“Black Boy Fly,” a bonus track on Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city, is in part a backward-gazing confession regarding Kendrick’s previous jealousy (and admiration) toward those who have ostensibly escaped Compton. This added-on track is a sonic elaboration on a question that Kendrick asks himself at the beginning of the song: “Would I survive to make it up out of this hole in time?”1 Here the image of living in a hole conjures Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, particularly the final scene in which the protagonist dwells in the basement of an abandoned tenement, operating on the “lower frequencies” of the social world.2 Yet whereas Kendrick’s aspiration seems to be to flee from this hole, to “make it up” out of a space marked in part by indigence, confinement, premature death, and cutting memories, Ellison’s protagonist embraces the possibilities of living in the underground, at the dark edges of the social order, in the proverbial break. We should be careful not to only think of the hole as a spatial signifier; Kendrick alludes to a temporal hole, or a puncture in time, which indicates both an interruption into seamless conceptions of temporality as well as an opening toward alternative possibilities. But, again, Kendrick desires to fly away, to break free of various constraints and obstacles associated with the spatial and temporal hole that is home. This can be heard in the third verse as he juxtaposes his emerging success story with the escape narratives of rapper The Game and basketball player Arron Afflalo thanking God that his counterparts were not the “last black boys to fly out of Compton.” At the same time, he underscores a feeling of ‘terror’ regarding the gap between those fortunate enough to fly away and the conditions that foreclose flight for most of his community. In addition, after the wide acclaim of good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick revealed that he experienced severe depression when faced with the fissure between his newfound freedom and “things going on back home.”3 We might say that Kendrick’s capacity to move, travel, and leap is constrained, and cut, by realities, antagonisms, and irretrievable losses that remain within and beside any uplift paradigm. He carries the hole or wound with(in) him even as he enjoys access to new horizons and develops a different relationship to home.
This fraught interplay between flight and confinement heard in “Black Boy Fly” is a central theme in contemporary black thought and practice (in addition to earlier slave and migration narratives). Consider for instance Frank Wilderson’s ethical aspiration “to stay in the hold of the ship despite … fantasies of flight”4 as he provides a diagnosis of how the coherence of the Human relies on antiblack violence. Here the hold/holed initially denotes vessels that transformed kidnapped Africans into fungible flesh, spaces, or voids in the slave ship where black bodies were stored, violated, and de/formed. Like Ellison and Kendrick’s hole, the hold is that non-position at the edges of social order and legibility. For Wilderson, the dream of flight refers to the fantasy of being able to access the domain of the Human, a fantasy that is emboldened by grammars of racial progress and the enticements of property. To resist this fantasy is to remain attached to blackness, to think and endure with those who the pursuit of progress requires us to flee from and abandon. But as Fred Moten points out in response to Wilderson’s powerful formulation, we do not have to imagine a rigid separation between flight and the hold.5 In fact, it is precisely in the hold, which includes covert spaces and rendezvous, that black people have imagined and created sounds, bodily movements, and modes of sociality that remind us blackness is not reducible to death and confinement. Like the fugitive slave or the maroon communities that absconded from the plantation, something escapes the predicament of social death, and this “is cause for celebration”6 as much as mourning and sorrow. Juxtaposing Moten and Wilderson with Kendrick prompts a series of preliminary questions: Is there a notion of flight within Kendrick’s music and black thought more generally that departs from the desire to leave something (the past, home, anguish) behind? How does black flight riff on, and depart from, notions of mobility associated with black uplift, individual success paradigms, U.S. exceptionalism, and the unrestrained movements of capital? How does Kendrick’s trajectory both resonate with and interrupt conventional success narratives and does this ambivalence rely on how we hear the language of flying in his music? Can one think of a kind of escape that flees from the inculcated desire to be whole, coherent, and settled? Is this sort of escape what Moten has in mind when he broaches the possibility of refusing what has been refused?7 What if black flight is both an ascent and descent, a simultaneous attempt to touch and hear the impossible (or unthought) and reach the earth, the dirt, the hole underground?
