Following church worship one Sunday morning, I made a quick stop at a nearby supermarket in order to pick up some last-minute grocery items for dinner later that afternoon. While walking through the store’s aisles, I saw from a considerable distance an older black woman clearly dressed in an outfit that could safely be described as ‘church attire’ complete with her beautifully adorned large brim hat (otherwise known as a ‘crown’). However, the reason she caught my attention was because, when I least expected it, I distinctly heard the woman faintly singing, “I am a sinner who’s probably gonna sin again/Lord, forgive me.” As any devotee of contemporary hip-hop might recognize, that lyric is from the chorus of “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” a song by Kendrick Lamar. Based on its title, it is obvious that this song is not a gospel hymn. Rather, the song’s title refers to a key phrase emphatically uttered by the protagonist’s drunk father to his agitated wife in order to delay the impact of everyday stress on the fleeting prospects of happiness felt from without and within the track’s lush yet languid melodic production. At the time of this writing, that chance encounter was a few years ago, and I never saw the woman again. More importantly, I never found out why this mature churchgoing lady was so fond of singing that very specific snippet of Lamar’s song. But to this day, I still find myself remembering the cognitive dissonance that I experienced during that somewhat odd moment one Sunday after church.
Remarkably, this song is indicative of a subtle yet succinct framing of Lamar’s theological anthropology. Without question, one gains a particularly clear insight into his view of sin as an ingrained feature rather than incidental failure of the human condition. Even more, his designation of himself (and all of us) with the label ‘sinner’ illustrates that we are all ‘fallen’ creatures prone to being sinful despite our great possibilities and best intentions. Unquestionably, the theological content of the song’s lyrics would fit well within the black church tradition – and that she recognizes it in this source – so the fact that this viewpoint is found in hip-hop was pleasantly surprising. Moreover, one can argue that Lamar intentionally invokes the issue of sin as derived by traditional church theology in an attempt to ‘soften’ the style of hip-hop deeply indebted to gangsta rap. Nevertheless, this creative exchange is marked by the mutuality that she recognizes her values permeating his worldview just as much as he recognizes his values in hers.
In many regards, Lamar echoes the sentiment of Reinhold Niebuhr’s doctrine of sin and God inasmuch as the sacred view of “human nature is involved in the paradox of claiming a higher stature for [human beings] and of taking a more serious view of [our] evil than any other anthropology.”1 Although somewhat unexpected, Lamar has helped reinvigorate the notion of hip-hop as a valid creative and commercial forum for critically engaging with ideas about sin and moral agency with unwavering seriousness to both negative (alienation, chaos, disruption, brutality, despair, and oppression) and positive (solidarity, peace, love, forgiveness, hope, and equality) possibilities that characterize the human condition.2 That being said, this chapter explores how Lamar’s musical compositions actually serve as an articulation of a cohesive, coherent moral worldview.
For our purposes, sin is defined as every transgression or rupture that contravenes one’s most affirmative and meaningful relationship with God and other humans in accordance to core Christian doctrinal beliefs (most chiefly the Ten Commandments and the life, lessons, and legacy of Jesus Christ in the New Testament). Whereas much consideration in classical moral theory as developed by the likes of Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin has placed great emphasis on the concept of original sin (the fundamental belief of human fallibility and imperfection), modern thinking on sinfulness depends on the juxtaposition of original sin and actual sins (specific wrongful thoughts and acts). In light of this situation, Lamar’s overall outlook lends itself to views on sin and moral agency within the human condition through the lens of hip-hop music and culture. His music affords the keen observer the opportunity to assess the role that sin is manifested in the private conduct of one’s personal life but is also deeply rooted in societal structures in which we live. Finally, operating within the liminal space between descriptive and normative ethical perspectives, Lamar’s work is undeniably wedded to broad Judeo-Christian doctrines of sin and salvation in ways reminiscent of Reinhold Niebuhr’s claim that “sin is inevitable but not necessary.”3
With particular attention to Kendrick Lamar’s three major label album releases – good kid, m.A.A.d city, To Pimp a Butterfly, and DAMN. – this chapter examines the ways in which he grapples with notions of sin on both an individual and communal basis within the contemporary African American experience. Throughout his astonishingly brief yet stellar career thus far, Lamar has demonstrated remarkable growth, depth, and dynamic range as both a lyricist and MC that gives his live as well as recorded performances a highly mutable, chameleon-like quality. As a native son of Compton – arguably the genre’s most notorious mecca – Lamar’s critical gaze of what it means for anyone trying to navigate the moral quagmire of such a ‘gangsta’s paradise’ in a safe (if not always saved) manner has made his recent recordings so remarkably compelling; while clearly a reference to Coolio’s 1995 hit song of the same name, “Gangsta’s Paradise,” the term’s usage in this chapter is rooted in the proliferation of what S. Craig Watkins calls the “ghettocentric imagination” in gangsta rap music and ‘hood’ films circa 1988 to 2003.4 In many ways, his evolving musicality has revealed that Lamar is distilling some of the best features of both his predecessors and peers into bold new creative forms that are often disconcerting and disruptive to contemporary trends in hip-hop. However, as Richard Shusterman notes, since gangsta rap’s rise as a musical subgenre in the late 1980s, hip-hop became,
The most unwavering facet of Kendrick Lamar’s work has been his incisive commentary and musings on the cumulative impact that immoral and illicit acts have had on his generation (who were born and raised in the shadow of gangsta rap’s emergence within the global cultural milieu).
Furthermore, as illustrated by Lamar’s rapidly growing and evolving body of work, he has proven that hip-hop as a musical art form can still possess a prophetic social critique while also being both critically acclaimed and commercially viable. Emerging in an era marked by a diverse array of black male hip-hop artists who have embraced overtly religious qua Christian symbols, sacred rhetoric, and subject matter in their music, Lamar’s burgeoning canon has dramatically expanded the definition of what might be called ‘holy’ hip-hop in genuine terms as his own personal journey as a religious seeker has led him from being nonreligious, to traditional Christianity, to the Hebrew Israelite movement. It is important to take into consideration that a crucial aspect of Lamar’s immense contribution to the American cultural landscape is rooted in his unflinchingly honest, heartfelt exploration of issues such as religious modalities, racial identity, and moral responsibility not only in larger society and culture but also in his own life.
When viewing Lamar’s struggles to navigate the perils of toxic masculinity, wanton sex, drug abuse, rampant crime, negative peer pressure, and lethal gang violence in his 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city, Lamar uses this autobiographical song cycle to illustrate his own desperate journey from reckless sinner to redeemed saint by the end of the album. Next, by examining the ways in which Lamar confronts various degrees of survivor’s guilt in his 2015 album, To Pimp A Butterfly, with the vast temptations and pervasive fears with which he now has to contend once he found worldwide success and great fortune via his ascendancy as a musical superstar, even as the nation was watching a burgeoning protest movement defend black humanity against lethal violence by police officers and vigilantes. Finally, while engaging in the critical reflection of his 2017 album, DAMN., it is quite evident that Lamar is theorizing and discussing what it means to be part of a ‘chosen people’ through such a tripartite examination of his constantly evolving interrogations of sin, salvation, and moral agency. On the whole, this chapter will make note of the changing religious-theological sensibilities at work as Lamar makes his evolutionary trajectory from good kid, m.A.A.d city, To Pimp A Butterfly, and, most recently, DAMN. as both a musical artist and moral agent.
