The cultural worlds we create provide cartographies of our individual and collective anxieties, hopes, dreams, and perceptions about our existence. In a general sense, all this points out our effort to render life meaningful – to make meaning – and, thereby, develop orientation for navigating life circumstances. And those “maps” have a hand in shaping our worlds too.
By meaning-making, we intend to express the way humans work to provide a ‘coherent’ and ‘continuous’ narrative of our significance, the way we occupy time and space and through this occupation foster substantive and dynamic markers of belonging and purpose. Some label this meaning-making ‘religious,’ and while there might be merit to such labeling, for our general purposes in the pages that follow, we suggest these senses of and references to the religious are engulfed in larger processes of mapping out the significance and ‘weight’ of movement between life and death. The scope of this effort shifts and changes in light of the particular contextual dynamics of our location in time and space, the place we inherit from others and make for ourselves, even if only in fits and starts. Religion, and so many other non-unique aspects of human social life, accounts for the content and grammar/vocabulary used to describe our cultural worlds.
Without a doubt, one of the most compelling cultural worlds to emerge in the last half century has been hip-hop culture. As the increasingly well-known story of its birth goes, the workings of urban life in New York City during the economically troubled and politically explosive 1970s served as its genesis as a soulful phenomenology and philosophy of life in the postindustrial north, marked by the destruction of black and brown bodies.1 Disillusionment with the rhetoric of the American Dream was occurring because so few seemingly had access to social mechanisms for making that dream an existential reality, along with the policing of any effort to trouble this arrangement, fueled a metaphysical revolt against a common discourse of blame.
Hip-hop emerged as an alternate mode of meaning-making – a new ‘map’ highlighted by deep descriptions of urban decay as part of the politics of racial disregard. In fact, hip-hop celebrates animosity toward these circumstances, and it valorizes industrious efforts to not succumb to such circumstances. A signifying on the American Dream, using the material cultural mechanisms that were available to young black and brown folks of the period (hand-me-down records, boom boxes, public spaces, etc.), added a certain texture to this rhythmic reassertion of life. Hip-hop served to disrupt the lie of respectability and abundant opportunity for the willing by inserting details of the life circumstances of brown and black despised populations into the ‘sound system’ of mass global culture. And it did this with a language marked by a stark moralism pointing out the hypocrisy of a discriminatory nation. This disruption and assertion of an alternate narrative constructed the figurative boundaries around a certain rethinking of meaning in a seemingly inhospitable world.
Describing hip-hop’s birth in this manner isn’t to suggest that hip-hop culture is monolithic in its aims and interventions but that hip-hop came to mark a suspicion of assumed and inherited meanings. Hip-hop remains dynamic, diverse, and continuously evolving in light of the shifting circumstances of society and culture. Still, one might think of hip-hop as a postmodern trickster opening new possibilities of encounter, alternate modalities of identity formation, and storytelling about these identities. Such stories privilege the margins of life as the locations of creativity and cultural abundance. Drawing on a wealth of musical influences and maintaining a firm handle on the dynamics of urban life, hip-hop ushered in an alternate aesthetic that celebrated life as disruption – its meaning defined by a rebellious occupation of time and space. For artists, entrepreneurs, and countless young people focused on self-expression; the discomfort of the larger social world spoke to the relevance and ‘truth’ of their intervention.
With time, academics took note. Viewing it from a variety of angles, and often with an underlying admiration and adherence, academics sought to unpack hip-hop’s place within the history of ideas and cultural production. And so, over the last 30 years, hip-hop culture has received wide-ranging attention across disciplines, thus creating a hip-hop canon providing a foundation for future work in the growing area of hip-hop studies. These works have addressed various methods and sources used in the construction of this canon from a wide range of viewpoints – e.g., education theory, cultural studies, politics, black history, theology, religion, and philosophy, to name a few. These and others have devoted attention to geographic and other sorts of contextually distinct expressions of hip-hop, as well as to key figures for close investigation, such as Tupac Shakur, Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West.2 We turn now to one of these figures.
Rising to meet these stars in the pantheon of hip-hop royalty and divinity is Kendrick Lamar Duckworth. Born June 17, 1987, Lamar has arguably made one of the quickest and most powerful impacts on hip-hop culture, as well as commanded remarkable influence on the broader culture. Among the wide corpus of hip-hop artists, entrepreneurs, and producers today, Lamar’s quick rise to fame, his meticulous and original artistic genius as it concerns shaping cultural discourse and taste, his (and his team’s) ability to seemingly produce nodes of significance that matter to millions almost instantly, and an adept political tone of awareness have gained notice by everyone from right-wing pundits on Fox News to the (then) president of the United States, Barack Obama.
