Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 debut major-label album good kid, m.A.A.d. city put the Compton word-crooner on the map. Within an eye blink, he would flit aerodynamic like a monarch avoiding a pin. The piece here, offered on the run from a Detroit under a gun, by a wanna-be-human hiding in white skin, takes up Lamar’s goodness inside the reigning madness and asks of the impulse channeled an ancestral question. Can Lamar’s riff on ghetto life be scanned as an insurgent drift of ancient griot-agitation,1 coding ‘black meaning’2 into postmodern pheening for a quick consumption of bliss and rawness outside the work necessary to become a mature participant in planetary survival? Juxtaposing Lamar’s laments alongside old griot rites of recitation navigating thirteenth-century Mali’s struggle to exit commercial control, overcome tribal folderol, return king to soil-intimacies, and blacksmith entreaties of tree-jinn to serve jali-spin in singing the world back into existence, the writing here offers itself as mere seed of a distant hope. The epic of Sunjata will supply ground and background for the sounding of a meaning black, loamy, street savvy, ancient, and mothering – indeed the living matrix of the planet’s tricks of resilience from which our species, faced with climate change blowback registering the earth’s growing refusal to tolerate our growing hubris and disregard of anything save human comfort and rights, must needs learn and thus return to something more sustainable and just. Lamar’s complex rework of a twisted turf of upbringing and divining for the forcefield of uncontainable stylistics and irrepressible scribblings on the eyeball of globalized scrutiny will take on rhizomic depth and ancestral heft in the mix, popping question marks of a postindustrial and perhaps even posthuman apocalypse whose deciphering challenges all of us to “get woke”3 from what matters today and ‘stay woke’ by means of the deep say-so of ancient oral send-up wrapping the mother continent in a wisdom of vision never yet eclipsed or repressed beyond recall. Recipe4 indeed! “Women, weed, and weather” augured into the code of water, song, and iron from the way-back of Afrique, coming around again with a formula for survival on a young lip in Compton! Sunjata’s Epic will supply ancestral decipherment on the Kendrick flow like a grandfather grin of rainbow shining over the top of the lightning.
But this piece is not any attempt to grab Lamar’s output like a rock of jewelry, hold it up to the light, blind my own eye to the fight, and sing like a commercial high on bling and fascination. This writing is rather a conundrum in a mirror – reading the bam and the sheer vibe, in the tumble of words invoking Kendrick’s Compton tribe, as an accusation – a finger pointed at me. The auguring index points straight through the time, through the blood, the reign of insanity, to the memory whence we all scribe and fall: the big mamma ride of a world itself rendered as black and disposable as any ghetto-born facsimile of a good kid in a mad city. Raw nature today is the ultimate n*#!a. The planet fucked like the worst rip of magnificent woman-geography hinted in the album’s yabish holler,5 putting the question on the ear in triple-time pound, like a low-ridder bump-mime of the oil rig plunder of the womb of all of us. I muse whether to write at all – white man observer of a Renisha McBride6 blast to the face of the ’hood at the strait,7 but in slow motion. How speak in the face of a full-on bullet-stream of white capital intention where I crib in postindustrial blight, run like crude poison through the pace of a bank exec calculus of the odds of recreating Detroit as the next Flint8 yielding even greater Nestle-primed, bottom-line celebration, treating the Car City like an SUV-combustion of gentrifying ignorance and decadence, foreclosure impudence, water-shut-off arrogance and emergency management macking9 of assets into urban apocalypse and demise?
In collaboration with many others, I fight back between harsh-drawn breaths. But up against the wall of a traffic stop pullover by the biosphere itself wearing a badge of dawn, packing the heat of the sun, demanding registration with the seventh generation, running the entire history through the data bank of a Jurassic memory of past conflagration, spitting floods like the thud of boot on throat once the dope of illusion has been discovered, and we are supine on the ground – I confess to guilt and violation. Schooled in Motown lyrics against the ever-continuing ’67 Algiers-Motel assassination of dark bodies by blue-suited toadies carrying out white-pimp mandates,10 watching now as late capitalist hubris glimpses the wall-scratched riddle, recognizes the brittle condition of an apparatus of theft reaching the limit of planetary beneficence, targeting water as the next war-igniting ‘gift’ (of creation!), pirated onto a shelf in plastic carcinogen, the city of my initiation nestled on the bank of riparian fecundation where flows twenty-percent of the entire globe’s H2O provision as the drones fly, the powers rattle the nukes, hack the secrets, and boast retribution in day-glo orange vituperation – I am unable merely to wheedle on Lamar’s magnificent survival tropes and honesty. Even he must be held accountable to the sky-wide warning, strobing the fast-collapsing horizon with omen and comeuppance. Climate upheaval is the ultimate diss rap of the planet on our species – to which even a Kendrick Lamar will have to answer.
