It’s 2018, and Kendrick Lamar has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music for his most recent album, DAMN. The award announcement describes the album as, “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”1 In short, the committee found artistic merit in Lamar’s ability to communicate authentically worded black experience. This is a common interpretation of Lamar’s work. His two Grammy performances in 2018 and 2016 are considered cultural events that “speak directly to the modern-day black experience in America.”2 His 2015 opening performance at the BET Awards stoked controversy among conservative commentators, with the reaction of Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera provoking Lamar to include a sample of it in the opening of his new album, DAMN. In the sample, Geraldo quotes Lamar as “stat(ing) his views on police brutality,” with the line, “And we hate Po-Po/Wanna see us dead in the street fo’ sho.”3 His cohost’s “I don’t like it” is not only meant to reject the lyric, but it is also simultaneously a rejection of organized black resistance to ongoing systematic violence against black people in the United States. Geraldo and his cohost both dismiss the song by embedding its message in an essentialized view of black politics. Geraldo’s rejection and the Pulitzer’s affirmation of Lamar’s work demonstrate the extent to which black aesthetic objects are consistently interpreted for their “social message,” obscuring the creative aesthetic work they do.
The persistence of this problem has defined efforts within the black art world to attend to the effects of their work in the lifeworld. In his work How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English uses the concept of “black representational space” to identify the discursive space where black critics have argued over the dimensions of proper representations of blackness – for example, the debates between Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois over the political obligations of black artists.4 Arguments over the dimensions of black representational space are simultaneously debates concerning black experience in our shared lifeworld. Our engagement with them opens and closes possibilities for the expression of varieties of experience and free modes of being in the world. Thus, at least for black artists, the art world is the lifeworld insofar as our judgments of the value and nature of black life are simultaneously at work in the aesthetic interpretations of the black art. The conditions of oppression that restrict interpretations of black art works cohere with limitations on the creative techniques of black artists. This connection mirrors the lived experience of the struggle of black people to assert their own humanity in the face of inter- and intraracial essentialism. The response to this challenge requires interpretive practices that self-consciously engage with the varieties of experiences articulated in black art and black life.
This challenge facing black aesthetic objects is at work in Paul Taylor’s definition of black aesthetics as “to use art, criticism, or analysis to explore the role that expressive objects and practices play in creating and maintaining black life-worlds.”5 I read Taylor’s definition as highlighting the role of ‘black arts’ in the struggles to define and create conditions for ‘black life.’ Black aesthetic objects and practices become sites for the struggle to articulate identity under conditions that restrict the possibilities for meaning or value in the lives of black people. This function of black aesthetics is why the Pulitzer description is correct but incomplete. When it identifies the “vernacular authenticity” of Lamar’s language, for example, it already marks a way of speaking that is authentically representative of the African American experience, universalizing Lamar’s speech to the African American lifeworld at large. It also allows Geraldo to reject Lamar’s statement as an explicit political proposition rather than a statement of fact about the experience of the “we” identified in the line. In both interpretations, the lifeworld supersedes the art world. The critic loses track of the aesthetic merit of the artwork by overemphasizing its role in cultural and political interpretation. From the perspective of black aesthetics, a successful interpretation requires the critic to pay attention to the intersection of aesthetic work and social life as it plays out in the construction and interpretation of works by black artists. This is especially true in the case of the work of Kendrick Lamar.
The genius of Lamar’s work lies in how it responds to the reception of black aesthetic objects in the art world and the lifeworld, opening a space to view the complex interrelation between interpretations of black arts and our interpretations of the black experience. In this chapter, I will argue that Lamar’s work provides a poetics of problems; he uses his experiences to narrate the many dimensions of his experience as a black man in the United States through a connection between the experiences of people he knows from his community and the experience of his audience. Throughout his discography, Lamar wrestles with Du Bois’s question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” In the opening of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois telegraphs to us that our inability to address racial strife is due in part to the incapacity to raise this question that floats between his world and the white world.6 The question is never asked or answered because we lack the ability to move beyond the discomfort it causes, face the reality of our context, and simply ask. On my interpretation, Du Bois’s work in Souls aims to lead his gentle reader to “hear the strivings in the souls of black folk” as a condition of attuning themselves to the reality of the black experience behind the fictional and move from cognitive awareness to moral concern.