From his debut studio album Section.80 in 2011 to the Pulitzer Prize winning and Billboard chart topper DAMN. in 2017, the ‘collective’ word on the streets, online, and among many taking pen to page is that Kendrick Lamar is ‘the one’ – the reigning fount of significance for not only hip-hop culture specifically, but more generally for black and brown young people during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Among the most notable features of K.Dot’s (as he is affectionately called by fans) creative genius is his ability to give voice to the complexity of racialized life under continued economic, political, social, and cultural uncertainties. He does this while balancing the growing pressures of fame with the long-standing, hip-hop tenants of “keeping it real” with self (and others) under intense expectations of commodification.
No stranger to talk and expressions of the religious, black religions take a front-and-center role in his work, saturating the twists and turns of Lamar’s always astute, sometimes radical, sometimes conventional thoughts on race, religion, and culture. And all of this is conditioned by a general concern with meaning-making inside a world marked by aggressive absurdity. As is often a feature of rap music, much of Lamar’s work attends to rich existential themes, such as death, the atrophying of hope, honesty in the face of the ugliness in the world, and temptations to abandon one’s human responsibility toward others. Religion is one way of categorizing Lamar’s wrestling with such themes, but the specific substance of religion as typically considered (e.g., churches, the idea of God) takes on a quality of assuaging these anxieties. In this way, religiosity becomes a particular cultural coding or ‘mood’ meant to cushion the harsh nature of meaning-making (and meanings made) in the world. For instance, references to “Ain’t nobody prayin’ for me” as occur in Lamar’s song “FEEL.” from 2017’s DAMN. convey both the expression of religion as a kind of cultural coding – with which Lamar appears familiar – and the purported failure of that coding to attend to its meanings assumed or promised.
Bypassing the all-to-common controversial and proverbial claims to belief that have quickly lifted artists like Kanye West to immediate stardom (think, for instance, of the logical paradox and pop cultural brilliance of complaining about not receiving airtime on a song about Jesus receiving an abundance of airtime), Lamar’s work and use of black religion, in the context of the meaning-making processes of hip-hop culture, remain elusive enough to keep analysts talking about his own beliefs or concerns. And yet such references are explicit enough to begin putting his claims to work within a wider analytic and conceptual frame that would tell a much more complicated tale of black life. While various streams of black Islam continue to remain hip-hop’s ‘religion of choice’ even if solely rhetorically, K.Dot dives deep into less discussed aspects of black religious fragmentation and ideations. Admonishing his listeners on 2017’s “YAH.,” Lamar boldly reminds them that he’s not a politician and not about a religion. He’s “an Israelite, don’t call [him] Black no mo’/that word is only a color/it aint’ facts no mo’.” And just when fear or queasiness might set in that Lamar has taken a post-racial turn away from the kind of black pride felt on some of his earlier productions, his collaboration with Don Cheadle on the music video for “DNA.” offers a biological-scientific turn that is as certain as it is immutable: “I got loyalty/got royalty/inside my DNA.” What’s more, the Hebrew Israelites, who consider black, brown, and Native peoples as the original tribes of Israel, remains an understudied group of African Americans among both academics and the larger public. Albeit, making no clear distinctions nor preferences among the schisms of race, religion, culture, and world, taken together, Lamar’s musical corpus over his last four albums portrays, narrates, and rewrites the complexity of black history from a point of view of ever-changing and elusively legible black subjectivity. Yet in a post-Obama world shaken by the quick resurgence of attempts at racial domination and other authoritarian sensibilities, many find something familiar in Lamar’s lyrical testimony across various chasms of social and geographical difference.
Lately, Lamar has told the world that at least for now, where religion is concerned, he is flirting with the Hebrew Israelites. And the Hebrew Israelites, discussed in several chapters that follow, offer a moment to define what we intend by black meaning and/or religion. We have in mind something of the mapping process described earlier, personal and collective efforts to chart one’s life on one’s own terms. This is sometimes easier said than done, considering that the charting of one or more ‘maps’ is in relationship – sometimes positive, sometimes negative – with other people doing something similar. Black religion is this process meeting the particular circumstances faced by people of African descent that includes hundreds of years of forced bondage, another hundred or so years of segregation laws, and ongoing disparities today. In short, to borrow from the definition offered by (coeditor) Anthony B. Pinn, black religion amounts to a “quest for complex subjectivity,”3 an attempt to meet the purported human impulse to make meaning at a point in time and space where others (white folks, historically) have sought to truncate the meanings made by peoples of African descent. Another way to describe this is that white folks have, historically, sought to make meaning by instrumentalizing black folks. Black religion, then, is not merely the meaning-making, but the double task of response to this complicated, painful past (and present). To this extent, not only is Lamar often indicative of black religious expression, but he is also a practical beneficiary of black religious expression, whether we think of this as the activism witnessed from some Christian churches during the civil rights movement or we understand the innovative musical stylings of jazz artist Count Basie or blues man Robert Johnson as ‘religious.’ In both cases, Lamar stands on the shoulders of cultural creators who have come before him.