Throughout his widely acclaimed 2012 major label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick Lamar demonstrates his conviction that the nature of sin for him and his peers as young black men and women prevented them from rectifying their moral inadequacies and iniquities on their own accord. In “The Art of Peer Pressure,” he insists “I never was a gangbanger, I mean/I never was stranger to the [funk] neither, I really doubt it/Rush a nigga quick and then we laugh about it/That’s ironic, ’cause I’ve never been violent/Until I’m with the homies.”6 What is most impressive about Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city is how it serves as a self-aware metanarrative of West Coast hip-hop over the last quarter century. But Lamar’s admittedly ambitious goal was to make an album that speaks both picturesquely and honestly in the polyglot poetics of his notorious hometown of Compton, not to mention of hip-hop itself, which is to say, as a product of his environment, the fragility of life expectancy of young African American men due to violent death. Listeners can find sheer exhilaration with this song cycle in the way Lamar voices and elevates contemporary hip-hop’s sonic, sociocultural, and spiritual geography in a manner that is both seemingly effortless and startlingly cohesive, enacting himself at different ages, dropping into other rappers’ dialects and vocal registers to include them (and their worlds) in the dialogue, crafting his ‘short film’ around the terrifyingly unpredictable relationships that feed and frustrate his experience as a young black man – with his parents, friends, rivals, and even his purported paramour. Central to good kid, m.A.A.d city is the album’s attention to the allure and effects of life’s everyday distractions of alcohol, illicit drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, nightlife, peer pressure, gun violence, and gang-related criminality, in addition to how the resulting song cycle blurs and distorts personal sanctimony by causing one’s emotional state to shift from apathetic, to elated, to devastated to relieved.
Narrative storytelling within hip-hop has been most associated with the best articulation of gangsta rap. Since its inception, gangsta rap’s paramount appeal has been its evocative lyricism as a means of perfectly conveying how important stereotypical depictions of vice and violence often can be manifested musically in ways that oscillate between the visceral and vicarious. Rather than being an outlier, Lamar is part of a contingent of West Coast rappers who have also addressed the looming shadow of death in gangsta rap. Crafted at the height of his popularity and prominence as a gangsta rapper, Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” is an interesting counterpoint to the overall memoiristic approach in good kid, m.A.A.d city. Having established his street credibility, critical acclaim, and commercial clout both as a core member of NWA and a successful solo artist, Ice Cube deployed his estimable skills as a rapper and lyricist by writing “Good Day,” a song that actually emanates from a simple premise: What is a ‘good day’ from within a gangsta rap worldview?
By analyzing Ice Cube’s definition of a ‘good day’ in relation to Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, listeners must grapple with such an event as either an eschatological ideal or merely a convoluted daydream. Much like Kendrick Lamar’s work on his debut album, Ice Cube was a relatively young black man from Compton when “It Was a Good Day” was written in 1992. The song begins with the observation that “just waking up in the morning I gotta thank God/I don’t know but today seems kinda odd” because he feels himself awaken in a relaxed and serene fashion. Although his morning is off to a placid and quite pleasant start, Ice Cube poses an existential query when he ponders “will I live another 24?” Over the course of this titular day, the narrator enjoys a good breakfast, dominates his peers during a friendly basketball game, has a huge windfall while gambling at midnight, watches mindless television while highly intoxicated, and then has a late-night sexual rendezvous with a woman he desired for quite some time. Finally, following all of his exploits that night, he drives home in the wee morning hours totally content through the deserted streets of Los Angeles. While Ice Cube’s protagonist in the song clearly embodies a bona fide gangsta persona, the song’s subtext is that – despite all the false bravado, wanton criminality, reckless violence, and oversexed appetite prevalent in the gangsta rap genre – he reveals the humanistic pathos at the core of this worldview. Instead of taking any measure of pride and satisfaction in an anthropological perspective that would not hesitate to kill anyone perceived as a threat, Ice Cube depicts violence as a necessary evil in his life that he would much rather avoid than perpetuate. Arguably, this concern is best encapsulated by the song’s final couplet: “Today I didn’t even have to use my AK/I gotta say, it was a good day.” Layered beneath the song’s lush musical tones and infectious yet laid-back lyrics, Ice Cube’s hit illustrates in the simplest terms not only a ‘good day’ but also the ‘good life’ in Platonic terms that most Compton residents wished they could live.7
Written roughly two decades after “It Was a Good Day,” the songs on Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city depict his protagonist chasing after similar pleasures – a day spent hanging with his friends, having fun at a party, and desiring sexual intimacy with his girlfriend – but ultimately confronting drastically different moral choices once the specter of lethal violence rears its ugly head. Ultimately, after the album takes us careening from the mundane domestic unrest; to adrenaline-laden, thrill-seeking teenage antics; and the harsh realities of nihilistic adulthood defined by diminishing returns, after trying to sublimate his angst and rage (fueled by a seemingly endless flood of intoxicated debauchery, sexual exploits, wanton materialism, and gang-related violence), Lamar ends up kneeling to pray on the album’s elegiac emotional centerpiece, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.” After confessing his sins, Lamar’s actual intent is to acknowledge his profound debt to the music, neighborhood, and even the man who made it possible for him to credibly drop such an outlandish claim in the first place. Although Lamar seems preternaturally wise beyond his years as a 20-something hip-hop artist, ostensibly it is this degree of enlightenment that sets Lamar apart from the majority of his contemporary peers in his ability to cultivate his artistic vision and voice with high levels of confidence and moral clarity.
In his 2004 song “Walk Like a Man,” the West Coast rapper Murs offers another approach to the demystification of the gangsta rap ethos. He tells the story of a man who witnesses his friend being shot and killed, and then the man decides to exact bloody revenge a year later with a killing of his own. This song contemplates whether revenge, or more specifically violence, can be used as a resolution to conflict and one’s own issues. Murs is able to show the temptations of revenge and the unanticipated feelings of remorse through exceptional storytelling. The progression of events in Murs’s story is gripping and leaves a lingering impact with his audience by compelling listeners to contemplate several issues: the depth and severity of trauma for black youth; the true nature of justice in a violent, volatile culture; and the extent to which the choices we make irrevocably define us.
Considering these themes, the relevance of Murs’s “Walk Like a Man” to the worldview similarly espoused in good kid, m.A.A.d city is that, outside the cultural milieu of gang-related social dynamics, murder as an appropriate response to either perceived or actual threats is typically difficult to justify. As products of their environment, given what is often referred to as the ‘code of the streets,’ both Lamar and Murs illustrate how the temptation of retribution can appear satisfying under the ‘right’ circumstances.8 For instance, from the song’s outset, Murs states, “If shootin’ is the solution, then you’re not that clever.”9 This mind-set represents how Murs began with a disposition held by relatively peaceful, agreeable members of society. Yet, for someone who inhabits a gang-related environment, however, a violent encounter that escalates without warning and results in the killing of his friend in a blaze of gunfire could prove overwhelming. Murs recounts, “I remember his [killer’s] face, but what I remember most, was when I got to my knees and held my nigga close.”10 These lyrics convey the powerful sadness that Murs experienced that made him passionately yearn for revenge. Upon hearing Murs or Lamar recounting the vicious cycle of violence in their respective tales, the average listener could imagine he/she would also want to seek vengeful retribution on someone who murdered his/her friend or loved one in cold blood if given the opportunity. However, unlike the revenge saga qua cautionary tale of Murs’s song, the young black men depicted at the heart of Lamar’s narrative utilize their agency to break the persistent chain of retaliatory violence through a confession of sins and subsequent repentance to God.
