from a negative place and take it to a positive place" (Kendrick Lamar). I had the perception that we black people always tend to the criticism, that there can only be negative commentary coming from someone as conscious as Kendrick and a title like "To Pimp a Butterfly". And I underestimated Kendrick's California grown love; its not true, overwhelmingly Kendrick and, the other Kendricks coming from the hood and making music focus on the optimistic side of thing, on the positive, and what's beautiful in their experience, turning the insidious and harmful into something powerful in the light of self-love. And they can get to the criticism and the negative but that's not all we, and they have to say. But do people listen when we Kendricks talk about the beautiful feelings of our lives? Do they take our thoughts and our feelings seriously? Or do they fall on unhearing or unconscious ears? I don't know, but you can get all the feeling you need and more from Kendrick Lamar if you're just willing to hear between the lines.