Both inside and outside traditionally considered ‘religious’ spaces, Lamar is an expression of black religion. More comprehensively, the Hebrew Israelites have long responded to the situation of race in the Americas by turning to ‘religious’ myth and language such that the oft-assumed distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘race’ becomes blurry, making Lamar’s claiming of affiliation with the Hebrew Israelites even more fascinating for its implications on our understanding of Lamar, the Hebrew Israelites, and religion in general. But Lamar is much more than a religious option, because like the capaciousness and complexity of black life and the struggle for the fullness of black humanity, religion is one among a variety of options to tell different stories, in different tones and hues.
For some, Lamar is simply a Christian who happens to be political. For instance, ChristianityToday.com’s Matthew Linder writes,
For others, Lamar is political: Justin Adams Burton remarks that “politics seems to be his most defining characteristic,”5 with religion taking a minor role in his art or reception. Still, for others, Lamar represents satanism and/or the illuminati, as dozens of websites and YouTube videos deliver accounts of Lamar’s affiliation with various conspiratorially constituted moral panics. Other accounts of Lamar suggest he is honest about his struggles to balance fame and physical, emotional, and mental well-being. For example, in a 2015 article in the journal The Lancet, Akeem Sule and Becky Inkster refer to Lamar as a “street poet of mental health.”6 Rather than priest or prophet, here, Lamar is psychologist. Some, like California State Senator Isadore Hall III, have suggested that Lamar is an icon, but, importantly, such a status has not impacted his relationship with a past life of black marginality.7 Others like Julian Routh, writing for the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, say Lamar represents the voice of a generation of young people.8 Lately, it seems many cannot stop writing about him in the United States, while he has at the same time been hailed as an artistic genius by commentators in places such as Germany where the feel, experience, and look of black American life might be transmitted only through film, a public speaker, and online. Der Spiegel’s write-up about the release of Lamar’s DAMN. includes a reference calling Lamar “the black Jesus” and is even titled – as if a nod to Lamar – “Jesus of the DAMNed” (DAMN. Der Jesus der Verdammten).9 The irony, of course, is in the naming of Lamar as the black Jesus, which can actually be understood better as “Jesus of the blacks.” It, this naming, has the effect of “religion-ing” Lamar while whitening “Jesus.” Highly thought of sources such as the Economist, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times have written about him, with the former suggesting Lamar is settling into the loneliness of being at the top,10 while Vanity Fair labels its long-form profile “The Gospel According to Kendrick Lamar.”11 The Vanity Fair piece does well to articulate not only the ‘religious’ sensibilities that many find inside of Lamar’s work but also the way fans, critics, and academics cannot seem to receive his musical product without ascribing to it some kind of ‘religious’ message. That is, Lamar matters for the study of religion because of the manner in which his art and the topic of religion exist in a matrix that helps demonstrate the way meaning is made; in the case of Lamar, we feel confident in describing that meaning as ‘black meaning.’
One might wonder how one person can be so many different things to so many people, yet – importantly – retain a particularized sense of (black)self? The possibilities for such a cultural milieu, as well as possible answers to this question, undoubtedly have something to do with what scholars call secularism, the ‘nones,’ and the simultaneity of waning membership in traditional churches while ‘belief’ remains what it once was or, in some cases, ever expanding in unexpected ways. While it is a bit presumptuous to read religion too much into the corpus of Lamar, it would be disingenuous to not reflect on the ‘secular’ modes of meaning-making that find Lamar mattering much more – in some quarters – than traditional religious figures. In short, Lamar offers something to most everyone and offers nothing to very few; he means something to many across the globe today. To wit, the pages that follow work to outline some of these many meanings and provide an incomplete, albeit we hope helpful, narrative articulating how these meanings are produced.
What has been said thus far begs the question: What is it about Lamar’s corpus of work that speaks to and about the meaning-making anxieties and efforts within a world such as ours?