So the tact taken here is to read the m.A.A.d city send-up as ventriloquism of a huge mansion of ancestral turbulence and elocution. More than the present and more than an individual are showing in the work. Like a Makavelian haint tatting ‘50 N *#!az’ on his chest, meeting Lamar in the heat of his art is meeting a pyroclastic flow of ancestral pique, venting itself like lava at the corner of community and pain, then and now. Lamar already, in this first breakthrough production, signals as much. He is not mere Duckworth11 finding an audible to crash the line. In full riff mode, he trances 2Pac and Biggie, NWA, and Dre,12 breaking grammar13 on lava long burning the Rosecrans concrete into a smoke sign. There’s all manner of peeps boiling up in his pop-n-lock word-joints. The divining task is to discover how far down the stick needs to tip to do justice to all the trips on amble below the surface of his time and soil. Here, I venture griot-rhyme as precursor, but with a difference from the literature warring over the convention. For sure, praise-song soliloquies in postcolonial Afrique today are bent by capital and invasion into a stark necessity if not a Hollywood hope.14 Displaced in the colonial breakdown of society, jalis and harpists in the ‘Sudan’ (‘black’ savannah/sahel region) of the great mother of continents are now ‘reduced’ to pop-culture combat to feed a mouth and secure an old-age policy. A dilemma not that different from the good kid’s own. Diaspora today is not only geography but also condition. Even on home turf, the reality is ‘dispersal.’ Whether ghetto street or Guinean crib, the ’hood is a construct of powers remote and other. But like Lamar, the best of the singers does not just capitulate to the market demand; they sift underground buzz into the media hype – mama and money15 remixed like honey and nut. But this caveat is not new.
Historically, griot-rhymers indeed palliated their patrons, but not only that. As balafon-crooners and nguni-tuners and chora-strummers, their charge was memory.16 Not only were they “living documents” of the “ancient speech”;17 flesh-voices of constitutions;18 pulpit-pundits of kings, speaking the royal whisper or mind, out loud;19 pharynx-recorders of court decisions and deliberations; and all manner of custom and precedent and genealogy.20 Not only that. Perhaps even more crucially, they were invokers of the Other-World shadows ghosting this one with meaning and din. They brought ancestral insight and natural potency to bear on contemporary conundrum. About which more later.
Numerous hip-hop commentators, over years recent, have dubbed present-day spitters the equivalent of these old-time bards – and been up-rocked with dissent otherwise.21 The easy read of the antique singers is that they functioned to praise power, like imbedded reporters in modern wars, or even CNN-dissemblers scrambling to secure salary and future in the face of flame-crested bellowers of fake news charges, shifting their brown nose from U.S. president to CEO. Many defenders of the game in our hour insist rap, in authentic rip of the state of things, serves the bottom strata and the voice of the ruptured – against the policy and pontifications of power. I would not gainsay such except to invoke a Lamar-like insistence on layering and nuance. Beneath the veneer of sound-bite bids for ‘this side’ or ‘that’ – the depth is complex. And this holds quadruple for any rearview look at ancient timbre and pitch. As armature for ‘seeing into’ today’s praise-rambles and word-diss, griot-work of old demands slow decipherment. To get at such, it will have to suffice here to turn to an early work-up in the alien mode of anthropology’s writing down of this irreducibly oral eloquence of ancestral brilliance.22 The classic tale of Sunjata (Sundiata)23 as an ‘epic of old Mali’ will supply the requisite ‘ground’ to think deep and probe wide in our interrogation of what Lamar’s initiatory lament might conjure – even beyond the dense compost of possibility contemporary urban detritus holds.
Initiation is indeed the trope of the hour. Historian of religions Charles Long has often urged that for populations of color on the downbeat side of Euro-colonial aggression – laboring to translate the white sole-grind into soul-gilding insurgence – history itself has conspired as rite of passage.24 The depth-encounter for the colonized was a death-confrontation in guise not only of iron weapon but also evangelical mission and civilizational “correction.”25 Those who survived physically were passed through the sieve of Christian conviction of perdition and scientific certitude of “true explanation.”26 Only shards of the old stories made it into modernity, carved into jagged fragments of integrity, woven with yarn and gum into the mega-story of salvation and taxonomy. Physical abjection, mythic dissolution, spiritual trivialization: these all too bluntly enacted the effects of a de facto ‘initiation.’ But unlike the pre-contact version of bush school, the limen of colonial dismemberment was never concluded with reintegration. Novices could not find the mask-edge to tear it off the face of mastery. Dark bodies in the regime of globalized whiteness and rabid capital are pinioned in a fracture zone.27 Such is a ghetto, such is the witness of Lamar’s second album, casting the ’hood as cocoon, his word-play as a butterfly-reincarnation as long as the beat lasts, but landing after hours in hotel madness in a room that is nowhere.28 Sure, his success showers him with the ‘Lucy-comforts’ of cheddar and power.29 But he can return neither to the Compton loam nor find a home outside. The fabric of sound alone grants a fleeting – and flitting, winged – coherence. He lives in a song.