Ironically, what makes good kid, m.A.A.d city such a remarkable album is Lamar’s restless humility in the face of the troubled and tumultuous legacy of the ‘gangsta rap’ aesthetic (that dominated not only West Coast hip-hop but also actually permeated into the pop cultural mainstream for more than two decades) and his willingness to deeply critique the multilayered culture of his upbringing as a native son of Compton, even as he also wholeheartedly celebrates his hometown’s legacy. As much as Kendrick Lamar’s worldview was clearly shaped by his early life and experiences in Compton during the heyday of gangsta rap, it might be surprising to some that much of his moral outlook bears some resemblance to that of Augustine of Hippo at several crucial points. While the enormous influence that Augustine, the North African bishop and theologian, has on the Christian moral tradition is fairly evident, few would recognize his imprint on hip-hop music and culture as carried forward by Lamar’s work on good kid, m.A.A.d city. Notably, it could be argued that they both would likely agree that the Divine must exist and operate in a reality above and beyond all worldly conditions. As Lamar demonstrates in his verses on this album, he and his fellow Compton natives are all seeking something to fill what Augustine calls the “God-sized hole” in their souls that would give their lives true meaning – in other words, someone or something to love. However, as good kid, m.A.A.d city reveals, the trick of making that realization possible is a matter of surviving all the temptation, torment, and traps that are an implicit part of their daily surroundings. The task of human morality within Augustinian moral philosophy amounts greatly to the responsibility to discern a hierarchical ordering of people, priorities, and principles and to ‘love’ them rightly on a metaphysical level. Thus, for Augustine, rightly ordered loves were deemed virtue and the disordered loves were viewed as vice.11 Augustine taught that we are most fundamentally shaped not as much by what we believe, or think, or even do but by what we love. The functional cause of our discontent is that our loves are ‘out of order.’ Using another powerful illustration, Augustine also coined the theological phrase incurvatus in se (Latin for “curved inward on oneself”) in order to describe one’s worldview bent ‘inward’ toward oneself rather than reaching ‘outward’ for God and other human beings.
Structurally, the influence of Augustinian thought on Lamar’s outlook moves beyond his autographical approach to ethical reflection in a number of key points. Much like Augustine’s classic text, City of God, Lamar’s narrative within good kid, m.A.A.d city, the album’s story arc, is structured both formally and functionally on a core belief that the good is equated with the Christian God – as measured via what is deemed true, right, decent, and noble in the human condition – is believed to be of purely supernatural origin for Augustine and Lamar. Conversely, exploration of mortal existence in the ‘city of humanity’ per se for Lamar and Augustine alike seems perpetually tempered by the perspective that nothing susceptible to change in terms of materiality, time, or space could serve as the basis for enduring truth. As an ideal concept, Augustine envisioned Rome – more than its geopolitical transformation as a city that became an empire – as an earthly realm juxtaposed to the ideal of the heavenly realm. According to Augustine, a city vis-à-vis a community is defined as a “multitude of reasonable beings united by their agreement in the things that they love.”12 The cultural character of any given society is thus determined by the choices of the people who inhabit it. If the choice is of sinful self-love rather than love of the Divine, then one resides in the earthly city. But if the crux of their focus is God rather than self, then they have attained the heavenly city. For Lamar, the implication is that the true believer will look elsewhere beyond Compton, or any other state, for the fulfillment of his or her heavenly hopes.
However, once the album reaches its climactic peak in which Lamar’s protagonist and his friends are unexpectedly caught in a drive-by shooting, which triggers a lethal cycle of aggression, murder, and retribution, the distraught main character and his friends realize that they cannot ‘save’ themselves on the dangerous streets of Compton in either a literal or figurative sense. Akin to Augustinian thought, Lamar evinces his belief that one’s humble submission and appeal for God’s unmerited, agapastic action to rescue and redeem a fallen humanity could achieve true salvation for him and his ‘homies.’ At the close of the song “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” the protagonist and his friends encounter an elderly black woman (portrayed by the late great Maya Angelou!). Finding the young men in a state of utter existential crisis, she ministers to the troubled young men about God’s grace and eventually leads them in a recitation of the “Sinner’s Prayer” as the renunciation of sinful lives marked by recklessness of mind, body, and spirit. In this fashion, Lamar offers glimpses of the complex moral schema facing many in the hip-hop generation by asserting that the manifestation of evil in human affairs is the enactment of wrong and worse life choices as determined by wanton willfulness leads people to fall prey to sin; conversely, Lamar’s major contribution to moral discourse in the post-gangsta era is that the source of goodness is only possible via God’s grace and mercy breaking into a fatally flawed human condition from outside rather than any self-determined morality.
As he was laying the conceptual groundwork for his next album, Kendrick Lamar recognized that both he and the larger black community were experiencing an intriguing inflection point in terms of conditions of possibility. In early 2014, Lamar was cognizant of how his burgeoning wealth and fame wasn’t only divergent but also diametrically opposed to the increasingly dire and deadly encounters for most black people in the world today. In an oral history of Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly recording sessions, Lamar confesses, “It was real uncomfortable because I was dealing with my own issues.” He elaborates by recalling that “I was making a transition from the lifestyle that I lived before to the one I have now. When you’re onstage rapping and all these people are cheering for you, you feel like you’re saving lives.”13 By December 2014, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the nation’s streets across the country in the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Tamir Rice among others. These protests sought to challenge the rising tide of police brutality and murderous vigilante violence. Protesters marched in countless American cities with increasing frequency and fervor, filling the night sky with a now-familiar repertoire of chants: “No justice, no peace.” “Hands up, don’t shoot.” “I can’t breathe.” This mass mobilization of activists and concerned citizens has become known as the Black Lives Matter movement, having gained worldwide attention. When thinking of the animus for those protests, one is reminded of the words of famed writer and activist James Baldwin when he stated, “Since I live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can.”14 Although uttered decades ago, Baldwin’s comment gains even greater significance when viewed alongside contemporary protests against state-sanctioned police brutality wherein there are burgeoning debates within the public square about whether a person of color can be fully recognized as an equal citizen or even as a human being.
As a work of art, Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly has had a complicated relationship with the evolution of Black Lives Matter as a protest movement. When commenting on Michael Brown’s murder in 2015 in a Billboard interview, Lamar reflected,
This coupled with his theological respectability espoused in the same interview, “I got into some things, but God willing, he had favoritism over me and my spirit.”15 This is indicative of the psychic angst of what therapists might call ‘survivor’s guilt’ with which Lamar visibly and viscerally grapples with during this period in attempts to figure out why he has survived and thrived while so many others have not.