The interpretations of black aesthetic objects show that to be black in the United States continues to be a problem. It means being an exemplar and site of social tension, whose humanity is tied to the ability to be seen outside of essentialized racialized representations. Lamar poeticizes his struggles with this problem in his music, fashioning fictional worlds and experiential spaces with structures that frame his experience with the problems attributed to being black and narratives that give birth to characters whose stories open a space to see where our interpretation of art and reality meet. These poetic connections are sites to contrast aesthetic representation and popular knowledge, which can provide the tools to cultivate a critical sensibility that discerns the intersections of art and life.
Kendrick Lamar’s fundamental talent is his worldbuilding. Lamar’s albums construct and depict rich fictional worlds, narrative constructions that combine conceptual abstraction and poetic techniques to enrich experience.7 The idea of fictions mark that they are constructed; their proper function depends on the artist’s ability to generate a contrast between ‘reality’ and the novelty of the fiction that draws attention to previously backgrounded elements of experience. Over the course of his career, Lamar has engaged in creating fictional spaces drawn from his own experiences that contrast with the experience of his listeners to communicate across perspectives. DAMN. is a walk through the inferno as Kendrick, who dies on the first song, grapples with vices and virtues.8 To Pimp a Butterfly moves through the spaces of Kenrick’s self-consciousness as he struggles with the perils and pitfalls of fame. Good kid m.A.A.d city is a journey through a day in the life of Kendrick in Compton, which hearkens back to films like Boyz n the Hood, Juice, and Menace II Society. Lamar generates these spaces through the skits and track sequencing that structure the album. The skits and interludes provide narrative structure with the songs acting as its scenes.
Section.80 takes place before the fame, before Kendrick has the heroic status worthy of an origin story. Its title simultaneously refers to Section 8 housing and the 1980s of Kendrick’s youth, giving the album space and time before the listener pushes play. It takes place in a fictional world characterized by the poverty of African Americans during the repeatedly referenced ‘Ronald Regan era.’ This space and time of the era immediately appears as a critique of the Reagan administration, whose economic policies and war on drugs contributed to ongoing poverty and mass incarceration in the black community of the United States. This reading, however, falls into an essentializing view of the music, presenting it simply as protest or critique. Lamar’s project is less concerned with a critique of Reagan and more concerned with exploring the struggle to achieve some sense of self-worth and self-determination in the context of racial oppression. The album itself is an exploration of the situations of its central characters, Kendrick, Keisha, and Tammy, as they gather together in a guided collective reflection.
The album’s opening skit begins this reflection by bringing the listener to a street corner in Section.80. Push play and you hear the sound of a roaring fire. A deep, elder voice welcomes “you,” both the listener and our main characters, to gather around this fire that burns for the passion of everyone gathered on their neighborhood corner. The inclusive pronoun gives listeners a position in the space of Lamar’s fictional world, becoming a character themselves. The narrator then begins the ritual. He invites Tammy and Keisha to the front and acknowledges the rest of the group, saying that he recognizes everyone despite race, creed, and color. Here listeners, regardless of background, are positioned in the circle by virtue of their desire to participate and listen. Lamar creates a ritual space in his fictional space where listeners can begin to engage in the reflective process, which begins with the narrator’s final command, “Fuck your ethnicity.”
The command, “Fuck your ethnicity,” transitions the listener from the fictional space into the album’s five song prelude, which introduces its central characters, Kendrick, Keisha, Tammy, and situates the listener within the world of Section.80. It also shifts the perspective to Lamar as artist and character in an opening track that establishes the album’s mission.
As the opening track, “F*ck Your Ethnicity” inaugurates Lamar’s technique of beginning albums with a central thematic statement or mood. These tracks function like opening credits, setting the scene for Kendrick through the words of Lamar. For the listener, they create an initial connection with Kendrick as character and the nature of the story Lamar wants to tell. “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” establishes the story of good kid, m.A.A.d. city (GKMC), as a romance that will eventually go wrong. To Pimp A Butterfly (TPAB) “Wesley’s Theory” plays off Wesley Snipes’s tax troubles as a metaphor for the album’s theme of the perils of black stardom. “DNA.” kicks off DAMN. with Kendrick defending himself, his music, and his experience to explain his past experiences as the source of his strength. On “Fuck Your Ethnicity,” the theme emerges in the opening invocation in the hook, which repeats the narrator’s command, giving it context in the music:
Lamar’s hook demands that his characters and the listener recognize that his music is there to reach audiences across lines of difference. In the opening verse, Lamar raps about how he’s motivated to make music because it saved his life. The rhythms of rap animate the body and open the mind, giving a space for creativity and reflection. It functions like a legal drug, foreshadowing the album’s later drug references, which Lamar uses metaphorically as a symbol of any force used to overcome the effects of oppression. Lamar is conflicted, however, since his music is ultimately a commercial product that can only spread its message by moving units. “His details are retail,” a commodity to be bought, sold, and consumed, not necessarily taken seriously.10 He dismisses the criticism based on his content and skill as an artist. Lamar takes extra care with his album structure, verses, and production to challenge his listeners’ attention. He goes so far on this track to claim that he’s so good, he’s not a rapper. His content is too important and his product too good to even be considered rap; it’s hip-hop. His attention to detail, his craft, and the persona that he’s cultivated push back against commercialization of superficial music. The process and product are worth the cost to him and his listener. His mission is to change the culture, and he wants the listener to come with him.