But this is precisely griot existence – social composition as a texture of rhythm, syncopating meaning with riddles and secrets.30 The griot role is a life reconfigured as a “living document of speech” encoding hieroglyph. In chord riff and refrain puzzle, jalis of the past continuously ‘re-membered’ the world of appearance and settlement back into its root of bush-birth and wild nurturance and provoked the future into being.31 Anciently, the praise song was lip service not only to powers human and enthroned but also beyond – to potencies spirit-born and nature-fed. But here we must need ‘go slow,’ with Sunjata in hand.
And here I defer to a teacher of my own late journeying. Martín Prechtel is a virtuoso of indigenous memory, half white/half Huron-Cree, New Mexico native, Pueblo nurtured, Tzutujil-Mayan embraced and trained for more than a decade, survivor of the Guatemalan civil war that wasted his community in Atitlan, stringed instrument aficionado, painter of no mean talent, author extraordinaire, cattle-rancher, corn-grower, horse-lover, antique-world-culture poly-math, busily reinvesting his Ojo arroyo with the ritual honor and storied praise that once was the earth’s indigenous due everywhere, before civilizational plunder and duress emptied the land of its memory and reciprocating praise-gift. In what follows, the turn of mind and phrase in recounting the Mali myth will as often be his as mine (gleaned from more than six years attendance at various ten-day ‘schools’ run by Prechtel), though any untoward twists must be understood as falling at the feet of a still-learning student.
The plot of rich nurturance is a threefold accounting of ancient Mandinka telling – in oral-offering running to multiple thousands of accepted versions, though in writing, necessarily ‘frozen’ in notation and hijacked in convention for the slow-motion mind and decaying memory of empire, unable to cruise the ‘sonic web’ of primal retention (a modern disability whose crippling crutch today in consequence is virtual and fiber-optic).32 D. T. Niane’s Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, triangulated with Bamba Suso’s and Banna Kanute’s Sunjata and David C. Conrad’s Sunjata: A New Prose Version, place the griot-vibrato in English prose and verse.
Prechtel’s telling orchestrates the early thirteenth-century epic on top of a sharp social struggle – the old Ghanaian empire coagulated in commerce in the late Wagadou mire of gold and ivory, finds upstaging from the south and west in a Mande attempt to return royalty to its priority fealty to soils and seeds, securing the violent upheavals of human farming by attending with offering and honor to the wild spirits of the lands so disrupted.33 Angling in from the antique side, in the mix, supplying axe and spear and pick and plow, is also the ancient eloquence of blacksmithing practice, smelting iron from ore and earth, demanding careful attendance on trees and thatch, clay and fire, rock and air and water. These are not personas and powers our modern connivance knows how to invoke other than by force and enslavement, as mere ‘objects’ and ‘resources.’ But arguably, the climate ‘catastrophe’ that is fast mounting its tsunamis and droughts, sea rises and riparian revolts today, is, from an indigenous point of view, ‘communication’ on the part of these disrespected ‘tribal’ actors, no longer willing to “go quietly into that good night” at the hands of “civilized” disrespect and ignorance.34 We, too (those of us who would seem to be beneficiaries of the history of enslavement and colonization) – no matter how unwitting and terrified – are now also about to be ‘initiated’ by the history of upheaval and forgetting we have unleashed on the planet. Hurricane Harvey hit one week after I first typed this (a still small-scale disaster compared to the situation in Bangladesh where one-third of the entire country lies under water and the region has witnessed 1,200 flood-related deaths in recent weeks).
In Prechtelian emphasis, griot-work in deep history did not only salute the king but also subtly staked out his responsibility as keeper of an ancient comity between bush35 and town, seed and blade, keeping the human crew awake to their (literal) rootage in a wild fecundity that is holy36 and self-offering in myriad creaturely forms – from the fungi and bacteria of the underworld, through the baobabs and lions of this one, to the rains and clouds above. No human character in the jali-tally is full-blown hero in Sunjata’s tale – certainly not the celebrated liberator-king, who begins life lock-kneed, melon-headed, and gluttonous,37 a cripple crawling the soil it will be his role to revere.38 He is assisted in his boyhood ascension to upright walking and subsequent initiation, by an iron rod, smithed into service as crutch, and then bent, in his sweat-soaked effort to stand, as bow.39 As the story unfolds, the baobab-upending40 king-to-be will then roam the savannah grass as ‘hot-head’ tracker, learning the hunt (and earning his title as ‘Simbon,’ master hunter)41 and maturity as precursor to his royal tenure on the termite-mound throne42 that he will one day inherit.43 And the words here all hint ‘far back’ and ‘deep down’ – an inheritance, not from an immediate human father alone, but a gift from way back, including even primordial crawlers of the ground, on whose ceaseless working and marvelous constructing, the race we so proudly and stupidly vaunt as ‘supreme’ utterly depends.44 (Not to mention that even today in Burkina Faso blacksmithing tradition,45 such detritivore-tunneled mound-mud is deemed exemplary for re-fashioning into straw-packed smelting-columns – the improvised ‘furnaces’ within whose charcoal-heated ‘wombs’ the iron, on which work and rule will depend for plow and spear, will be ‘birthed’ from ore, if attended with suitable offerings and praise. It is not only ‘biota’ that indigenous perception embraces as living and giving and hungry, but rock and metal and fire and clay.46 In indigenous ken, material power and spiritual aura are interwoven inextricably and everywhere in natural world propensity and magnificence).