All the way through, To Pimp a Butterfly is heavily saturated with Lamar’s keen sense of survivor’s guilt with all the deep-seated uneasiness and cognitive dissonance such feelings can generate for the reflective, remorseful person. Other hip-hop artists during this period who were commenting on the bittersweet trappings of fame and success – Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday, Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne, Jay-Z’s Magna Carta … Holy Grail, Drake’s Nothing Was the Same, Kanye West’s Yeezus, and Future’s Monster mixtape, among others – resonate with some of the central concerns Kendrick Lamar addresses on To Pimp a Butterfly. Constructed as a concept album, Lamar thoughtfully picks apart the hard lessons and lived experiences of his perilous youth – the sum total of his motivations and impulses, lessons learned and taught, greatest successes, and worst mistakes – in the midst of his newfound fame, wealth, and celebrity as he tries to circumnavigate the evil of ‘Uncle Sam’ (otherwise known as the United States) and ‘Lucy’ (short for Lucifer). In the face of this existential crisis, Lamar finds himself craving for a life that’s better than the one he thought that he once wanted. Peppered among To Pimp a Butterfly’s songs are tracks such as “Wesley’s Theory,” “King Kunta,” “For Free?,” “Alright,” “For Sale?,” and, most notably, “How Much a Dollar Cost” that reveal Lamar’s internal tug-of-war between the seductive comforts of celebrity and success and to the moral accountability demanded by his awakened political consciousness. In this way, this leitmotif of grief makes the album much more of a spiritual sequel to good kid, m.A.A.d city than merely being its sequential successor within Lamar’s discography. In the album opener “Wesley’s Theory,” legendary hip-hop artist, producer, and entrepreneur Dr. Dre simulates a phone call to Lamar in which he offers advice to the younger artist: “Remember the first time you came out to the house? You said you wanted a spot like mine. But remember, anybody can get it/The hard part is keeping it.”16 As much as Lamar struggles with the dizzying matrix of diametrically opposed forces impacting his lived experience, the lyrical and sonic tableau expanded on To Pimp a Butterfly is much more of a palimpsest than a tabula rasa.
In light of this, the album helped lend voice and vision to the mixed emotions of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States during the latter years of the Obama presidency while also helping to expand Black Lives Matter’s association to broad-based human rights struggles globally.17 As an overlooked and devalued system of thought and praxis with an emphasis on human possibility that demands the cessation of numerous social ills, the evolution of Black Lives Matter promises to illustrate a richer, more complex understanding of civil as well as human rights worldwide. In terms of new social movement theory, the ‘leaderless’ paradigm of Black Lives Matter is akin to the activist frameworks pioneered by civil rights icon Ella Baker’s mentorship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee seeking grassroots, bottom-up, and decentralized organizational structures rather than heteropatriarchal and hegemonic hierarchy more readily recognizable to the status quo.18
Yet as innovative, impassioned, and inspired as the Black Lives Matters movement has been since its inception, it is nothing new. That is not a condemnation but rather a confirmation of the enduring quest for freedom and human dignity by people of African descent in the United States. In fact, this is but one of the most recent organizational efforts since the abolition of chattel slavery in the late nineteenth century by African Americans and committed white allies to combat racial inequality as well as interlocking modes of oppression and injustice. Seizing the prospects of an expansive multiracial democracy deeply rooted in the promise of Reconstruction, African Americans sought en masse opportunities to strengthen their families and communities by developing both formal organizations and grassroots movements in order to secure their newfound social, cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and religious independence. Confronted with the simultaneous ascendancy of white supremacist terrorism and Jim/Jane Crow segregation throughout much of the twentieth century, African Americans established a variety of civic institutions, schools, churches and other religious bodies, trade unions, fraternal orders, social clubs, professional guilds, and civil rights organizations to countermand the deleterious impact of both de facto and de jure segregation within American life.
Historically, efforts to ‘uplift the race’ through community organizing and institution building are even more impressive when considered by the challenges of doing so not just in the presence of outright racist policies and practices but also the absence of civil rights and constitutional liberties routinely being denied them. As Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us, “Never forget that [African Americans] were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains – whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.”19 Despite the myriad of societal hardships and external stresses (or, based on one’s perspective, possibly due to them), African Americans founded their own independent institutions wherever and whenever they could with whatever means were available to them at the time in order to meet their needs and even fulfill their dreams. Even in the face of ideological schisms and interpersonal conflicts based on gender, class, sexual identity, skin color, religion, ethnicity, and other factors, earlier generations of African Americans who were born fully emancipated yet still not totally free entered professions and vocations, started businesses, and created numerous organizations often by blood, sweat, tears, and sheer force of will. In realization of the adage “making a way out of no way,” much of the zeal to develop such a rich and varied array of black institutions (both traditional and organic, to borrow a Gramscian framework) was a direct product of a complicated history of the black radical imagination’s restless impatience and righteous indignation at social injustice that leveraged such creativity, resiliency, and vitality with the twentieth century’s changing material conditions, expanding opportunities, and shifting worldviews.20
Illustrating his own personal and professional journey during this politically volatile moment in To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar is articulating a move toward antinomianism, a viewpoint that rejects unjust laws in deference to higher, more legitimate moral principles or social values.21 The crux of antinomianism invoked by Lamar’s work in this particular album is rooted in a clear-cut concern: How do people live as good citizens in a society defined by a biased, unfair legal regime? Part of the driving force that encourages oppressed and marginalized people in a fully functional civil society is the bedrock belief that good people who are behaving nobly can trust the powerful stakeholders in society to respond to appeals based on legitimate principles, perspectives, and practices that we all share. The key issue here is the question of legitimacy as a fulcrum for shifting the balance of societal power from oppressors to the oppressed. In his classic examination of legitimacy’s role in civil society, Max Weber raises the crucial distinction between the normative philosophical basis of legitimacy (why people OUGHT to obey the law and comply with authority) and the sociological foundation of such behavior (why people DO obey the law and comply with authority).22 The most rudimentary definition of legitimacy within the body politic, as one scholar suggests, “is a reservoir of good will that allows the institutions of government to go against what people may want at the moment without suffering debilitating consequences.”23 When observing why people comply and obey with legal authority, Tom R. Tyler argues,
After a lengthy, intense series of debates about the pragmatic agenda that Black Lives Matter sought to achieve, nearly 60 organizations associated with the movement from across the United States released a set of six platform demands (end the war on black people, reparations, invest-divest, economic justice, community control, and political power) in the hopes of further advancing their goals beyond local protests into the formal arena of national electoral politics.25 In thinking about this matter, the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr asserts, “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world… [Humanity’s] capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but [our] inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” Herein, it is additionally fruitful to recall the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau who argues,
Those who seek to transform unjust and unbearable conditions into ones that permit human freedom and flourishing must consider, as George Lipsitz puts it, “the desire to work through existing contradictions rather than stand outside them represents not so much a preference for melioristic reform over revolutionary change, but rather a recognition of the impossibility of standing outside totalitarian systems of domination.”26 The quest to transform an unjust society into a better one always has been a good faith proposition.
However, concerns arise for Lamar and others about how will ethical concepts, such as definitive value or dutiful obligation, ever be shared with the next generation? Integral to the historical tensions illuminated in Lamar’s work was not merely advancing the causes of civil rights, racial equality, and electoral politics but rather exploring those vital concerns through the complex prism of African American protest and ultimate progress. In “The Blacker the Berry,” Lamar’s final couplet poses a rhetorical question that frames the tension at the nexus of respectability politics and politicized representations: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was [murdered] in the street/When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?”27 By literally calling himself a hypocrite at the end of the song, Lamar upends the entirety of the song’s perceived moral critique by holding responsible himself and the larger black community for wholeheartedly condemning white deadly assaults on black humanity but not effectively addressing black horizontal violence as a manifestation of internalized racism and self-hate. The crucial dividing line within black leadership and activism paradigms in the post-civil rights era has been the diametric feud between the “politics of respectability” advanced by the black middle class and the politicized representations (aka ‘dog whistle’ politics) deployed by white conservatives. Although not discussed either in tandem or contention with one another, the politics of respectability and politicized representations have been enmeshed together in a deeply complex fashion during the past 50 years. While working at cross purposes – the former viewed as a means of racial uplift and the latter as a system of racist subterfuge – these dual forces have converged in disastrous fashion particularly in the fates of poor black people hanging in the balance.