This mission, however, comes with conflict. The second track, “Hol’ Up,” moves us further into the world of the characters as Lamar transforms into Kendrick, his rapper persona. This is another characteristic of Lamar’s albums, a second track in which Kendrick as character establishes himself in the world of the story. In each case, Kendrick plays out a different form of the conflict between artist and black artist that track the development of his own career. In GKMC’s “Backseat Freestyle,” Kendrick is in the backseat of a friend’s car proclaiming his desire for money and dreams of stardom. To Pimp a Butterfly’s “King Kunta” sees Kendrick playing with the tension between himself as popular artist and performer of blackness. In DAMN.’s “DNA.,” Kendrick speaks from the position of an established artist elaborating on how his youth in the hood has made him stronger than others in his social echelon. The Kendrick of Section.80 speaks from the position of a black man reflecting on the tension between himself as a rapper with a mission and the material comforts that come with that success. “Hol’ Up” exchanges the hard beats of the opener for swinging horns, as we find Kendrick on an airplane writing his verse and flirting with a stewardess who notices his nappy hair. He responds to her with
In these lyrics, Kendrick presents hood riches as treasures of a pharaoh’s funeral, playing on the tension between representations of young-rich-black irresponsibility and the American Dream of freedom and immortality through wealth. This feature of “Hol’ Up” positions Lamar firmly in a black representational space where the masks of political consciousness and social responsibility meet myths of the irresponsible negro and the sellout. Like the references to hip-hop as hypnotism in “Fuck Your Ethnicity,” these images, which are tropes of rap music, are meant to be interpreted as symbols of a motivation for excellence.12 The distinction between hip-hop and rap in the previous track has already signaled that he does not use these tropes literally. Instead, he uses this language to perform the conflicts facing black artists: the struggle to escape poverty through art, the conflict between creating art from the experience of poverty and the commodification of that art for monetary gain, and the fact that that success in rap is lyrically translated into the display of wealth. Facing these struggles, Lamar subverts these stereotypical images but keeps the language as it refers to motivations to create that are produced in response to poverty. He feels the need to indicate the path that they form, which he rejects, to differentiate his mission and indicate to listeners that they may not always be literal to other artists as well.
The hook frames Kendrick’s language as a marker that indicates his world of discourse under conditions of poverty, which he can’t abandon despite the wealth it brings him. In the opening verse, Kendrick delineates between bitches, hoes, and women and referencing having killed someone as a child, thus having experiences that a child shouldn’t have. These references contextualize Kendrick’s vulgarity and brashness as features of his experience as a young man, which he cannot fully separate himself from. He aims to transform the images of twerking girls and the rap hustle into metaphors that maintain their motivational force but have a different aim. A close reading shows that Lamar hustles in the same spirit that motivated the superficial dreams that mark an escape from poverty in order to maintain a drive for artistic success. This makes the “Hol’ Up” consistent with the mission expressed in “Fuck Your Ethnicity,” indicating that the habits that drove one to create in the first place can change form, but the effort remains, and Kendrick remains the same person as he started. The wealth changes but not the experiences and instincts that led him to it. Through the play with theme, Lamar ties himself to Kendrick, creating a contrast between their ideals that play out over the course of the album as a struggle for purpose.
By resisting straightforward readings, Lamar asks that the listener simultaneously entertain the artist as creator of a hip-hop fiction and the character that uses the tropes of the genre to position himself in hip-hop’s discursive space. This resistance challenges the listener’s ability to hear the artform as artform in order to evade essentialist interpretations of the work. Listening well requires attention to Lamar’s techniques to experience the album as Lamar singing Kendrick’s experience, inviting the listener into their shared space. “Fuck Your Ethnicity” and “Hol’ Up” demonstrate how Kendrick Lamar sings experience through a play with perspectives between his position as artist and character, forcing the listener to cultivate a sensibility that can balance between them. “Hol’ Up” tests the listener’s ability to entertain both perspectives simultaneously through attention to language. The ability to read between the lines, for these songs, requires a familiarity with the structure of Kendrick’s albums to see this process at work. “A.D.H.D,” the third song of Section.80’s opening prelude, provides a model for this movement between perspectives in the structure of its verses and the first moment when the listener can move through its experiential space.