Though certainly sung into high elevation by the griot’s grace, the Lion-King (‘jata’ means ‘lion’ in Mandingo) finally emerges as himself the embodiment of imperial accession only after years of exiled service to sub-kings of the supporting tribal lineages whose loyalty alone will ensure Sunjata’s final triumph in delivering Mali-land from the oppression of neighboring Soso’s heavy-handed sorcerer-king, Sumaworo in Suso (Soumaoro or Sumanguru in other versions).47 Having gained repute in griot-joke for stealing cloth to answer griot-begging as a teenager ‘Soun’ in his name means ‘thief’ in the lingo), he will also later be the butt of an ironic griot-jest naming him as “one who runs slowly” – to “cover” the fact that he apparently rapidly fled Sumaworo’s arrow in fear at one point in their battle.48 He will even show himself as ruthless as to cut the Achilles tendons of his own griot Bala Faasigi (other versions’ spellings, Balla Fasséké, Bala Fasali) to keep him from running away.49 Yes, he ultimately succeeds in uniting the tribes into a block capable of overturning the Soso King’s violent subjection. But he is not an undiluted ‘superhero champion.’ His victory is secured largely from the aid of women and the hidden help of wild creatures, whose potent dalilu-spirits50 he amasses as amulets and aids, as instructed by elders and guides from the old world.51 His mother (Sogolan) secures the heritage of his father’s magic power in the form of an interlocking triumvirate of sorcerer’s mask and bow and horse.52 His sister (Nana Triban) secures the countervailing secrets of Sumaworo’s own assemblage of wild amulet power by way of seduction and counter-magic – without which this blacksmith king could never be defeated.53
The mother’s own sister (Dò Kamissa) emerges in the riff as shapeshifting Wild-Woman (incarnating the bush at will) who even before Sunjata’s conception had secured his Condé genetic ancestry and spirit-legacy by endowing her younger sibling (Sunjata’s mother, Sogolon) with the dalilu-powers that would protect his upbringing.54 (Unfortunately, but nonetheless also conforming to destiny, the means of this endowment was a ‘far-seeing’ spirit mask that also damaged Sogolon’s as yet too young physique, resulting in her notorious disabilities as weepy-eyed, bald-headed, hump-backed, and club-footed).55 Dò Kamissa haunts the pre-birth narrative in her shape-shifted form as an angry Buffalo-Wraith-Power (embodying the whole of ‘wild nature’), ravaging the male-ruled Condé settlements in response to being ‘Herself’ ravaged by disrespect and neglect,56 until She is finally mollified by kindness on the part of two hunter-novices on initiatory quest from Morocco, ultimately disclosing (after testing the two brothers) the secret necessary to halt the natural onslaught and provoke Her generosity in once again (as Earth’s bounty surrounding Condé) offering Her own life willingly and thus enabling Sogolon’s marriage and Sunjata’s birth.57
And, finally, it is another of the mother’s sisters (Tenenba Condé) who will succor her own grief at being childless by raising and endowing with dalilu-amulet power, the Soso king’s nephew, Fakoli, after his own mother (Kosiya Kanté) sacrificed herself to the chief of jinns so her brother, Sumaworo, could obtain the Soso Bala (the balaphon spirit-person incarnate in and as the instrument).58 Fakoli alone, among human figures in the Mande ballad, qualifies as unphased by the imperial penumbra, a dwarf-smith, who defers to neither Sunjata nor Sumaworo, finally supporting the former in the battle, but only after foreswearing the company of either tribe, and setting up his own ‘hamlet’ at the edge of the veld.59
Likewise in Prechtel’s retelling, Sumaworo himself is not simply enemy and villain (see also Conrad, xviii). In early life, he is hunting apprentice to Sunjata’s father, Maghan Konfara, from whom he learns his wiles and earns his potency.60 As king of blacksmiths, he assembles vast powers of dalilu and rounds up all the griot instruments of the region.61 Certainly, he exhibits the paranoia of untoward power, like Herod of biblical fame, attempting to root out by wide spread massacre, any possibility that the oracle of an insurgent successor would ever come to fruition (namely, Sunjata, who at that point is still incognito before Sumaworo’s surveillance).62 His fetish room houses the human heads of kings he’s killed in conquest, whose skins he dons on ritual days as portents of his resolve and his numen.63 His rule is peppered with stories of aggrandizement and appetite. But in one version of the epic, he fashions two iron crutches for Sogolon to help her crippled son stand, and in another he is entrusted by her with apprenticing Sunjata (and his brothers) as hunters.64 In this latter account, he is also reputed to adhere to the potency of griot-song – seemingly against interest – jamming with Sogolon at one point as she sings, in riddle riposte, of his own demise. The epic simply asserts his nkoni harp stayed “in harmony with her song.”65 Indeed, it is not merely as blacksmith sorcerer but also music-sponsor that he looms large over the storyline.
