In an era in which hip-hop supplants all other genres as the most influential form of American music, Kendrick Lamar cuts through the dominant blasé courtesy of run-of-the-mill pop hits and ‘mumble rap,’ with some of the most masterful artistic statements of the 2010s. As rappers such as Young Thug admit to leaving the task of societal awareness to “the critics and the laws” and Kanye West likens 400 years of slavery to “a choice,” Kendrick, in contrast, lifts the voice of a people, prescribing fearless soundtracks for the social upheaval that Gil Scott Heron once said “would not be televised.” He is the voice of this generation and, more appropriately, black America.
Within each album in his canon, Lamar peels back a layer to the black experience. His most recent album, 2017’s DAMN., earned the best reviewed artist of the twenty-first century a Pulitzer Prize – a hip-hop first – for its affecting “vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” His 2015 opus, and Grammy award-winning, To Pimp a Butterfly, sonically captures the essence of Wallace Thurman’s 1929 book, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, while 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city autobiographically unpacks its own acronym (“Me, an Angel on Angel Dust”) against the backdrop of an inner city rocked by the Reagan era. In each of these works burst unapologetic black art that celebrates, and heightens, black identity. Overall, Lamar’s discography resembles James Brown’s 1968 declaration, “I’m black and I’m proud.” One album that gets overlooked in the conversations of his cultural resonance, though, is Lamar’s proper 2011 debut, Section.80 – the introduction to his path as vanguard.
Before his epic disquisitions on self-love, violence, and spirituality within the black community would get acknowledged by the Grammy Academy and the Pulitzer board, it was on Section.80 that Lamar properly set the stage. Where his major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city plays sonic film (i.e., the ‘short film’ subtitle) and its follow-up To Pimp a Butterfly concretizes poetry, Section.80 contextualizes an entire generation in the form of a novel.
Where the aforementioned albums particularly delve into the psyche of the thinking-man’s wordsmith, Section.80 sees Lamar’s voice become GPS for a generation in need of upheaval and understanding. With a runtime of just 36 seconds short of an hour, this pensive narrator opens his book with the hook “Fuck your ethnicity,” and closes it out with the refrain “Thug life!” In between, lyrics are replete with visions of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Seale (“HiiiPower”), reflections of the conflicted (“Kush & Corinthians”), and meditation on the Reagan Era (“Ronald Reagan Era”). “Section.80 is really based on my generation,” he explained in a 2011 Q&A interview with the Los Angeles Times. “The album just talks about the ills of going through life and society as a young person when you’re trying to figure things out the hard way, for better or worse.”1 What he puts together is a grand three-dimensional treatise on the life and times of America’s children of the 1980s. What he ends up with is his most transparent album to date.
For Gen-Y (or ‘millennials,’ as they are often called), Section.80 picks up where N.W.A. left off with Gen X. Where Eazy-E, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Dr. Dre baptized the preceding era as ‘niggaz wit attitude,’ Kendrick christens his own as ‘Section.80,’ or “the dysfunctional children of the Ronald Reagan era.” In this core is a generation that “learned to do everything spiteful” by way of the “live fast and die young” credo. He laments on this existential crisis on the album centerpiece “Chapter Six”:
An argument can be made for this group being an incarnate of Tupac Shakur’s 1993 war cry, “The hate you give little infants fucks everybody” (or “Thug Life”). Coincidentally, Lamar even credited Shakur as an influence on the album, even going as far as closing the final seconds by chanting “Thug Life.” One thing for certain, though, is that Shakur’s infamous mantra underscored the burden of a people. A burden left after the civil rights movement that saw Richard Nixon’s veil of ‘law and order’ allow the FBI, along with local law enforcement, to use covert operations such as COINTELPRO, among other ‘legitimate’ means, to destroy liberation and anti-war organizations, such as the Black Panther Party. A burden packed with the realization that ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ come at a price. The mantra also underscored the way of life for (a) people socially invisible to Miss America. Halted by the fetters of her justice system. Plagued by the economic disparities affecting its claustrophobic communities. Paralyzed under round-the-clock (and unjust) policing. The societal issues affecting urban America were aplenty. So the ‘hate’ Pac emphasized came to be a ticking time bomb that went on to combust in the generation that Kendrick was born into – one he calls ‘Section.80.’ This group is the product of that ‘hate,’ otherwise the political frustration of the black and brown children coming of age during the Reagan Era.
Ronald Wilson Reagan arrived in office on January 20, 1981, with a mandate of restoring the U.S. economic system and a play on the imagination of poor and working-class whites. In the race to replace an embattled Jimmy Carter as the President of the United States (POTUS), Mr. Reagan contended that the government deficits were too high, that taxes had to be cut, and that spending had to shrink. In his inaugural address, he famously declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” What made him so appealing was how much he quenched white America’s growing fear of the nation’s decline. The defeat in Vietnam, the spread of Black Power, the recession of the 1970s, the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 – the general consensus among working-class and conservative upper-class whites was that ‘their America’ was falling apart at the seams. In Reagan, they found coherence – and he won them over with dog-whistle politics that coded racial earworms like combating ‘welfare queens’ and criminal ‘predators’ and denouncing ‘big government.’ Omitted from that best-selling dream (see “Make America Great Again”) was the assuage that the forgotten majority would be heard. Upon his inauguration into office, it was clear why.
What Nixon packaged as ‘law and order’ in the late 1960s, a play on sensationalizing a broad array of popular anxieties, Reagan repackaged as Morning in America. For urban communities and the socially invisible minorities, though, it was more like mourning in America. If it wasn’t ‘Reaganomics,’ the ambitious economic plan that birthed the slogan “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” it was Reagan’s big-time attacks on racial equality gains, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 1982, he popularized the blockbuster slogans “War on Drugs” and “War on Crime,” all as he played to America’s fantasia with words like ‘crack dealers,’ ‘strapping young bucks,’ and ‘gang wars’ as supposed threats to domestic order and imposed lifetime consequences for drug offenders with minor offenses. The latter promoted significant racial disparities in the incarceration rates as it produced the criminalization of large segments of the U.S. population, mainly black and brown, for illicit drug consumption, possession, and distribution.