“A.D.H.D” is a paradigm case of Lamar’s ability to produce a cinematic landscape through his poetry. Blissful chords enter on a tremolo wave, setting the stage for Lamar’s verse to sweep in. The opening verse puts the listener in a third-person perspective, seeing Kendrick find a friend collapsed and overdosed on drugs. He responds by giving his friend Vicodin to help numb the sensation of living in Section.80, life under poverty. He describes the sensation, singing,
Kendrick slips into the second-person plural “you” to speak between the perspective of his friend and the perspective of the listener, positing the two in the same space. The listener is the friend and should reflect on how drug abuse and isolation manifest themselves in black culture and American culture on a broad scale. The song’s title makes this connection clear. Kendrick’s use of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) conceptually links drugs taken illegally within Kendrick’s community with the overprescription of ADHD medication to white children of the same era. The contexts change, but the forms are the same. This forms a first moment of shared sensibility, which carries over as Kendrick advances his narrative.
This connection broadens to hip-hop culture at large with the next change in scene. Now we find Kendrick at a party reflecting on his peers’ heavy drug use and its relation to their musical sensibilities. By switching to a reflective mode, Lamar brings the relationship between the listener and his friend into his own perspective, giving a third dimension to his use of “you.” This connection opens our interpretation of the “you” to contrast between the interpretations of the effects of experiences under conditions of poverty and privilege in the present culture of hip-hop. The loneliness and isolation of Kendrick’s friend requires medication to numb his condition. These conditions, the sense of living in Section.80, lead many to evade social reality – shortening their attention to the pain of life. Lamar, through Kendrick, extends this numbness to the taste of rap audiences. They never listen unless the music is bumping and there’s weed and drink to go around.14 Here Kendrick challenges listeners to evaluate their interpretation of the music. If you hear the slick talk about guns, drugs, and women, you’re doping yourself. An experience of the music, and reality, requires attention to the details.
With this challenge in place, Kendrick shifts the scene again, positioning the listener as a member of his audience in his world. He looks out from a first-person perspective to see the crowds, which he refers to as “relatives relevant for a rebel’s dream.” As he begins to perform, Kendrick, Lamar, and the listener engage in a challenge of communication. Kendrick has to create a track that resists superficial interpretations and brings the audience to its senses. The listener must learn to sense what Kendrick has to say. The artist’s dilemma is given to the audience, opening a space to interrogate the listener’s interpretation of Kendrick’s music and the events he describes. For Kendrick, the audience’s presence can be revolutionary if they understand his mission as an artist. Before he can finish the thought, his attention turns to a young woman in the crowd drinking and watching the show – who he diagnoses with ADHD.
The title, “A.D.H.D,” now functions symbolically and pragmatically. On the symbolic level, ADHD is a fiction that captures the problems of malaise, conformity, and drug use as a generational issue across positionalities. In the following verse, he grounds the condition in the age of his and the young woman’s birth. The children of the ’80s are crack babies, children born during the war on drugs, which was justified on the grounds of alleviating poverty while inflicting trauma on the impoverished black community. A similar problem, the opioid crisis, and the demand for legalized marijuana point to a more widespread issue with drug use in the country, which Lamar contextualizes rather than condemns. The context connects this past problem to the present, making it important in the context of the listener. On the pragmatic level, the shifts between perspectives in the verses mimic the rapid shifts of attention associated with attention deficit disorder. Lamar as an artist thus performs the condition he’s describing, making Kendrick’s perspective consistent with the generational condition he’s describing. If the listener follows the movement, they have a shared perspective. They lack, however, the experiential content to share sensibility.
Lamar’s encounter with the young woman in the audience shows a shared perspective does not necessarily lead to shared feeling. In the final verse, Kendrick engages her in dialog, attempting to explain their situation. The woman’s “feeling herself,” exuding overconfidence to rebuff his advances, and he responds with an appeal to her sensibility: He introduces himself as a rapper and asks her age. Her being 22 and him 23 means they share the sense of being children of the ‘Ronald Regan era.’ The pain of their upbringing and tendency for substance abuse short-circuits their ability to form relationships. As they start to have sex, Kendrick shifts to his subjective perspective to express his desire and anticipation. As soon as it starts, a Kush-carrying friend appears, interrupting the scene. The woman stops and chooses smoke over Kendrick, illustrating the sensibility he describes, “That ADHD crazy.”15 She fails to understand Kendrick’s message and, in doing so, is a placeholder for the way that Lamar’s message can be misunderstood. In the end, he cannot save her and hands over a lighter for her to enjoy her blunt. The same can be said for the listener; if you don’t get it, enjoy the show.