A central episode will recount his daring, in the midst of his hunting apprenticeship, when a genie-epiphany of the Maghan Jinna (King of Jinns) leads him on night trek in outback wild across the threshold to the Other-Side, where he takes refuge in a tree-bough, fearless, though the branches are the home turf, as Prechtel notes, of these spirit-powers.66 The jinn-king goes subterranean in cave-mouth; returns with iron-knife-wielding consorts, circling for the foreskin-cutting rite of initiation, backlit by strange light from that world below. And then as Sumaworo watches in hungry fascination, brings forth a gourd-resonating bala xylophone, hosting three magic arrows, and dunun mutukuru drum, as full-on apparitions, according to the footnotes, of tone- and rhythm-personifications, never-before seen by the upstart Soso youth, who himself claims in subsequent negotiating stratagem, to have invented the entire range of Soso instrumentation to date, including kèrèlèngbèng, koworo, donso nkoni, bolon three-string, soron, and kòra.67
Sumaworo here comports as ancient blacksmith adept – himself deft shapeshifter into any air-cruising or ground-running creature extant, or even becoming air itself – championing the smith-art responsible for crafting the full repertoire of these ‘griot-familiars’ (the physical instruments not as mere technology but living spirit-companions of the griot-vocation to sung-memory).68 But he is infected by the overlay of commercial orientation seeping out from the trade routes of ancient gold and ivory exchange, whose most potent fallout ferments now in the old Ghanaian capital of Wagadou. He offers to buy the bala – in hope of grabbing the arrows enumerated in oracle as necessary to his political ascension – by means of gbensen, crossed strands of black iron functioning as trade currency.69 And is told, in deep laughing mockery, that the jinn already ‘have’ (as the Earth-Power ‘producers’ and ‘givers’ of such to humankind) all the iron, gold, and cowrie in the world and will only settle for human ‘payment’ (four persons strong), setting up the voluntary self-sacrifice of Sumaworo’s sister, Kosiya Kanté, as already mentioned.70
That the story concludes, in numerous versions, with this compromised blacksmith-king never being fully subdued by the competing dalilu-magic of Sunjata, but disappearing into a cave on the heights of Koulikoro mountain at the drop of night,71 reinforces the assessment.72 Sumaworo is engulfed back into the jinn-power of hollowed rock and underground ore that had gifted him originally with vocation and role. And, indeed, that there is so much more at work in this story than merely human design and concern, had already been telegraphed by the reciprocal assertions, early on, that Sumaworo was conceived of two different women at once, while Sunjata, himself, came to be only in the mystery of seven different pregnancies (or even 14 in one version) in successive years by the same woman.73 Even these two central and flawed characters are not simply themselves as human beings, but resound, in griot-breath and song-tone, with multiple hints of reference, as simultaneously pointing to bigger realities at work: the Country itself in political shape, forged in the fires of struggle and collision of one temporal epoch with another;74 Iron in its power-danger as gift of earth-deep (in bog seep and hematite outcrop) and star-drop (as meteorite, or even planet core originally) bent to trade calculus against the Bright Land Humus of plant- and animal-gift;75 and certainly sound-syncopation and rhythm-layering, vibratory-beings of string and skin and gourd and wood, coursing across riparian updrafts and savannah clearings and mountain cloud-drifts, joined in choral response by hippo-bellow, lion roar, and water-fowl screech.
And thus what we have, in large-picture compass, as Prechtel spells out, is a story line of empire, teased by griot-song to pull leg and torso out of the trade-warped maw and return king to older labor as keeper of the covenant relations with seed beings and spirit-powers of a land that even though subjected to farm-service and tool-coercion by ‘iron children,’ smithed from rock home to human employment at the violent expense of plant-profusion and animal freedom to roam, will nonetheless give assent to such enslavement and produce anyway if recognized and regaled in ritual remembrance and praise-eloquence, accompanied by instruments, ‘birthed’ and ‘fed’ by initiated adepts, honoring ancestral tastes for beauty and grief in spite of the imperial ‘theft’ of all the beings so employed.