Respectability politics refers to efforts by marginalized and/or disenfranchised groups to police the bodies, behaviors, and beliefs of their own members in order to demonstrate their social values as being not only compatible with but also absolutely consistent with mainstream values rather than challenging the mainstream for its failure to accept diverse cultural perspectives and experiences. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham states that while adherence to respectability enabled elite black leadership over a century ago to counter racist images and segregated social structures,
Moreover, Higginbotham asserts respectability politics invariably
Rooted in her analysis of the turn-of-the-century struggles of middle-class black churchwomen activists who established their own voluntary associations in order to advance their own racial uplift agenda, much of the intraracial schisms rooted in social hierarchy and moral standards that Higginbotham indicates were glossed over largely in the historiography of the black freedom struggle. However, as Frederick C. Harris notes,
For instance, Lamar’s “How Much a Dollar Cost” gives a riveting lyrical depiction of his own pivotal realization that, in an era marked by rising inequality and declining economic mobility for most Americans – but particularly for black Americans – the twenty-first-century version of respectability politics works to accommodate complicity with neoliberalism rather than fomenting human liberation.
Arguably, the aforementioned dissonance regarding respectability politics suggests that we are experiencing a sea change in the structure of the civil rights activism largely indicative of a generational schism between the millennials and their elders in terms of the targets, tactics, and tangible outcomes in the struggle for human liberation. One example of the search for moral legitimacy and institutional trust highlights a nagging problem in which, as Bakari Kitwana notes, many adults bemoan “a withering sense of values and social responsibility among the younger generation … is the steady drop in youth membership and attendance in the Black church – long a community haven of spiritual centeredness and respectable values.”31 Although there might be some merit to this claim, it is necessary to counterbalance this worry with the realization that the primacy of the black church as the main source of either respectability politics or political representations is much less pertinent for Kendrick Lamar’s age cohort than for previous generations. One thing that has to be overcome both in academic and popular circles is that the black church tradition that is being criticized is nothing more than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People with hymnals where white liberal political candidates can offer lukewarm platitudes about improving race relations in order to stage photo ops and drum up black votes. Conversely, too many white conservatives only feel comfortable with black churches that are little more than sanctified amusement parks that are high on prosperity preaching and empty emotionalism but are also anti-intellectual wastelands where any good issue dies a lonely death. Needless to say, there is a necessity to disrupt the knee-jerk reaction that the black church tradition is the one and only source of social justice activism and political mobilization. This critical disposition might be suggestive of Lamar’s highly public transition from traditional Christianity to Hebrew Israelite thought.
Conversely, politicized representations function as a system of political rhetoric that utilizes racially coded vocabulary and imagery that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an alternate, more layered resonance for a conservative political constituency. Over the last half-century, Ian Haney López asserts,
Part and parcel of politicized representations since the electoral success of Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump has been an inexorable pattern of the systematic scapegoating of racial and ethnic minorities in order to appease the cultural anxieties of white working, and middle-class voters. Such racist appeals became a mainstay of conservative political rhetoric that, in turn, consequently established the implicit and explicit racial politics of the contemporary Grand Old Party (GOP).33
In the first verse of “The Blacker the Berry,” Lamar catalogs a veritable litany of negative racist stereotypes designed to indicate that everything associated with blackness emanates “from the bottom of mankind.” As a child born in the tail end of the Reagan-Bush era, his lyrics recall how the epidemic of crack cocaine into impoverished urban Black communities led to federal efforts to mount an aggressive “War on Drugs” that was met with commensurate escalation in gang-related killings and other criminality in countless communities, such as his native hometown of Compton. This proliferation in the poverty, crime, drugs, and gang culture, as well as ruthless law enforcement practices, in Lamar’s view, arguably led to unleashing the criminally sociopathic forces unfettered by gang members who lack any allegiance to a conventional morality bound to normative notions of right and wrong; thus, this conflict marks what he calls “the emancipation of a real nigga.”34 Although operating in a vastly different frame, Ta-Nehisi Coates invokes a query that is comparable “in accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live – specifically, how do I live free in this black body?”35 Whether envisioned as enabling black people to fully exist as self-determined, self-defined human beings in a Nietzschean sense of freedom or remorseless and relentless reprobate wretches, Lamar’s “the emancipation of a real nigga,” is, in point of fact, the potential manifestation of mainstream American society’s worst nightmare.
The best way to understand the inescapably fraught tension between responsibility politics and politicized representations in hip-hop from gangsta rap’s heyday in the 1990s to now would be through a brief discussion of Lamar’s idol (in many senses), Tupac Shakur. Without fear of exaggeration, Tupac Shakur was a paragon of hip-hop authenticity vis-à-vis politicized representation who was staunchly against adherence to respectability politics. Woven into the cultural fabric of hip-hop, the premise of authenticity – ‘keeping it real’ – has been a veritable mainstay of music and culture that stood in diametric opposition to respectability politics while simultaneously tethered to politicized representations. In his consideration of hip-hop music and culture as a prime repository for black cultural authenticity, Lewis Gordon raises a concern that we should give serious thought to “the consequence of investing so much of a claim to black authenticity into what is in practice and sentiment black adolescent culture.” Gordon further elaborates by noting “there is already a fallacy and a form of decadence at work when part of a community subordinates the whole, when what is in effect a subgroup eliminates the legitimacy of the larger community from which it has sprung.”36 In the early 1990s, the backlash against offensive misogynist, violent, homophobic, materialistic, and hypersexualized language and images was becoming unmistakably radicalized as well as politicized in the cultural mainstream.
In this regard, Tupac was prophetically cognizant of the vast revolutionary potential of hip-hop music and culture. For instance, when asked to explain his persistent use of the term ‘nigga’ in his lyrics, he contended that his usage of the controversial ‘N-word’ was actually an acronym meaning, “Never ignorant, getting goals accomplished.”37 Literary scholar Ronald A. T. Judy contends that gangsta rap’s strategic deployment of the black experience – via use of the word ‘nigga’ – operates within a global political economy as a reductive “adaptation to the force of commodification.” As for Judy, nigga serves as an ontologically authentic category for describing the condition of being an impoverished young black male in the modern “realm of things.”38 Similarly, at the peak of his tragically brief life and career, Tupac was deliberately and doggedly committed to the concept of ‘thug life’ (which he defined as a an acronym “The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fucks Everybody”) as both a metaphorical trope on his albums and metaphysical reality for black and Latinx youth’s quest for authentic lives in the face of dire circumstances. Michael Eric Dyson argues that, while Tupac waged a frontal assault on respectability politics and mainstream normativity, “he yearned to live the life he rapped about in his songs. That golden ideal was the motive behind the gospel desire to close the gap between preaching and practice, between what one said and what one did.”39 For better or worse, Tupac served as the patron saint for ‘keeping it real’ authenticity that resulted in a disastrous turn in his own life in addition to a dangerous trajectory within hip-hop.