Kendrick’s complicity at the end of the song is crucial. It contradicts the ideals that motivate him to paint this portrait of our shared experience by providing a concrete instance where the messenger fails to live out his message. Lamar, through Kendrick, reminds the listener that he sees the problem, but he is also problematic. By taking this step, Lamar undercuts straightforward essentialist readings of his work that read him as providing programmatic, universalizable statements of his own character and of black experience. For Lamar, this move provides a space for him to reflect on his situation through his work and its interaction with the aesthetic community forged by hip-hop culture. He invites the listeners to learn, to follow his perspective and his story to see how their position as listeners is equally implicated in the process of producing cultural shifts. The danger of this move is that it is easy to take his problematic moments and opinions at face value, which creates a space where listeners must reject artist and artwork on political grounds or provide apologia for controversial lyrics and themes.
Kendrick Lamar’s music is problematic. It generates spaces to reflect on social problems through interpretations of art. This notion of ‘problematic’ conflicts with our common usage, which signals that an album contains material that offends the ethical or political sensibility of the listener. For Geraldo, his music is a problem, as he senses that Kendrick aims to evoke anti-police sentiment and black radicalism. Because these principles contradict Geraldo’s politics, he rejects the music outright.16 Lamar has also been criticized by the black community, particularly black women, as perpetuating the lineage of problematic representations of women in hip-hop and black culture in general. In the same way that the reception of hip-hop music struggles with interpretations of race in black representational space, hip-hop artists often struggle with representations of women in their work.
Two problematic issues with Lamar’s views on women throughout his catalog appear in his discussions of women in Section.80: his championing of natural beauty standards and the use of women as stock characters that embody stereotypes of women in poverty. Lamar’s aesthetic preference for ‘natural’ women is a consistent feature of his work, expressed on TPAB’s “Complexion,” an ode to the beauty of women’s black skin and controversial lyric on DAMN.’s “Humble.” The negatively voiced sexual objectification of ‘natural’ women on “Humble.” sparked controversy among black women on social media as an example of misogyny hiding beneath Lamar’s ‘woke’ veneer.17 This interpretation of Lamar’s work opens a space to consider how beauty standards have long played a role in the struggle for black self-determination. These issues elide with the second problem of controlling images, such as the jezebel.18 Kendrick’s aesthetics of women play off of these controlling images, attempting empowerment while positioning women as objects for his sexual gaze. Thus, Lamar’s misogynistic feminism replicates the images and objectification of black women.
The critique captures Kendrick’s characterizations of Keisha and Tammy, the two female characters who populate the fictional world of Section.80. The issue of beauty standards arises on Section.80’s “No Make-Up (Her Vice),” where Kendrick attempts to empower a woman with the request to skip the makeup so that he can see her natural beauty. On the hook, he acknowledges all the work the woman puts into her appearance. He politely asks if she wouldn’t mind leaving the makeup off today and take a break from the expectations of others. This reading is consistent with the feminist critique of Lamar’s work earlier and is supported by the stock narratives Lamar gives the two female characters in his story. “Tammy’s Song (Her Evils)” and “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain)” introduce two women who share narrative space with Kendrick in Section.80. On “Tammy’s Song,” Kendrick narrates the story of her struggle to find an honest man in a cloudy atmosphere punctuated by skittering distorted synths. In this space, which runs sonically close to the work on DAMN., Tammy ends a sequence of relationships when she catches one partner in the act of cheating, and the subsequent partner admits to cheating after she finds condoms in his pocket. Juxtaposed with “No Make-Up,” this track seems to lionize Kendrick as a potential savior figure as opposed to the other men who fail Tammy. This reading is interrupted by the fact that it ends with Tammy having sex with another woman after bonding over shared failed experiences with men.