In this book, we’ve asked a variety of authors to give attention to such questions of meaning-making, and the volume benefits from the complexity and layered nature of the various perspectives on this significant issue. What we offer is meant to add to an already robust and growing hip-hop studies canon; yet we seek to push theory, method, and data into a more affirmatively complex dialogue where topical and thematic range is not overlooked at the expense of quickly disappearing intellectual silos. While Lamar’s work is rooted in the particularities of black life, struggle, love, and pain, his catalogue of work seemingly provides something of global appeal in racially, politically, and culturally divisive and uncertain times. A close consideration of Lamar’s output and the substance of his art, spanning a range of topics from gender, science, class, race, mental health, structural inequities, community, and self-empowerment offers a unique opportunity to conceptualize, measure, and assess global shifts among varying cultural contexts. In other words, examining Lamar (and our relationship to him) can tell us a great deal about social and cultural trends and developments in a time when global connectivity, technological innovation, and political turbulence impact our environments and our capacity to make meaning in and of those environments.
Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning takes note of the prominent role black religious and theological grammar plays in Lamar’s work, not as much for religious purposes per se but rather as the mode by which his stories about life, black life in particular, are curated to produce narratives about, and express the material realities of, black thought and life. The book brings together a highly interdisciplinary and cross-occupational group of scholars, artists, and journalists, and so readers will encounter chapters that are conceptually organized, highly diverse, and informative for cultivating a better understanding of the historical and cultural contexts out of which Lamar creates, in addition to contributions that take Lamar’s work in unlikely intellectual directions.
The book is divided into four sections, each focusing attention on one of Lamar’s four studio albums. We hope that this organizational structure helps to chart a trajectory that is anything but linear, even if Lamar’s seemingly ever-increasing public reputation and influence make subtlety and nuance somewhat difficult to spot. In fact, Lamar shows both consistency and diversity across his first four albums. Additionally, the focus on each album is meant not as a comprehensive assessment of Lamar’s oeuvre, but a basic launching platform where this volume’s contributors have moved in a variety of directions. Some chapters emphasize empirical understanding of Lamar as a cultural phenomenon, while other chapters make Lamar into something of a foundation or platform for addressing deep philosophical questions and pressing social problems alike. In this way, the chapters that follow construct various portraits of Lamar and make meaning with and from those portraits. Also, in good hip-hop fashion, they remain critically suspicious of those meanings made.
The first part of the book looks to Lamar’s Section.80 from 2011. Lamar’s debut album, prior even to a major label contract, gave attention to the tragicomic posture toward life many young marginalized people experience today, where drug pipe and church drum retain a distinct meaning melded into a complex whole. Such a perspective has profound implications for the study of black religion and the study of black religion in/as a product (and producer) of black life and culture more generally.
Ralph Bristout’s chapter, “Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80: Reagan-Era Blues,” argues that in a microwave-based and on-demand culture, Lamar’s music rises above the dominant boring noise to offer some of the most masterful artistic statements of the 2010s. Among these compelling works is 2011’s Section.80. Bristout has us consider that if good kid, m.A.A.d city plays sonic film and To Pimp A Butterfly is pure poetry, then Section.80 is a volume of short stories. Inspired by a dream of Tupac Shakur, these stories offer a pensive interpretation of, and answer to, Shakur’s “Thug Life” maxim: “The Hate U Give Little Infants F – ks Everybody.” Bristout argues that in his ability as a lyrical orator, Kendrick pulls from visions of Martin Luther King Jr. (“HiiiPower”), reflects on the path of the conflicted (“Kush & Corinthians”), and meditates on the children of the Reagan era (“Ronald Reagan Era”) to deliver a cultural snapshot of the enduring black struggle. Speaking directly to the contemporary black experience in the aftermath of the 1980s Reaganomics, Bristout suggests that Lamar narrates the psychological and physical baggage from the perspective of being smack dab in “the dead f – king center” of the struggle, “looking around.”
Chapter 2 finds Margarita Simon Guillory asking “Can I be both? in her chapter titled “Can I be Both?: Blackness and the Negotiation of Binary Categories in Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80.” Here Guillory explores “Poe Mans Dreams” and “Kush & Corinthians” in order to document the complexity of Lamar’s persona characterized by both righteousness and wickedness, what Guillory labels as effectively “bipolar,” “oppositional modes of identity” that consider the “individual and the collective.” She explores the relationship between contradictory modes of identity construction and conceptual notions of blackness utilizing Lamar’s Section.80 to examine the creative ways that Lamar holds in tension various forms of ‘embodied contradictions’ to offer an intense depiction of blackness, one characterized by opposition, interplay, and dynamism.
The next chapter, written by Daniel White Hodge, is titled “Hol’ Up: Post-Civil Rights Black Theology within Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80,” and it suggests Lamar represents a myriad of complex theological tropes for black theological praxis and for the broader study of black people. In this post-civil rights era, Hodge argues that black people find themselves in a locality that is neither post-racial nor public Jim/Jane Crowism, neither fully equal nor fully separate, and not fully human yet celebrated in full for culture and entertainment; it is an era that contains all the elements of hope and forward momentum in the symbol of the first black president of the United States and the nefarious nature of racism poignantly symbolized in Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and countless other black lives lost at the hands of racism and profiling. For Hodge, Lamar’s symbolism rises as a figure and presents an anomaly, of sorts, in a post-civil rights era.