In what follows, I respond to these queries by thinking at the intersection of Kendrick Lamar and black study, or more precisely, by hearing Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly as a site and sound of black thought. In the first section of the piece, I trace the relationship between flight and containment, or escape and antiblack violence, articulated in authors like Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, authors who in many ways provide the black feminine stage for Moten and Wilderson’s disagreements. In the second part of this contribution, I offer a reading/listening of Kendrick’s 2015 album, drawing attention to the jagged relationship between the fluttering movements of the butterfly and strategies of control associated with the caterpillar that pimps the butterfly. My argument is that Kendrick, sometimes against his intentions, offers a notion of flight that is not defined by “making it up” out of the blackened hole. What he makes up smears any stable distinction between flying away and staying with. In addition, his music indicates that the black hole in time extends beyond Compton, beyond his initial sense of home. Antiblackness anticipates and awaits the fugitive.
According to Ashon Crawley, black study is “the force of belief that blackness is but one critical and urgently necessary disruption to the epistemology … that produces a world, a set of protocols, wherein black flesh cannot easily breathe.”8 Alluding to the police chokehold that took Eric Garner’s last breath, Crawley contends that black study, the study of blackness and its various expressions, is an interruption into modes of being and thinking that aim for resolution and purity. The insistence on purity is articulated through “protocols” that contain, patrol, and choke black life (and mark blackness as a contaminating force that requires constant surveillance). Part of the rupture that black thought introduces is a sense that things could be otherwise. As Crawley puts it, black thought is “about openness to worlds, to experiences, to ideas, to otherwise possibilities.”9 This commitment to an otherwise includes thinking beyond rigid, academic binaries, such as knowledge and belief, reason and affect, philosophy and theology, or high and low culture. And this otherwise is found in everyday forms of sociality that endure in the proverbial hole, in spaces and communities that have been relegated to non-being. For Crawley, black thought exists at the intersection of mourning (the accumulation of black death) and hope that things could be radically different. In addition, black study refuses the kinds of demarcations, or projects of purity, that would cordon off popular music from literature and critical theory.10 Working within Crawley’s understanding of black study, I juxtapose Spillers, Hartman, and Kendrick in order to develop a sense of flight that is not incompatible with staying in the hole/d.
One important source of contemporary black thought is Hortense Spillers’s reflections on the body and flesh, reflections that are germane to my interest in the intimacy between flight and containment. In her oft-cited “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers examines the grammars that associate black culture with pathology and deviance, a tendency that is prevalent in hip-hop even as artists depart from this paradigm. The logic of black pathology, expressed in moments where artists attribute black failure to a matriarchal family structure and the lack of a strong father11 often extricates blackness from “the sociopolitical order of the New World … that order with its human sequence written in blood.”12 In other words, by placing the burden on cultures that are considered deviant, abnormal, and unassimilable, we treat the normal, the standard, the domain of order, as innocuous and untouched by the tensions and ruptures of history. Consequently, Spillers contends that the order of the New World “represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile,”13 a scenario that compels us to rethink categories like progress, order, normal, and so forth. The image of mutilation informs Spillers’s well-known distinction between the body and flesh, a distinction that helps us think about the effects of chattel slavery and antiblackness more generally. As Spillers puts it,
This passage suggests that the body is a coherent, well-defined entity whereas flesh is that stuff that forms the building blocks of the body. Flesh is what is carved out to imagine and fabricate legible bodies; flesh is also the most basic level of existence15 which, because of its strong association with mutilation and permeability, is what the aspiration for a coherent body defines itself over and against. To put this differently, to be a body that matters, to be a recognizable Human being, is to be elevated above the torn black flesh “riveted to the ship’s hole.” As I describe below, this distinction plays itself out in Kendrick’s simultaneous identification with the King’s body and the slave’s flesh on “King Kunta.”