“Keisha’s Song” fills out the picture of what’s going on with the women of Section.80. Kendrick’s remark at the end of “No Make-Up,” “to be continued … eleven,” indicates that Keisha’s song is its sequel. She’s the woman Kendrick talks to in “A.D.H.D” The floating synths have a softer touch than on “A.D.H.D.” Its dreamy space is interrupted by the reality that Keisha is a sex worker who Kendrick describes on the job. In the second verse, Keisha is caught by a police officer and escapes charges in a pay for play. The result, in the third verse, is a sense of nihilism that she’ll never escape a life haunted by the desires of men. Kendrick exposes that this cycle began when she was abused by her mother’s boyfriend at the age of 10, producing a stock story of sex workers turning to the trade from a history of abuse. It appears as a case of patriarchal moralization. This reading is consistent with the roles played by women on his other albums. ‘Lucy,’ on TPAB is the daughter of Uncle Sam, the personification of exploitation of black men in the United States. Her role is to tempt Kendrick into selling his soul for success, leaving his path to freedom behind. GKMC’s Sherane is Kendrick’s love interest who sets him up, leading to a shootout that kills his friend’s brother. However, the subtitle of the song shows that Kendrick and Keisha’s stories are intertwined. They share the experience of self-destructive responses to pain that characterize the mentality of Section.80.
If we follow the play of perspectives in the opening three songs, we see that Lamar has constructed a narrative in which he defeats his own character’s perspective. At the end of “No Make-Up,” Keisha shares a secret with the listener: Kendrick doesn’t know that she “had a black (silence).” Lamar thus gives Keisha’s own side of the story, which outweighs Kendrick’s lack of knowledge about her real situation. As we find out later, Keisha is also working on the side as a prostitute and may have been assaulted on the job. We also know that Kendrick only finds this out later in the story at the end of Keisha’s song. Kendrick’s angry delivery of Keisha’s story of abuse is not righteous indignation; it’s the anger of someone close to her who only saw her suffering too late. When he tells her story, he doesn’t make her actions a moral fault; her hustle was a habit that becomes a norm as the conditions of her life cease to improve. This striving after intimacy and affection on the part of Keisha and Kendrick elides with “Tammy’s Song” and Tammy’s search for intimacy after a series of failed relationships. ‘Her evils’ are not moral evils; she searches because of the terrible treatment she’s received from men. In the song itself, Kendrick lets the listener know he’s in the wrong as well, he “barks” at her (a reference to cat calling), to open up the hook where Tammy sings about her fidelity with a reference from Snoop’s “Down 4 My N’s.” This use of the Snoop verse is strategic as it interpolates a song about masculine fidelity into a song about masculine infidelity … and Kendrick is the culprit.
Geraldo’s critique and the feminist critique succeed only if we hear Kendrick’s verses as Lamar’s thoughts. This interpretation is consistent with the tradition of interpretation of black arts that view them as the artists’ statements on social problems. Things are not this simple in Kendrick Lamar’s work. If the listener follows the play of perspectives, they will see these statements are Kendrick’s and not necessarily Lamar’s. The structure of Lamar’s albums is not programmatic statements. They form a narrative world that contextualizes all of the events that occur within it. The interconnection shows that Kendrick speaks from the position of a character within the world, which reflects its conditions. His problematic behavior inhabits the same space as the problematic behavior of the women. Together, they function as models of a struggle for intimacy and support to fight the same conditions that lead to excessive drug use. The listener is not meant to judge the characters themselves. Lamar’s focus is the context that leads to these behaviors. He wants us to focus, with him, on their problems.
On Section.80, Lamar’s fictional world is a street corner where a group of people meet in search of a sense of empowerment in oppressive conditions. Lamar brings the listener into this world through skits that locate them in the ritual space and announce the themes of their conversation. When he introduces himself as an artist on “Fuck Your Ethnicity,” Lamar commits himself to producing this resistance through his music across positionalities. To move between positions, he creates a fictional world for the listener to inhabit using narrative structuring techniques, including skits that divide its moments thematically, poetic language that simultaneously evokes and resists the tropes of rap discourse, and a play with perspectives produced by his use of pronounces, cinematic verse structures, dialog, and contextualization as breadcrumbs on the path toward cultivating the capacity to hear what he has to say. The elements of this world form a poetics of problems, a way of inhabiting social problems within a fictional context that produces an experience of life under problematic conditions. In one sense, Lamar’s works are problematic because Kendrick says problematic things in the second sense. His work risks reinforcing problematic beliefs and behaviors only if the listener, like the essentialist interpreter, fails to enter and understand the problem space he’s created. When Lamar makes problematic statements as Kendrick, he’s speaking from his experience as formulated in a fictional world in which he is reflecting on the problems as an artist. Thus, Lamar, in the form of Kendrick, makes himself a problem, giving the reader an experience of how it feels to be a problem by drawing from the experiences of, and from, his community.