Michael Thomas’s chapter, “Singing Experience in Section.80: Kendrick Lamar’s Poetics of Problems,” explores the chronic trouble over not allowing black art to simply “be,” looking to Lamar’s reception as inherently “social” and emblematic of strictures historically (and still) imposed on black creative expression. For the philosopher Thomas, Lamar’s art creatively plays with the tension between our interpretations of black artistic production and our (collective) reception of black experience and life, writ large. In short, Lamar is bound to this narrowing of interpretive possibilities for black art and life, what Thomas refers to as “restriction,” while Lamar is at the same time – and like artists before him – able to negotiate this space of tension in productive, varied ways.
Part II of the book examines black meaning from the perspective offered in good kid, m.A.A.d. city (GKMC) from 2012. GKMC thoroughly situated Lamar’s social context – Southern California, Compton, Los Angeles, West Coast, poor, male, black – with such artistic panache that it is hard to not remain mesmerized by the finished product. With the album, Lamar managed to present sonically the breadth of black experience while maintaining a particular aesthetic and cultural commitment that mark his work as emblematic of the best of black cultural expressivity, regardless of genre or medium.
Juan M. Floyd-Thomas’s chapter, “The Good, the m.A.A.d., and the Holy: Kendrick Lamar’s Meditations on Sin and Moral Agency in the Post-Gangsta Era,” examines the ways in which Lamar grapples with notions of sin on both an individual and communal basis within the African American experience. Here Floyd-Thomas argues the most consistent and unwavering facet of Lamar’s work has been his incisive commentary and musing on the cumulative impact immoral and ‘illicit’ acts have had on his generation born and raised in the shadow of gangsta rap’s emergence within the global cultural milieu. Exploring the relevance of ‘West Coast’ sensibilities as fomenters of Lamar’s interest in morality, alongside thorough analysis drawing parallels with St. Augustine, Floyd-Thomas’s chapter presents Lamar as a marker of the contemporary complexities concerning making right-action in a world with so little of it and leaves readers with the impression that, at the very least, Lamar is honest enough to help navigate the moral terrain.
Rob Peach’s chapter, ‘ “Real Is Responsibility’: Revelations in White through the Filter of Black Realness on good kid, m.A.A.d city,” argues that Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city (2012) employs the trope of ‘realness’ as an expression of black cultural criticism. As a ‘real-life’ documentarian deploying an autobiographical ethnography of Compton, California, Lamar negotiates the politics of black male identity and Dubosian double-consciousness (“my angry adolescence divided”) against the backdrop of postindustrial urban decay in the manner of what Michael Eric Dyson (1993) calls a “post-modern secular spirituality.” In so doing, Lamar engages in what Peach refers to as an autoethnographic mode of racial/ized self-reflexivity, or ‘realness,’ that finds its expression in a synesthetic LP/‘short film.’ Writing from the standpoint of a white scholar of hip-hop and religion and a fan – a “KENdrid” – of Kendrick, Peach poses questions that produce an interpretive framework for unpacking and understanding better Lamar’s embodiment of ‘black meaning’ with GKMC in mind. Using autoethnography as method, Peach’s chapter attempts to answer these questions as a means by which to model and sharpen the white religion studies scholar’s engagement of and with the ‘black meaning’ of hip-hop.
‘ “Black Meaning’ Out of Urban Mud: good kid, m.A.A.d. city as Compton Griot-Riff at the Crossroads of Climate-Apocalypse,” by James W. Perkinson, argues that Lamar’s first major label album good kid, m.A.A.d city put the Compton rapper on the map. Perkinson’s contribution, by “a wanna-be-human hiding in white skin,” as he self-describes, asks if Lamar’s riff on ghetto life can be understood in parallel with ancient griot wisdom and teaching. Perkinson juxtaposes Lamar’s laments with the manner of old griot rites of recitation in thirteenth-century Mali’s struggle to ‘sing’ the world back into existence. In a poetic fashion that seemingly seeks to inspire and mimic the brilliance of hip-hop as a tool for social intervention, Perkinson’s chapter offers a word on the tragic late coming of Lamar (as a voice who might inspire the masses to address current social and ecological climate crises), while Perkinson also suggests many may find solace in the manner in which Lamar’s complex reworking of ancient wisdom gives glimpses of a way forward.