Ultimately, Tupac was instrumental in transforming hip-hop’s politicized representations into quite literally a matter of life and death. The posthumous debut of Tupac’s adopted alter ego, Makaveli, via his album The Don Killuminati: 7 Day Theory (1996) revealed his deep affinity for Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). Commonly summarized as “the ends justify the means,” the term “Machiavellian” typically has a pejorative connotation as the epitome of the pathological pursuit of power. Tupac eagerly gravitated to the theorist’s amoral approach to politics and ethics quite readily. Yet one might also recognize that Shakur’s unwavering embrace of thug life as a worldview and its violent implications, and his persona within popular culture and public memory actually suggests his implicit embodiment of what Abdul JanMohamed refers to as “the death-bound subject.”40
As a key early inspiration on Lamar’s musical career, Tupac has had a profound influence on his moral outlook as well. Lamar’s indebtedness to the late hip-hop legend was manifested in To Pimp a Butterfly’s album closer, “Mortal Man,” in which the pair are engaged in a virtual dialogue. Much like millions of other hip-hop fans worldwide, however, Kendrick Lamar was greatly shaped by Tupac’s worldview as articulated in his lyrics. During several interviews, Tupac often commented about his hope that he would inspire the next generation of artists and activists who strove to overcome violence, hatred, and hopelessness in their own lives.41 This album’s very existence was heavily influenced by Lamar’s heartfelt adoration for Tupac as a hip-hop icon since his childhood. Lamar originally intended to name the album To Pimp a Caterpillar as an abbreviated homage to Tupac’s name but was ultimately persuaded to switch to the album’s present title. Moreover, Lamar’s continued reverence for Tupac proves to be so powerful that he resurrected his slain hero (with the help of the recording studio) via Lamar and Tupac’s virtual dialogue in “Mortal Man.” Rather than asking about the salacious and scandalous aspects of Tupac’s tabloid exploits as a gangsta rapper on Death Row Records, Lamar bonds with this slain hero, seeking sage advice about the challenges of mixing stardom and social responsibility. As demonstrated by these symbolic gestures, Lamar has selectively chosen from Tupac’s complex negotiations of celebrity and consciousness in order to discern what to keep or ignore; in very significant ways, Lamar views himself as the outgrowth and product of Pac’s legacy. Put another way, as Frantz Fanon famously opines, “Each generation out of relative obscurity must discover their mission, fulfill it or betray it.”42
One of the most daunting challenges when faced with fomenting an ethics of black liberation in the crux of respectability and politicized representations is to develop a progressive vision especially for young black folks who have not been deemed as perpetually ‘positive’ for their entire lives. To borrow from contemporary parlance, there is a certain silent but detrimental disdain among activists and community organizers who are ‘doing the work’ for those latecomers to particular social justice movements/hashtag campaigns (i.e., #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #TimesUp, #FightFor15, and #Never Again) for not always already being ‘woke’ from day one. This phenomenon was most glaringly apparent when Kendrick Lamar’s credibility as both an artist and activist came under intense scrutiny when the album’s second single, “The Blacker the Berry,” debuted prior to the official release of To Pimp a Butterfly. On the one hand, while the song offers a devastating sonic and lyrical assault on the ravages of self-hatred and internalized oppression on black racial identity during the rise of Black Lives Matter, there were countless progressive listeners who heard the track decontextualized from the larger album and responded harshly to it. On the other hand, once the album was released, the same critics could actually listen to Pimp a Butterfly in its entirety; with the opportunity to reckon with the album as the work of a musical auteur, one hopefully realizes that Lamar had an intellectual design and ideological intent that actually was more nuanced and honest than is often permitted in the current scope of political correctness on the left. “Progressive social movements,” as Robin D.G. Kelley contends,
This maturation of Black Lives Matters is crucial because, contrary to what conservative detractors and right-wing pundits might say, protest is not the act of communal whining, collective nagging, or organized begging. Instead, it is the heart and soul of any true democratic society insofar as it is the most immediate, intense, and impassioned form of direct political participation. In both an aural and oral fashion, the album’s narrative frame illustrates how Lamar’s newfound success and fame brought about existential transitions in his life that were layered and complicated underneath a seemingly superficial veneer. These transitions did not try to ignore, avoid, or erase the exigencies of his earlier life in a Compton neighborhood saturated with gangs, violence, drugs, and poverty. For instance, in the song “Hood Politics,” Lamar clearly illustrates the inherent conflict between respectability politics and political responsibility. He coins a pair of terms – ‘Democrips’ and ‘Rebloodicans’ – that speak volumes to this crucial tension. While noting that the infamous Los Angeles street gangs share similar color-coded political schemes as the two major U.S. political parties – blue for the Democratic Party/Crips and red for the Republican Party/Bloods – Lamar is also indicting the conjoined politics of his hometown and the nation-state for sharing a comparable brutal, bloodthirsty approach to human relationships predicated on a ‘take-no-prisoners’ ethos, even to the utter disregard of innocent bystanders. As stated by Lamar, the quest for power at all costs has a deleterious and ultimately devastating impact on the weakest, most vulnerable in society, whether in gang-related streetwise politics of his native Compton or the partisan electoral politics of our deeply polarized nation.
Contained in his rebuke, however, is the genuine concern that politics in any iteration should be considered as the solution rather than the source of human problems. Ultimately, illustrating what one might refer to as a prophetic patriotism, James Baldwin implores,
To this point, even casual listeners magnetically were drawn to the song “Alright” as the de facto anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement with its simple yet straightforward message of resilience, resistance, and hope in the face of injustice and despair. When considering the pain and despair of these young people, it is little wonder that many have found solace in the song, when Lamar intones,
Long story short, the prophetic work of achieving social justice depends on constant vigilance of proven enemies, but it also demands the mutually advantageous welcome of potential allies in the struggles we currently face.
It is practically impossible to divorce the creation of Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN. from the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The startling upset victory of Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton on November 9, 2016, sparked passionate nationwide protests and mobilizations by a growing coalition of concerned citizens collectively dubbed “the Resistance.” As a bloated, paranoid, impulsive, petulant, insecure, and pathologically dishonest narcissist, Trump is a living embodiment of white supremacy for millions of people. Even more, his infamous campaign slogan – “Make America Great Again” – now signifies that the sheer crudity, cluelessness, corruption, cruelty, cravenness, chaos, combativeness, and connivance of Trump have quickly pervaded the White House and the broader GOP establishment since his inauguration. Confronted with this drastic sea change in presidential leadership from Obama to Trump, there were millions of folks, especially young people of color, yearning to actualize a radically honest and liberating vision of intersectional politics. Reflecting on the political rise of a racist, sexist, xenophobic, narcissistic failed businessman and former reality television star to the Oval Office, Lamar’s DAMN. is a truthful antidote to the surreal age of Trump.