The album’s second section, thematized in “Chapter Six,” uses Kendrick as a model of the problematic perspective of the youth of the ‘Ronald Regan era.’ The three tracks of this section, “Ronald Regan Era,” “Poe Mans Dreams (His Vice),” and “The Spiteful Chant,” characterize Kendrick’s mental space, showing us how his pain grounds character in the same way as the women he encounters. In this sequence, Lamar addresses his own struggle by exposing the good, bad, and ugly of Kendrick’s personality. In “The Spiteful Chant,” Kendrick chants of paranoid isolation motivated by the sense that everyone around you is a deceptive, jealous hanger-on attempting to vampirically suck out your energy. As drums pound in the negative space between the trumpets, Kendrick describes the scene by inverting a party metaphor from Ludacris’s “Southern Hospitality”:
The inversion moves from a complaint about a party with a lack of women to a critique of an industry and environment where individuals lack authority over themselves. The source of this language and anger at others springs from a mentality born of struggle. The systematic violence perpetuated by the war on drugs and poverty produced by the principles of ‘trickle-down economics’ conditioned an environment where Kendrick developed a gangster’s mentality as a means of survival. The advantage of this mentality is that its insensitivity provides a diligence and dedication that gets things done. The downside is that its resistance to pain produces a fear-inducing narcissistic sense of power that preserves an ego under oppressive conditions. This ego translates from success in the street to success in rap, serving as an essential link between Lamar’s artistic persona and Kendrick’s personality, which plays itself out in his signifying on hip-hop terminology. To get ahead in a society that doesn’t value his experience, Kendrick accepts the desensitization necessary to pursue life outside of poverty with a low margin of error. It’s this desensitization that leads him to not see the bigger picture with Keisha and contribute to the conditions that hurt Tammy. Kendrick himself is a problem, and Lamar, by making himself a problem, opens a space to model how one can take a broader approach to social problems by attending to them as systematic features of an environment.
Kendrick Lamar’s stories aren’t meant to lament the necessity of suffering, addiction, and poverty to blackness. They’re meant to motivate those who suffer under poverty to push forward and provoke those on the top to push for better shared conditions of life. The “poe man’s dream” of “smoke good, eat good, live good” expresses desire for freedom limited by the conditions of the Ronald Regan era. The characters in Kendrick’s stories turn to vices and seek out intimacy as an escape for what feel like conditions of confinement. Lamar’s path to freedom requires him to see how these conditions have shaped his sensibility to successfully address the threats around him. They pose the interpretive problem for Kendrick, Lamar, and the listener(s): do they treat Tammy and Keisha as stock character black women, or do they attempt to sensitize themselves to the experiences of black women in their own lives?
In response to the feminist critique of Lamar’s work, the critics are absolutely right with regard to the content of the songs, but they fail to entertain the artist and character’s perspectives simultaneously. Kendrick’s method of considering the positionality of the speaker provides a method of taking a more intersectional approach to these problems. In response to the criticism of “Humble.,” Carter Kim, the model featured in the video, defended the choice, remarking that many of the critiques came from women who would question her blackness given her mixed-race heritage.20 Kim’s critique comes from the experience of not being acknowledged by other women as a black woman based on her skin tone. Thus, many of the women defending her as a woman would deny her blackness, repeating the same essentializing move as Lamar’s performed misogyny in terms of race. Paying attention to this performative aspect of Kendrick’s work thus provides a model of keeping account of one’s own positionality relative to other’s experience to approach problems from mutual implication rather than superiority. Proper intersubjective engagement requires attention to the positionality of the speakers to give a sense of reality to their perspectives.
Kendrick Lamar’s description of hip-hop’s hypnotic quality in “Fuck Your Ethnicity” explains that it’s saving power operates on our ability to experience the world differently through music. In his work on hip-hop, Bharath Ganesh argues that hip-hop is a form of anticolonial aesthetic violence that opens the possibility of the experience of emancipation.21 It operates between a thematic play of distance and proximity, animated through the somatic effects of music. It creates vibe or atmosphere. Thus, he argues that hip-hop music requires an “ethics of listening” that cultivates the consciousness of the art form through engaged contact with the production of hip-hop culture. Following Ganesh, my interpretation hears Kendrick Lamar attempt to open this possibility of emancipatory experience by problematizing his own struggles as a model for wrestling with the sense of life under systematic oppressive forces. Lamar speaks at the interstice of his inner world and broader society, presenting problems through poetry, giving voice to a struggle for freedom through appreciation of one’s own humanity and the humanity of others. His music thus engages in play between the linguistic and sensual elements of fictions. Their interaction creates atmosphere and dimension, giving experiential texture to the fictional world. Lamar’s poetics give life to the actions of the artist, characters, and listeners performed as inhabitants. This connection ties together the work of aesthetic interpretation and engagement, opening the possibility of training experiential capacities. It’s also the interactive process of meaning-making.