In Prechtelian emphasis, the hero of the epic is actually the story-song itself – a being whose body is made (synesthetically) ‘visible’ in audition, adorned in resonance, drenched in laughter and grief, carrying memory as the continuous metabolism of history into an offering worthy of attention and apprenticeship. And certainly in this sum, so much of ‘Her’76 has been left untouched – a texture of living remembrance, ‘warped’ with sudden-appearing creatures of this-or-other-worldly provenience, gnat-flits, and monkey-swings and elephant grunts from beyond the range of eyes, a menagerie of eco-comity, including iron glints and fire licks and water twists, whose mystery and genie-potency our modern sensibility can scarce catch, ‘woofed’ through animal-gut strings, plucked by beggar-singers whose entire life-task is to become the upwelling source of gourd-song whence a humanity whose deepest reality is that they are not primarily or only human, but a brief epiphany in human form of all that feeds their bodies and brilliance into existence – such texture in text of mineral-ink on tree-bark, that can only flash with Her welter of voice and appearance, like a brief meteor-shower in the flowering of night, before winking back into the Other-World of vast galactic brooding and wonder. I have barely scratched the surface.
Between such an indigenous perspicacity at the intersection of world layers – negotiating five levels and manifold beings at once – and our modern condition of colonial ‘reducido’ in spirit and capacity to navigate multiplicity – much history has passed. Much indeed has been lost. Such as Lamar languish on islands not of their making, cut off from the deep soils of tradition. Nonetheless. What if this grasp of griot-work is laid at the MC’s feet as measure and task? How might we assess? Of note in the juxtaposition is the griot-initiation rite – requiring the jali-caste-apprentice to roam as beggar across the villages to learn the stories and songs and secrets of ancestry and incur debt across lineages,77 recognizing life as gift, food as offering, and breath as gratitude. It is this dependence that easily draws down evaluation of the role as sycophancy, when the evaluator is captive to a social order of commodification and capital. But begging is finally the ‘true’ reality of our entire tenure on the planet, from Bill Gates and Donald Trump down to the most destitute homeless on the corner, before an earth whose bounty we neither author nor own. Life-long, we stand before the world, empty-bellied and hollow-lunged, in need of earth’s provision as food and breath (as of water and shelter and clothing, etc.), like a child before a mother. Griots are baptized into the fact and thus sing from the hollow78 that hallows life with its genesis out of that tiny aperture of infinity, giving rise to everything. Their entire existence will become an improvised scaffolding of sound elaborated around that very point of vacuity.
Which Kendrick’s own genesis and dance approximates. Certainly, ghetto reality is a social construct of vacuity and abandonment – a creation, not of its own denizens, but of the supremacy of a (white) ignorance that organizes entire urban cores as zones of bereavement and ‘begging,’ inescapable and denigrated.79 Lamar may not have aspired to mendicancy as pedagogue, but for him, as for most prisoners of such a condition, the lessons are unavoidable and stark. That the surrounding society berates such experience as ‘impoverished’ only testifies to the real ‘lack’ ravaging the modern condition. Being in debt and unentitled is the true bone of all existence. Indigenous cultures built social relationship and economy on that fact.80 Griots trained in it. Our world runs from it in terror with war and murder as its response, seeking to amass enslaved ‘workers’ and extracted ‘parts’ of wild nature as a buffer against the reality.81 But no matter how fast we run or high we build the wall, finally, we are beggars before an astonishing bounty. Saying such is not in any way to rationalize the racialized coercions of modern urban poverty-creation by corporations and administrations; it is rather to say that wealth-hording and asset-accumulation are themselves a form of theft and delusion, bereft of truth or life.82 They will not yield beauty and wonder. They create devastation and spawn lying. And they will not last.
In such a world of (now) globalized plundering, it is no puzzle or surprise that hip-hop ferocity has gained notoriety and attention (and since the mid-1980s, market-deformation) as the ‘ “realest’ report on reality” extant in the urban situation.83 Compton and Detroit today (as South Bronx and North Philly and a thousand other ’hoods before and alongside them, here and abroad) are omens. As cauldrons of oppression and debt-pillage, such spaces are also incubation chambers for griot-voices and vocations. In Mandean epic terms – they might be cast as ‘forge sites,’ smelting hardness and grandeur into what the tale hammers out as “cats on the shoulder, Simbong and Jata at Naarena,” alongside those who “cut iron with iron”84 – or what we might update as high-velocity rhyme-spitters and fierce survivors and precocious youngsters looking for a cause. The situation begets the beauty. But the genesis is not automatic. Part of Lamar’s genius is his vaunted ability to laminate lament and gratitude onto the same experience, using word-copulation and sound-inebriation to lay grief and beauty side-by-side in the same aperture of throbbing existence. He neither runs from, nor runs to, his birth-home. But rather, in song, recreates the agony and ecstasy as both real in their simultaneity, and as quaking with vision and life for a chronicler willing to probe them as ancestry and mother-force. The intricacy of the verbiage and fusion of the beats does judo on the condition. Good kid, m.A.A.d city is a mode of what Prechtel would call metabolism. This initiation send-up ‘eats’ broken brick and hot concrete like a Mackie D and fries, swallows despair and loss like Hennesy, shits compost beat-rhymes like a postmodern belly anticipating diarrhea with a vengeance.