In his two terms, Reagan played to the choir of his constituents, imposing an underlying ‘you’re on your own’ series of legislation that widened the gap between the rich and everyone else. He declined wages and living standards for working class families, punished labor unions like the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981, oversaw an increase in poverty and homelessness, and slashed the budget for public housing and Section 8 rent subsidies in half. All in all, these laws became one of the deeply divisive punishment campaigns on the African American population. For Lamar, this came to be the world and era he was born into. This is also the burden that his generation carries.
Arriving six years before Tupac Shakur addressed this madness via “Thug Life,” one-year shy of N.W.A.’s ‘niggaz wit attitude’ declaration, and two years before the end of the Reagan era, Lamar, like millions of others, was born in ’87 as a product of the dysfunction brought by this political establishment. When the line “the kids just ain’t alright,” pops up in the opener of Section.80’s explosive “Ronald Reagan Era,” it’s not to provide a catchy note. Instead, it’s testimony to the soupy angst left after Reagan’s blitzkrieg of culturally stifling policies. And why wouldn’t it. “Welcome to vigilante, 80’s so don’t you ask me/ I’m hungry, my body’s antsy/I rip through your fuckin’ pantry,” he raps on, further illustrating the furor.
While the social fabric for African American communities was weakened in the 1970s, thanks to a succession of executive-sponsored campaigns under the Nixon administration, it was torn apart further during the 1980s. You have inner-city communities marred by broken households and poverty thanks to crack, unemployment, and the swelling of incarceration rates. Programs that were once put in place to aid low-income families and advance opportunities for the disenfranchised, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, either had their funding slashed in half or cut out altogether. The War on Drugs, a product of Reagan’s gift of hysteria-generating squeals, left these neighborhoods in a police state, prompting militarization of communities through massive policing. Kendrick poetically captured this omnipresence of violent claustrophobia on ‘m.A.A.d city’ on his major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city, as well as on “XXX.” on DAMN. These aforementioned policies saw African Americans experience record levels of unemployment, poverty, increases in incarceration, and steep slowing in socio-economic gains – ones that would stretch onward. Reagan’s broken dream led to a broken system that created broken households and, ultimately, gave a generation growing into the 1990s broken communities.
“You know why we crack babies, because we born in the ’80s,” Lamar raps on the excellently titled “A.D.H.D” Interestingly enough, the term ‘ADHD’ (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) was first added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987, the same year as Lamar’s birth. He speaks to and about his audience with sharp focus on Section.80. Broke but not broken, Kendrick’s path to Section.80 arrived in 2011. The album arrived in a far different environment than its narrator. At the time, the country was three years into the first term of Barack Obama’s presidency – America’s first elected black president. While the unemployment rates and social programs were in far better shape than in the ’80s, the remnants of Reagan’s iron fist had crystalized. No other label could have best described Lamar’s generation than song No. 3 on Section.80. Numb to the existential crisis brought up by the societal makeup of their upbringing, they are a group seeking to escape the harrowing world left behind in their rearview, all in hopes of entering a clear road ahead – by any means. Each song describes a different circumstance.
Everywhere he looks, Lamar sees generational symptoms of the kids who came from the era of crack, social disparities, and Ronald Reagan. On “A.D.H.D,” he expounds on his generation’s connection to prescription drugs and the need to drown their feelings of disconnection into these substances. He acknowledges that, yes, his peers are “sippin’ cough syrup like it’s water” but adds some perspective, like maybe due to a broken home with no parents, there was “never no pancakes in the kitchen.” That potent symbol, while metaphorical, illustrates the effects of the aforementioned broken homes left after Reagan’s battering ram. Who’s cooking in the household when unemployment rates are high and parents are split up at the cost of drug abuse or incarceration?
Topics of self-destruction continue on “Poe Mans Dreams (His Vice),” where he recalls feelings of one day seeing “the penitentiary way after elementary,” only because he “thought it was cool to look the judge in the face when he sentenced me.” The feelings of insecurity also come up, most notably on “No Make-Up (Her Vice),” advising his female peers to accept their “imperfections” as a “wonderful blessing” and “from heaven is where you got it from.” No other record provides a clearer picture into this scarred world than “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain).” A frighteningly vivid four-minute tale that puts a modern-day twist on Shakur’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby” to detail how fragile a woman’s life is, no matter what her age. The song comes to a head in the closing seconds when Keisha is murdered. Because life is filled with lessons, he goes, “My little sister 11, I looked her right in the face the day that I wrote this song/Sat her down and pressed play.” He later revisits this narrative on the 12-minute good kid, m.A.A.d city masterstroke “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.”
Standout songs aside, overall, the 23-year-old who was seeking to make a case for his generation and its “live fast” GPS destination comes out discovering the power of his voice. Broke but not broken, he conveys the resilience of his people throughout his album. A resilience to go with the rules that caused their predecessors pain, anguish, and grief. While some of these tales are dark, Lamar reveals the bleak reality of life in America’s m.A.A.d real world without removing hope from the equation. Section.80 is both dark and bright. Though Lamar explores the dark realities and the political frustrations brought against his generation – millions of black and brown folks still struggling with the burden of the civil rights legacy – he offers up an ethos of taking back one’s own world, offering light and liberation. If those who listen to “HiiiPower” can accept their history and stake in Lamar’s words, then they are prepared to whisk away the world in their rearview and find solace in that clear road ahead.