In many ways, DAMN. is an obvious response to Trump’s toxic relationship to numerous constituencies to which Kendrick Lamar is linked: millennials, progressives, cultural producers, consumers, people of color, and multicultural fans of hip-hop. For countless people across the United States, and even globally, the startling Trump victory on November 9, 2016, marked levels of spiritual devastation and emotional trauma akin to the lethal 9/11 terrorist attacks some 15 years earlier. On the one hand, in the days and weeks immediately following the election, rapid response teams of therapists and grief counselors were made available in numerous urban school districts across the country to address the heightened levels of mourning, grief, and dread faced by thousands of young students. On the other, myriad protest marches and other mass mobilizations both in the United States and abroad have been and will continue denouncing racist and xenophobic policies and pronouncements. To capture this volatile mixture of sentiments, this album’s production arguably veers away from either the aural minimalism or immediate intimacy of good kid or the meticulous poignancy and lush maximalism of To Pimp a Butterfly. Instead, Lamar and his collaborators crafted a song cycle that lyrically and musically cultivates an ambient, stream-of-consciousness soundscape that is hazy, languid, and disorienting yet always captivating in nature. DAMN. is very much the woozy, discordant soundtrack of the psychic shockwaves created by the advent of the Trump era. Taken as a whole, the album is largely driven by an inclusive ethics that seeks to reinvigorate conditions of political possibility, justice, equality, integrity, and truth in Trump’s America. What is important here for the sake of analysis, in addition to the recognition that countless Americans are currently suffering from PTSD (President Trump Stress Disorder), Lamar’s DAMN. reveals how this worldview defines the human condition as the teleological journey from damnation to redemption.
Arguably, it is Lamar’s shift from a Christian to a Hebrew Israelite religious sensibility that enables him to grapple between the state of personal damnation juxtaposed with the state as a ‘DAMNed nation.’ In his song “YAH.,” Lamar states, “I’m not a politician, I’m not ’bout a religion /I’m a [Hebrew] Israelite, don’t call me Black no more/that word is only a color, it ain’t facts no more.” During numerous interviews, Lamar has explained that his religious outlook has shifted from Christianity toward Hebrew Israelite theology under the tutelage of his cousin, Carl Duckworth. As an Afro-Jewish tradition, the Hebrew Israelites have been deemed members of a controversial religious movement because of their bedrock beliefs centered on African Americans being the direct and only descendants of the Israelites of biblical antiquity; many critics have looked askance at the Hebrew Israelites’ views of divine chosenness and racial exclusivism and by extension question Lamar’s possible commitment to a more pluralistic and progressive society. Moreover, he reframes notions of blackness to be synonymous with the cursed plight of the Israelites depicted in Deuteronomy 28 – as a perfect metaphor for being a conscious and conscientious observer in a land of sinfulness. It could be argued that Lamar’s gravitation toward the Hebrew Israelite theology perfectly mirrors so much of the polarization and extremism taking shape in various corners of contemporary American society. The Hebrew Israelites are not the alt-right in blackface; for all their incendiary beliefs, there has not been any race-based hate crimes or acts of terrorism by the group against white Americans. As such, it might be more productive to discuss Lamar’s newfound religious outlook based on its function rather than its form. To this point, much like Rastafari or the Nation of Islam, Hebrew Israelite theology might reflect a militant separatist religion that is largely anti-American but, ironically, this and other marginalized faith communities only exist due to guarantees by the First Amendment. By this token, anyone who felt comfortable listening to the music of Bob Marley or Public Enemy’s Chuck D in the past should be perfectly fine listening to Kendrick Lamar now.
The central tension of DAMN. hinges on the juxtaposition of ‘wickedness’ or ‘weakness’ as opposed to righteousness and rectitude in a society where everyone is perpetually besieged by temptations of all sorts. The moral tradition within the canon of Christian ethics is typically juxtaposed between acknowledging the distinction of definitive value (notions of good and bad) and dutiful obligation (notions of right and wrong). As Thomas Aquinas contends, “One opposite is known through the other, as darkness through light. Hence also what evil is must be known from the nature of good.”46 The dilemma at the core of how we understand moral agency in a society inundated by secular and sacred corruption is divided into two catastrophic shortcomings: thinking without acting and acting without thinking. In his song “XXX.,” Lamar openly criticizes the current state of American culture by saying, “Donald Trump’s in office/We lost Barack and promised to never doubt him again. But is America honest, or do we bask in sin?”47 More than merely commenting on a routine transition of power following a highly contested presidential election, Lamar truly laments Trump’s political ascent as a divine curse imposed on America as a wayward nation. Faced with the ceaseless litany of vices and sins that are Trump’s chief stock-in-trade, Lamar asks the inescapable question: Is America more devoted to sinfulness than sanctity?
Throughout DAMN., Lamar is deeply troubled with the array of bad decisions and twisted motives that led the American republic to transition from Obama to Trump without some predilection toward sinfulness. Like many of us, he is trying to make sense of how America as a people and a nation went from electing one of its most civil, capable, and competent presidents in the nation’s history to ensconcing in the Oval Office an individual who was the absolute opposite without questioning the core cultural ethos of the United States. Key to this concern is that sin is about how one employs his or her moral agency either on an individual basis or in union with others. As the Talmud instructs us, “Sin is sweet in the beginning and bitter in the end.” If any sizable constituency of the American electorate found themselves comfortable with the unexpected election of Trump as its head of state, one has to wonder whether this was a horrible choice made in a morally compromised moment or if this reveals a fundamental flaw in our society that gravitates toward wrongful thoughts and evil actions. When considering the elemental difference between vice and sin, Solomon Schimmel further states,
After asking whether the nation can still discern, much less desire, choices that are hopeful, honest, and holy in nature, Lamar is clearly dismayed by the American people being in a doomsday scenario of our own making. This level of prophetic witness by Lamar is deemed all the more extraordinary because for decades, it has been a mainstay for conservatives to demonize hip-hop artists for destroying the moral character of America through an alleged degradation of decency, morality, and ‘family values.’ Rarely, if ever, has the United States been in a position to have a rapper like Lamar who can boldly lambast the nation’s hypocrisy and moral turpitude with such clarity and confidence. Furthermore, it is worth noting that this reality inversion in which a hip-hop superstar is able to levy poignant and prescient moral proclamations on U.S. culture and society in a credible manner would have been totally unthinkable some five to ten years ago. In her deconstruction of the ongoing ‘culture wars’ in American politics, Tricia Rose astutely observes, “The success of conservatives’ version of what constitutes morality is partly due to liberals’ failure to embrace and promote a moral and emotional language on behalf of liberal values.”49 Ironically, it was Trump’s presidency rather than even the most popular hip-hop artist who has brought about the degradation of American morality in a truly fulsome manner.