And the facsimile of initiation is part of the connection with the griot tradition. No question Lamar earns chops as survivor of a fierce landscape. His ’hood might, with slight license, be cast as postindustrial version of the rage of the wild – a kind of ghetto-ferocity-equivalent of the Buffalo-Wraith in Sunjata, who initiates the hunter-apprentices seeking to remedy the bush-devastation of the hero’s ‘mother-land’ and secure Sogolon as wife for his increasingly desperate mansa-father.85 The epic clearly celebrates a wide populace of spirit- and nature-entities marvelous and dread – the Shapeshifter-Sister (Dò Kamissa) morphing into Wild-Bovidae-Embodiment-of-Natural-Revenge not least among them. And while initiation situations appear everywhere in the text, the Buffalo Woman encounter is certainly the most central and elaborate. But it is emblematic of indigenous rites and protocols across the globe. Underneath the particularities of ecology and culture, the encounter is always with Death – always incarnate, always in a body, potent and threatening.86 In whatever mode of eloquence and offering, the weapon alone of the initiate is expressed beauty in the face of accepted self-limitation – a willingness to embrace Death’s ultimate requirement of being metabolized back into the flux of everything else as meal and gift when the appointed hour has arrived, but negotiating an interim standoff otherwise, securing breathing space and sustenance for others of the community and place.87
The conjunction with Lamar’s formation and eloquence should be obvious. In the Sunjata epic, such an encounter with wild nature, raging against mindless abuse by human hubris and forgetfulness, is not the typical forum for jeli-initiation, as already hinted. Traveling as a beggar serves that purpose. But the story is prescient in narrating the emergence of an entire lineage of griot-singers from the event. The older brother of the two hunter-wanderers, standing foot-on-buffalo-back once the beast is subdued, bursts forth in praise-cadence of the ancestral-line whence he and his buffalo-shooting younger brother have descended, and ‘births,’ on the spot, the Diabaté88 family tradition of jeli-singing.89 Lamar can be roughly recognized as undergoing a similar ‘smithing’ in the face of danger in his own geography. Again and again, he pirouettes close to demise, only to back away and reflect, and leverage his own accusation in the mirror as stupid (on the track “Real,” for instance, riffing “hating all money, power, respect … hating the fact that none of that shit makes me real”). In “Backseat Freestyle,” he pheens for money and power, threatening a “lead shower” for any who would challenge – all the while, “squabbing”90 his dream with an invocation of Martin’s (ghetto kid risking King’s fate, but for a scheme of driving Maserati and “ballin” rather than for racial equality!). In “The Art of Peer Pressure,” he confesses that while nonviolent when left on his own, with the homies, he bangs, lifting TV and DVDs in a B & E and then suddenly getting tailed and barely escaping. On the “Money Trees” track, he soliloquies “everyone respects the shooter, but the one in front of the gun, lives forever” (a bit of his Jesus-upbringing that continues to haunt), before lamenting the two bullets to the head of his uncle in front of the local Louis Burger – a space now tainted with the pain of ghetto war and devastating loss, everyone seeking to find solace and shade under dollar boughs and gold leaves (while as of June 2015, the only big purchase Lamar had ‘indulged’ was a modest new suburban L.A. home for his parents).91 Mortality is a daily apparition; Lamar a reluctant seer (see, for instance, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” Part 1). Too often the final breath comes too close under the braggadocio.
Of course, the narrative – as the life it rives with contradiction and equivocation – is hot with hormones, a teen on a quest to get off and the appetites nowhere tempered with elder-constraint or initiation-vision of the real aim (though ‘word-haunts’ of older haints do occasionally ‘sound through’ like his mother- and father-ventriloquism on “Real”). And this fast lanes us straight into the DAMNableness of the condition. Ghetto geography is minus Buffalo Woman integrity: there is little hope a youth can see through the dope of Hollywood neon and catch scent of the Wild Heron of desire his libido actually tracks. And this – a full halt for all of us in the modern way, including this writer and you, reader! Modern sex, in a world of sound bite and social media hype, is a short circuit away from the Big Encounter.