Christopher M. Driscoll’s “Rap as Ragnarök: Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, and the Value of Competition,” offers comparative analysis of artistic references to greatness (e.g., “gods” and G.O.A.T. [Greatest of All Time]) and broader cultural references made about Lamar and Eminem. Looking specifically to the respect garnered by Lamar through his verses on the 2013 Jay Rock track “Control” and the 2013 BET Cipher, alongside Eminem’s 2013 self-ascription as “Rap God,” Driscoll’s chapter suggests that between self-proclamation and external praise, Lamar and Eminem represent more fundamental social and cultural forces. Through the comparison of Lamar and Eminem, Driscoll offers a snapshot of how social value is adjudicated through rhetorical appeals to authority that take place among artists and fans alike.
Lamar’s third album To Pimp A Butterfly (TPAB) from 2015 produced a string of pro-black anthems that, nevertheless, presented the paradoxes, aporias, and complexities of urban black life in early twenty-first century America. Attention to the album serves as our frame for the third part of the book. Able to provide anthems that were at once unique to a generation but steeped in a tradition of black protest (and accommodation), To Pimp a Butterfly finds Lamar able to simultaneously become the voice of a movement for recognition of black life while he himself wrestles between poles of reformation and respectability politics.
In “Can Dead Homies Speak? The Spirit and Flesh of Black Meaning,” Monica R. Miller considers the role of time, space, and ontology in the work of Lamar, asking, “What does it mean to let dead homies tell stories for us?” And, “How might, or ought, scholars go about analyzing the technological alchemy in constructing the ‘spirits’ of these dead homies (methodologically) brought back to life through the contingencies of a sample marked by times past, while made current through sonic cipher-like assignation?” In so doing, Miller considers dueling subject positions of spirits and bodies, contested visions and versions of blackness, the empty and full void of black space, and the nonlinearity of Lamar’s play with time. With great ingenuity and alchemical posterity, Lamar enables multiple modes and registers of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen.’ Through a ‘thin’ ethnographic approach relying on Lamar’s craft and interviews, Miller examines the aporetic flows and lines of flight running throughout Lamar’s penchant for digital immortality and mortally minded constructions of black meaning. From the “Spirit of Black Meaning” to the “Flesh of Black Time,” Miller’s chapter takes the reader on a black time travel on a variety of topics throughout Lamar’s work, most especially “Mortal Man” – from ghosts, to Africa, black history, mental health, pimping, celebrity status, and black memory, Miller relies on Lamar to look past the flesh of black death to dialogue about the current state of black life.
In “Loving [You] Is Complicated: Black Self-Love and Affirmation in the Rap Music of Kendrick Lamar,” Darrius D. Hills examines themes pertaining to black self-love (and/or self-affirmation) in the lyrics of Lamar. Hills argues that Lamar contributes to black meaning-making through insistence upon ‘self-love’ against the many threats of antiblack violence, both discursive and material/physical forms of violence grounded in an antiblack/brown societal context. The first segment of the chapter discusses the importance of self-love for beleaguered and besieged communities. Hills then poses the question, “In what ways might black and brown communities be impacted by a radical embodiment of self-love?” Hills develops an answer to this question while conversing with the theme of self-love as articulated within womanist scholarship. Additionally, the chapter expounds on radicalized notions of self-love by considering the usefulness of Lamar’s construct of self-love in black communities and its capacity for reimagining black personhood and self-image.
Next, Jon Gill’s “From ‘Blackness’ to Afrofuture to ‘Impasse’: The Figura of the Jimi Hendrix/Richie Havens Identity Revolution as Faintly Evidenced by the Work of Kendrick Lamar and More than a Head Nod to Lupe Fiasco” argues that many members of the academy in several disciplines along with a significant portion of the nonacademic world have found major significance in the work of West Coast stalwart/mainstay MC Kendrick Lamar. While agreeing that the aesthetic of Kendrick is indeed potent and transformative, he instead initiates an alternative reading of Lamar’s body of recorded music that may reveal Lamar’s methodology is not as groundbreaking as many scholars are wont to suggest. Gill pays homage to what he feels is the greatness of Lamar’s work to this point by instigating a contrast between To Pimp a Butterfly and Chicago exceptional lyricist Lupe Fiasco’s less publicized Tetsuo and Youth, released two months before. Gill proposes that Lupe in Tetsuo and Youth follows the more beneficial direction carved by rock/folk/blues icons Jimi Hendrix and Richie Havens in their reinvention of the possibilities of Afro-diasporic identity in the United States, ultimately distinguishing this from what Gill finds to be the reifying/maintenance of the oppressive category of ‘blackness’ reconstructed in To Pimp a Butterfly.