In the opening section, I provided a sketch of Lamar’s ability to articulate the experience of ‘being a problem’ by luring his audience into his fictional world, carving a fictional space, and producing an experience of that world by moving the listener through the perspectives of the artist, album, and the characters that inhabit it. Lamar uses his opening track to bring the listener into his perspective as an artist, providing a key to understanding the aims of his work. “Fuck Your Ethnicity” follows Lamar’s theme of opening tracks referring to the struggle between his identity as an artist and his identity as a black man, following the tradition of understanding the black experience as a form of ‘double consciousness,’ a sense of always having to look at oneself through the lens of an essentialist understanding of who you are based on your identity category. In the same way that black arts must resist being interpreted as simply representations of blackness, black people have to resist essentializations of who they are as members of a race, issues of prejudice, and systematic social conditions that have come to define what it means to be black in the United States. Lamar, as a hip-hop artist, has to struggle against conceptions of himself as a prophet of blackness, a protest artist, or just a rapper on account of the fact that he is a black artist. He also has to struggle against the material and social barriers to succeeding as an artist due to systematic racial oppression. His album’s themes center on his position within this struggle and discuss his experience within these fictional worlds by dramatizing himself as Kendrick, his persona in the album, and the characters and situations he encounters. They invite listeners to explore this problem with Kendrick and reflect on their own position in the process.
The ability to interpret Kendrick’s world requires the listener to cultivate the ability to follow the play of perspectives in his narratives, which produce a sense of double or triple consciousness that refutes essentialist readings of his characters and themes. Lamar’s work cultivates this sensibility through challenging the listener to read between the lines and see his use of hip-hop tropes and techniques as cultural tools that can signify the material gain and superficial happiness that we take them for or forms of empowerment that provide the same sense of worth and a richer sense of reality. By signifying, Lamar gives the listener a path from a superficial reading of hip-hop’s content to a deeper reading of it as a model for empowering black artists and communities. Listeners also gain the opportunity for reflecting on their own positions relative to Lamar’s and Kendrick’s. By retaining its problematic aspects, Lamar acknowledges the tension between materialism and empowerment within himself and in the genre. Listeners now have the same choice. Their form of interpretation will show whether they take the simple or the complex route.
The simple route continues the tradition of interpreting black arts and black people in terms of stereotypes, denying their complexity. While there are works that simply aim to profit off the effective use of genre tropes and themes, Lamar and other hip-hop artists strive to produce music that resist the generalizations about black art and the production of purely commercial music. Lamar uses the play of perspectives between himself and his characters to model the development of his sense of power and purpose to understanding the interconnection between his experience and the experience of others. The play of perspectives in “A.D.H.D” reflects on the collective depression facing members of his audience and his struggle in the face of the conditions of his youth. Moving through his third-person narrative, first-person reflection, and second-person references to audience and character, he moves the listener through the levels of his album, demonstrating how intersubjective engagement, movement between perspectives, can produce a rich sense of interconnectedness and a broad sense of our shared conditions of oppression and disempowerment. On Section.80, this richer picture shows that these conditions can’t be generalized to our identities; they manifest themselves in all of us through variations based on our positionalities.
Kendrick’s music indicates that the complex route is superior since wealth won’t buy you freedom. In each phase of his journey, the struggle between his life of stardom and his identity as a black man are in conflict. In response, he uses his art as a way of reflecting on himself and using his reflection as a model for the listener to follow. By focusing on himself as a problem, Lamar uses Kendrick to contextualize the challenges he faces through the contexts that he inhabits. He finds himself by seeing himself in a shared context with others. Lamar sings of his own experience and the experience of others in hopes that we engage with their stories as representations of starting points for understanding, never a definitive, programmatic argument. By singing of the problem in himself, Kendrick opens a space to evade the praise and curses of popular and critical encounters with his work. Each makes the mistake of overdetermining his work in terms of their understanding of the black experience and the politics of race in America. By being a problem, Kendrick challenges us to tarry with the negative and see his reality as a tension rather than a solution. In doing so, he opens a model of self and artistic creation that resists essentialization for the reality of a complex, multifaceted experience of blackness in America. Lamar himself appears with his flaws. He is neither hero, sinner, nor saint. This limitation produces a conceptual, consciously formulated representational space that becomes a model for the production of art and life through experience. He also gives us a space to interpret his work in order to develop a critical sensibility that sensitizes us to the complex nature of the black experience.