In indigenous initiation work, testosterone, and estrus are unhooked from physique and age and given a focus, under the cigar-belch of Death, in search for the honeysuckle breath of Her who is everywhere dispersed in seed-course under the ground, and bear-relish of salmon at the river bank, diamond-shimmer on stream-curve when dawn awakes the Great Salamander of Day and hush of dusk when first blushes Venus behind the black veil of the moon, as mist perfumes the ravines and the Great Hunt for the yet distant Deer Star begins.92 In a mere chapter such as this, it is impossible to convey the real burden of this writing. It is finally not just about Lamar and beats or griots and koras, but rather the entire situation a globe now faces in the loss of awareness of how we used to live. ‘Love’ in antique compass, was a tsunami of wild mystery happening everywhere through all things. Human youth, awakening to the rush, were carefully steered to face the Great Appetite that would one day eat them, and under that sign, find their own huge eloquence, brought to fruition in serving the big attraction of the Holy in dispersal in wild nature, bring Her (or His or Their) tiniest relic-fragment of memory93 back to those in the community most consumed in life-struggle (such as widows or the elderly in general) and only in that breakthrough into recognition that it is this Big Romance94 that all of our mundane motions of desire seek in the lament of loss and littleness, finally be ready for mating and adulthood.
Absent such a schooling of our desire into the Big Stream of Big Desire whence it originates and where it returns, in a communal village still dancing with the wild bush provision and symbiotic gift-offering whence it derives and thrives – we all end up as children in adult bodies, lost in seeking remedies in tools of our own making, thinking we are the authors of our destiny and architects of our possibilities, aiming far too low, settling for a life of trivial frivolity, trying to drown our big thirst in distraction and our lust in a body far too small to honor the actual thrust and romance. A Kendrick Lamar, popping and locking on a high wire over the ghetto-void, jousting death and wrestling life without the wide-screen truth and support requisite to actual maturity – mesmerizes the youth of the culture, because something closer to the reality of life is happening in him than in the zombie march and war frenzy of the corporatized mainstream. But missing in the Lamar remix – inevitably given his ecology and time – is the reality and pedagogy and ferocity of wild nature. It is also missing for most of the rest of us, except as domesticated backdrop and violent reinvention as ‘resource.’
But the augury he offers despite the poverty is not empty. It compels because it hints and channels what is hard-pressed, but not fully eclipsed, under the surface. He has the recipe right, though the ingredients have been made small and toxic. “You want LA?” he asks. You really want a wily trinity. “Women?” For sure! But I would ad lib: not the Hollywood version. Not the straight attraction. Not the fabrication of a culture canning experience in a binary, stripped of its polymorphous sinuosity crossing boundaries not merely of “orientation,” but of species and genus, and lithic and aquatic and atmospheric wildness presently domesticated in a taxonomy answering only to colonialist blindness before indigenous prodigality and wonder. “Weed?” Hell yes, but not primarily in commodified form of outlawed drug. Rather the trance-love is rooted in a Big Tongue capacity evolved to crave wild plant rapacity, sending the spine in orbit merely at the slightest taste of fruit or nut or root unadulterated by human resolve to preserve and package and transport for gain and aggrandizement. We have cartwheeled down a three-million-year eon to long for the real tang of the Holy offering Herself (Themselves) as food. And “Weather?” Of course – but not the mere concourse of Venice Beach sun, or lapping Pacific wave, or date palm scented breeze, stippling the nose with vague tease of half-recalled memory. Rather weather as the entire weave of a planetary breathing of the algae-gift of oxygen and atmosphere, dating to a three-billion year-old innovation of cyanobacteria entering endosymbiotic community with chloroplast affinity for green95, precipitating iron from ocean, granting red-ochre supplement to ice-age seacoast dwelling supplicants of a mollusk- and bi-value nutritional gift launching our species into its advent as sapiens96, painting cave recesses like quahog interiors as graffiti for the Holy97, giving rise to the entire panoply of finned and winged and four-legged ferocity from whence we came and to which we return – as continuously as the in-and-out-breath we all share and populate with intimate chemical uniqueness at every instance of our shared animate amble through water or soil or air.
So, yes – “women, weed, and weather” – an (unwitting) MC-griot-recipe for celebration and invocation and lament, learning all over again how to dwell in symbiosis with all else, respectful, humble, and singing. “KENdrid Spirits” as ancestry and destiny! But the question – for Lamar and me and the rest of us is this: Do we really want to rekindle the “ken”? I don’t know … I suspect we just want the titillation to distract from the growing terror. But nuclear winter or climate-change-perpetual-summer that may come – Wild Nature will have the last word. Nonetheless, I could wish a return date for Lamar to an African spate of learning – this time not in the south,98 but the west, to sit at the feet of some old village griot who yet syncopates this more-than-human vision of our species’ ‘black meaning’ into a rhyme-and-song-offering adequate to the memory and reality of our profound reciprocity with, and dependence upon, wild nature.