Joseph Winters, in “Beyond Flight and Containment: Kendrick Lamar, Black Study, and an Ethics of the Wound,” contends To Pimp a Butterfly is Kendrick’s attempt to re-express depression in the form of black intimacy, a way of communicating with and experiencing the world through what Winters calls “cuts and wounds.” In an interview on the Breakfast Club, Charlamagne tha God expressed surprise at Kendrick’s confession that he experiences depression at a moment that, according to Charlamagne, should be experienced as achievement and triumph. While the hosts of the Breakfast Club assume that Kendrick should be moving upward and forward, Kendrick attributes his depression to the gap between his newfound freedom and wealth and the conditions of ‘home,’ the forms of social death in Compton he refuses to disavow and extricate himself from. As exemplified in songs like “King Kunta,” a term that brings together sovereignty and slavery, Winters cautions that Kendrick’s suggestion of his being at any kind of summit is also a kind of fall – an identification with black bodies in the afterlife of slavery and at the edges of human recognition. Lastly, drawing from Fred Moten’s elaborations on the relationship between blackness and tumultuous movement, Winters argues To Pimp a Butterfly cuts against the common sense of linear (racial) progress.
The final section focuses attention to Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize winning DAMN. Made available on the Christian holiday, Good Friday in 2017, DAMN. was so popular upon first release that all its songs showed up on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart simultaneously. Many of them remain on the chart as of this writing (as do songs from previous Lamar albums). DAMN., released in standard and deluxe editions (with the deluxe edition meant to be played in reverse), finds Lamar at his most existentially angst-ridden, unable to tell himself (or listeners) if there is a way out of the circumstances that he (and perhaps, black folk more generally) find themselves in today. Shifting between enthusiastic efforts at self-definition and or self-destruction, by 2017, with DAMN., Lamar had galvanized himself as one of the greatest emcees of all time, and one of the most marketable, influential American musicians working.
Anthony B. Pinn, in ‘ “Real Nigga Conditions’: Kendrick Lamar, Grotesque Realism, and the Open Body,” argues that there are layers to Kendrick Lamar’s track “DNA.” – layers that “chronicle the thick and contradictory nature of black/end existence.” Pinn’s interest in “DNA.,” as well as the entire album DAMN., rests, in part, in this conveyed complexity, including emotional and psychological forces, social structures and “network identifications,” history and genealogy, metaphysical perspectives, and the concrete physiological building blocks of life. In this way, Lamar’s “DNA.” speaks to what thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin have positioned as the grotesque body, or what Pinn references as the “open body” – the body ‘porous’ and in relationship to the world. Furthermore, Pinn argues Lamar offers in the track (as well as his lyrics more generally) a “psycho-ethical” response to the human encounter with the world marked by a mode of black moralism in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois.
Ben Lewellyn-Taylor and Melanie C. Jones’s “DAMNed to the Earth: Kendrick Lamar, De/colonial Violence and Earthbound Salvation,” asserts Lamar’s DAMN. presents a humanist subjectivity that is both ‘earthbound’ and ‘bound’ in the sense of U.S. American racial relations, particularly the tragic hegemonic manifestations of black vs. white encounters. Reading Lamar’s DAMN. through Frantz Fanon and womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, Jones and Lewellyn-Taylor examine ways by which Lamar at once critiques Fox News for their dehumanizing commentary yet contends that their existence is, nonetheless, bound with his. Thus Lamar necessitates a ‘radically subjective’ demand for black recognition by black hip-hop artists as well as accountable white subjectivity that alters white engagements with hip-hop beyond oft-dehumanizing assaults on black meaning-making. Using a decolonial womanist cultural criticism, they engage the dualisms presented in the album’s themes (as illuminated by the tracklist) – notably two of the more complex pairings on the album, “XXX.” and “FEAR.” – which serve to construct an earthbound DAMNation revealing the potential for ‘grounded salvation.’
“Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. as an Aesthetic Genealogy,” by Dominik Hammer, argues Lamar offers an account of the open as well as latent qualities and traits shaping his character. Focusing on an analysis of “DNA.,” Hammer’s chapter examines the layers of this genealogical work, the genetic themes present in “DNA.,” and the sociopolitical and the historical context of those themes. To describe these traits, Hammer argues that Lamar uses the language of genetics, talking about them as being “in his DNA” and referring to his “pedigree.” As characteristics he names, among others, “loyalty,” “royalty,” “realness,” but also “evil” and “a troublesome heart.” Hammer discusses Lamar’s use of DNA as a metaphor referring not only to the biological but also to the social aspects of heritage and to personal experience. By using DNA as an image for a broad range of influences, Lamar employs a widely used, yet controversial figure. However, through listing such contradictory qualities as “power, poison, pain and joy,” Hammer draws attention to how Lamar uses it in a way that hinders deterministic readings. The rhetoric of “DNA.” ties into a recurring theme in DAMN. – with various songs on the album dealing with a search for origins and an explanation of development. As discussed in the chapter, in “FEAR.,” Lamar reconstructs the different dominant fears he had at ages 7, 17, and 27, respectively. And in “DUCKWORTH.,” the artist tells about a fateful encounter that would shape his future life. As discussed by Hammer, DAMN. is a genealogical project.