Thankfully, as someone who not only witnessed but also overcame the seduction of gangstersim in his own life, Lamar’s emergence on the public stage as a prophetic voice marks a seismic shift in that perspective. In addition to winning a 2018 Grammy Award for Best Hip-Hop Album, Lamar’s DAMN. was also unexpectedly awarded the coveted Pulitzer Prize in the same year. As one reviewer declared on the Pulitzer Prize announcement, the album is being honored 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.”50 When Cornel West famously described the plight of nihilism in black America, he was actually giving prophetic utterance to the moral decay that would inevitably rot the soul of America. West proclaims that,
West challenges the menace of nihilism by proclaiming “as long as hope remains, and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.”51
The song “DUCKWORTH.” (which is Kendrick Lamar’s legal surname) is a morality tale steeped in the ‘code of the streets’ about how Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith had planned to rob a local KFC where Kendrick’s father, Kenny Duckworth – nicknamed Ducky – was working. Lamar declares, “We gon’ put it in reverse” as he narrates this chance encounter between two of the most pivotal men in his life, the armed robbery that could have resulted in Ducky’s murder, and how his generosity caused Top Dawg to refrain from committing the robbery. This happened many years before Top Dawg would unknowingly sign a then 15-year-old emerging rapper named Kendrick Lamar Duckworth to Top Dawg Entertainment, his newly minted recording label. As Lamar illustrates in “DUCKWORTH.,” both Top Dawg and Ducky broke the Deuteronomic curse that Lamar mentions throughout DAMN. by ultimately refusing to surrender their agency to supreme acts of wickedness that too often define such a state of sinful existence.52 Some 20 years later, Kendrick Lamar recounts Ducky’s fateful interaction with Top Dawg at the neighborhood KFC restaurant. According to Lamar, had his father not “processed and digested poverty’s dialect” in order to discern a reasonably safer, more successful way to negotiate this volatile situation without escalating the conflict, he and Anthony could have been another set of tragic statistics ending up either in prison, graveyard, or any other dead-end situation. “Life can only be understood backwards” as Søren Kierkegaard famously remarks, “but it must be lived forwards.”53 Lamar ultimately drives home this pivotal insight when he notes,
Instead, as Lamar prompts the two men to reflect on the once potentially lethal but now nearly forgotten incident that almost destroyed all three men’s lives (among untold others), it becomes increasingly apparent that Top Dawg and Ducky are most likely the only survivors of their generational cohort who escaped the seemingly inevitable pitfalls of violence and criminality that plagued their Compton neighborhood. Telling this story as a young adult roughly a decade older than the 17-year-old K.Dot (the central protagonist of Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city), Lamar’s own continued longevity at the end of “DUCKWORTH.” is yet another testament to the supreme value of surviving dire living conditions by making better life choices and taking more beneficial chances than most of his peers and contemporaries. In an uncommonly forthright manner, Lamar’s three major label albums painstakingly represent him as a person who has made and continues to make mistakes due to his perfectly human imperfections in ways that suggest historian of religions Charles Long’s notion of “crawling backward through history.”
Similarly, the Roots’ undun was a 2011 concept album that tells the story of dying man Redford “Dun” Stevens in reverse. The album starts at the moment Dun fell victim to a fatal gunshot wound and then the song cycle rewinds, hitting the points in his life where he’s at his most self-aware. For listeners familiar with the tropes of hip-hop subgenera, such as gangsta rap and more recently drill and trap, the group presents Dun as someone who is caught in the all-too-familiar criminalized hustle of street life that the modern media’s documented countless times as the justification for draconian public policy on community policing, judicial sentencing guidelines, and mass incarceration. While the Roots cobbled together the album’s central character from a fictionalized composite of several real people, the band captures the essence of a young black person’s life and confronted the increasingly limited options and opportunities for everyone born in Dun’s community. Throughout the album, the MCs filter Dun’s ultimate demise through a matter-of-fact narrative that cuts through the character’s moral ambivalence with an incisive level of journalistic impartiality. This is a crucial detail because it bespeaks the futile inevitability of any and all people who find themselves trapped in contexts wherein moral agency is constantly constrained by spiritual and structural forces alike.
This upshot of undun is reminiscent of the well-known biblical passage, “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”55 For example, Black Thought – the Roots’ cofounder and primary MC/lyricist – outlines the exigent circumstances that undergird Dun’s existential crisis in the song “Tip the Scale.” As the last song with lyrics on the album, “Tip the Scale” is indicative of the beginning of the character’s life. As Black Thought illustrates in his verse, how do you create a life and worldview that otherwise has no chance to survive, much less thrive?
It is in this moment that the album’s listeners, who have been made privy to the character’s untimely journey toward his inevitable death, have the chance to finally explain and fully defend the hard choices he knows he will be compelled to make. Much like Lamar, Black Thought’s lyricism masterfully depicts that the world surrounding him is set up for his failure. In light of this, the album operates more as a character study than a morality tale of a poor young black man whose existential crisis ends only with his murder, an untimely death that would have been largely unreported and underinvestigated in our contemporary society.57
Saturated with a foreboding self-resignation about the protagonist’s fate, there is a relentless sense of doom that grounds the ultimate reality of the Roots’ undun. On the one hand, “Tip the Scale” and “DUCKWORTH.” both serve as veritable cautionary tales about the deadly consequences of lives locked into the vicious cycles of modern gang life. On the other hand, Lamar’s efforts to explore moral agency throughout DAMN., culminating ultimately in the song “DUCKWORTH.,” is the revelation of Lamar’s secret weapon: hope. Lamar is confronting the systemic and systematic assaults on black humanity in a narrative akin to those elucidated by the Roots, but he refuses to either assuage white guilt by preaching peace, unity, and colorblindness or continue the fatalistic downward spiral of Afro-pessimism. To be black, honest, and hopeful in the face of white supremacist terror is, by definition, what it means to be a threat. Lamar is bearing witness both implicitly and explicitly to the violence and violation that large constituencies of human beings have endured for far too long. Whereas Lamar’s musical exploration of the contemporary human plight does not illustrate that the things necessary to survive in this world are easy by any stretch of the imagination, his approach indicates that what needs to be done is simple and straightforward. Delivering scathing critiques and vulnerable truths with a gap-toothed smile, however, is what makes Lamar the most hopeful and threatening rapper of his generation.
In the end, to bring it back to how this chapter began, Lamar might say that the church woman in the grocery store humming the melody and dropping a lyric from “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe” on that Sunday afternoon perfectly depicts the shared subject position he speaks from as well as the audience for whom he yearns to speak. Whereas Kendrick Lamar’s shifting religious sensibilities have been a significant facet of his music, he has never addressed his religious worldview in a puerile or perfunctory manner. Rather, his songcraft has found its greatest and most sublime expression when he reconciles his spiritual quest for salvation with the sinful activities in which he has indulged during his roughly 30 years of living as a young African American man struggling with possessing both an empowered political consciousness (‘being woke’) and engaged prophetic conscience (‘being wise’) in a world that regards all of this to be paradoxical at best. Although these twin concerns are framed dialectically, it is a credit to Lamar’s genius that they are never diametrically opposed to the point of mutual exclusion.
Lamar is undeniably a virtuosic artist whose prodigious musical vision initially might have seemed too ambitiously high-minded and morally complex for both his underground hip-hop fan base and the mainstream popular music marketplace. What is exceptional for a hip-hop artist of Lamar’s caliber is the level of self-awareness he readily displays in his music. More than anything, this chapter advances the argument that Kendrick Lamar has drastically redefined how scholars of religion and culture should approach hip-hop music as a locus for theorizing and debating issues of race, religion, and reflective music as prophetic witnesses in order to address some of the multilayered themes in Lamar’s examination of the exigencies of trying to live as a sanctified and sane individual in a ‘damned nation.’ As Lewis Gordon asserts, “How … could black art be politically effective when its aesthetic efficacy has been stratified, and turned the other way, how could the aesthetic quality of black art be defended in a world of black political impotence?”58 Nevertheless, it is impossible to overstate the significance and power of art in the black experience as manifested in Lamar’s work. While it is unrealistic to believe that black artistic and cultural productions alone can change the world, black art has always been indispensable in triggering the black radical imagination in the hopes of transforming how we live.59 What the morality embedded within Lamar’s music is indicative of is a critical concern: Human beings in a valueless world – one where people are devalued and devoid of values – suffer a fate that is mutually alien and alienating in nature. As such, Lamar’s artistry reflects what existentialists and humanists have long argued – namely, that we bring values to the world; as Albert Camus states, “I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.”60 In the effort to make sense of the good, the mad, and the holy that encompasses the human condition, Lamar’s contributions as a musical artist make clear that wherever, whatever, and however we encounter meaningful art that affirms life, we find and embrace an accompanying spirit of humanity.