Sam Kestenbaum’s ‘ “I’m An Israelite’: Kendrick Lamar’s Spiritual Search, Hebrew Israelite Religion, and the Politics of a Celebrity Encounter” points out how Kendrick Lamar has delivered spiritual and esoteric messages on all his albums. Yet DAMN. was the rapper’s first foray into Hebrew Israelite theology. This shift, according to Kestenbaum, is no coincidence. There is a family connection here: Lamar’s cousin, a member of a prominent Israelite group, taught the rapper in one-on-one study sessions. Lamar’s telegraphing the fire-and-brimstone doctrine of this movement was a surprising move to some listeners, and Kestenbaum describes some of the backlash Lamar received for it. The move was also met with ambivalence from Hebrew Israelites wary of a worldly rapper adopting their beliefs on the world stage without their formal approval. Even Lamar’s public statements about the beliefs have been muted and vague. For example, as the chapter points out, Lamar told Rolling Stone he was speaking from his cousin’s perspective, but he agreed with some core Hebrew Israelite beliefs. In this chapter, Kestenbaum looks at the limits of celebrity endorsement – how Lamar’s exploration of Hebrew Israelite belief is policed by insiders, outsiders, and the media, and it considers what this says about the place of marginalized American spiritual beliefs in pop culture.
In “Damnation, Identity, and Truth: Vocabularies of Suffering in Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN.,” André E. Key turns to the record’s third track, “YAH.,” and argues Lamar’s embrace of Hebrew Israelite teachings appears tied to “ethnic suffering” as the result of divine will rather than human agency. Hence, black people’s transgenerational suffering in an antiblack racist society demands they construct identities that argue for ethnic “chosenness.” Key’s reflections on Lamar’s ties to the Hebrew Israelites signal the relevance of traditional moral epistemologies for ascertaining Afro-Jewish cultural coherence and identity. Specifically, he argues that DAMN. represents an expansion of Afro-Jewish perspectives on ethnic suffering by signifying the concept of DAMNation as a legitimizing marker of identity. As Key argues, Hebrew Israelites, in the face of expansive moral evil and the constant death of black bodies, have not only posited challenges to the traditional categories of moral epistemology but also articulated a theodicean framework for black identity.
Spencer Dew’s chapter, “Hebrew Israelite Covenantal Theology and Kendrick Lamar’s Constructive Project in DAMN.,” offers a snapshot of American religion as it relates to race and the Hebrew Israelite’s remixing of race and religion in a narrative first exposed to many by Lamar’s references to them on DAMN. Dew argues that Americans, long believing themselves to be a ‘chosen people’ in a covenant with God, have since the Puritans found evidence of this exceptionalism even in damnation. For instance, as discussed in the chapter, in Deuteronomy 28, God rewards or punishes; there is no in between. Such foundational American theology was presented as scandalous by Fox News with a Jeremiah Wright sound bite, blind to context as the similar sound bite in Lamar’s 2017 DAMN., an album Dew suggests finds the reassurance of providence in the suffering and terror of this world while taking exception to certain claims to American exceptionalism, speaking not on behalf of the New Israel of America but as an original Hebrew Israelite. One song from DAMN. discussed by Dew, “YAH.” manifests in such learning, in the bonds of family, the company of cousins, the kindness offered regardless of risk. As with “YAH.” and other tracks discussed, Dew uses Lamar’s album to explore Hebrew Israelite theology and that lineage’s simultaneous rebuke and exposure of the irony inherent within American exceptionalism.
Lastly, Monica R. Miller offers a concluding meditation of sorts with “KENosis: The Meaning of Kendrick Lamar,” giving attention to the ways Lamar is used in service to meaning-making while he fashions himself as a human in need of such processes and a moral agent with a responsibility to family and KEN-folk, broadly conceived. Miller aids in situating the wide diversity of ideas found in this volume, while also centering readers’ thoughts toward future avenues of investigation.
Taken together, these various chapters offer a complex and layered depiction of Kendrick Lamar’s attention to deep issues of meaning – as this attention develops, shifts, and changes over the course of four albums. It is our hope that this initial discussion will spark more attention not to Lamar alone but also to the very manner in which the framework and logic of hip-hop culture addresses the fundamental dynamics of human presence in the world.