It is important to track the multiple ways in which the language of flesh is operating for Spillers. On the one hand, the severability of flesh draws attention to the routine practices of disciplining slaves through cuts and punctures. Following Achille Mbembe, the flesh registers a “body entirely exposed to the will of the master … the name of a wound.”16 Flesh talk fastens the reader to images and sounds of bodily anguish experienced on the plantation and other sites of terror: “the smack of the whip,” “eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle punctured,” the “calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet.”17 In this fastening to techniques of skin-severing, the reader is susceptible to being figuratively cut and wounded; the succession of flayed body parts, the vividness of this imagery, resists the tendency to safely relegate slavery to a distant past or talk about slavery in a casual, nonchalant manner. For Spillers, the “familiarity of this [middle passage and slave] narrative” should not prevent us from being “startled” by the events and experiences of blacks in the New World, especially as these events are reimagined, reinterpreted, and discovered anew. We should also underscore that the image of flesh invokes the simultaneous desirability and disdain of black body parts. Spillers indicates how the association of blackness with depraved sexuality licensed the captor to discipline black men and women while using the enslaved as repositories for the kinds of ‘perverse’ desires that were perceived as intrinsic to blackness. To be a black fe/male, under this regime, is to be both sexually dangerous and readily available for sexual consumption. And even though Spillers contends that the regime of slavery unraveled gender distinctions (women were beaten like men for instance), black women have endured the brunt of this conflation of blackness with excessive sexuality, a predicament that is evident in hip-hop’s visual culture. But while the idiom of flesh, as connected to but distinct from the body, heightens attention to the penetrability of blackness, it also indicates an opaque excess that cannot be completely whipped into shape. Notice that Spillers associates black flesh with ‘escape’ and with ‘falling’; flying overboard to elude the anguish of the passage across the Atlantic; falling into the hole or abyss – a void in the ship where black bodies are contained but also develop forms of painful intimacy and care.18 Liberation is not incompatible with death. Flying away is not opposed to falling, drowning, or staying in the hold. When Spillers contends that black flesh does “not escape concealment” under the brush of discourse, I read her as saying that there is an opaque quality to flesh that cannot be grasped or rendered intelligible by language, concepts, reason, etc. There is something about flesh that resists the clarity of discourse or the clutches of the Logos. Or to put it differently, there is a nontransparent aspect of blackness that is often heard and experienced in the unordinary grammars of rap, or in what Adam Bradley calls the poetics of hip-hop.19 This is a poetics that involves unstable flows, multiple rhyme schemes, shifting tempos and intensities, and the turning of words and phrases against their ordinary meanings.
In her magisterial text, Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman responds to Spillers’s call; Hartman cites and samples Spillers’s reflections on the horrors of slavery and antiblack racism. In fact, Hartman’s notion of the “afterlife of slavery” re-mixes, and elaborates on, Spillers’s harrowing question: Does the “marking and branding” of black flesh “transfer from one generation to another?”20 For Hartman, the afterlife of slavery compels us to refuse grand narratives which identify certain events – Emancipation, civil rights movement, the election of a black president – as victorious moments on a progressive trajectory toward freedom and equality. This afterlife makes,
The language of transition replaces the idioms of transcendence, overcoming, or triumph regarding the legacy of slavery. Without denying that something important changed in the position and status of blacks after 1865, Hartman traces successive forms of subjugation (vagabond laws, the sharecropping system, Jim Crow, lynching, the relationship between criminality and involuntary labor) that “trouble, if not elide, any absolute and definitive marker between slavery and its aftermath.”22 The “complicity of slavery and freedom” alludes to,
Following Spillers, Hartman contends that black life is haunted by a past that shapes, agitates, and remains alongside the present, thereby blurring any solid distinction between freedom and domination. Kendrick’s musical corpus is a kind of witness to this afterlife, to a horror that remains even with shifts and transitions in black people’s relationship to the social order.
In Hartman’s work, this blurring of reliable divisions and boundaries extends to a series of opposing concepts – pleasure and pain, agency and constraint, and flight and containment. Think for instance of how the captor’s pleasure was made possible by the distribution of pain and anguish; how slaves were trained to appear jovial, and conceal pain, on the auction block to maintain their market value; how black female slaves were considered agents in cases where ‘consent’ was ascribed to their sexual relationships with the master, even though this consent occurred within a situation defined by terror and coercion. In addition to these examples, Hartman directs the reader’s attention to practices of resistance within enslaved communities, practices that refuse any transparent separation between anguish and joy, or confinement and escape. Alluding to slave songs, or the spirituals, she writes,
Here Hartman is “following the path laid by Douglass and Du Bois,” authors who suggested that the qualities of the slave song – the cry, the shrieking sound, collective ecstasy, incoherence, hidden meanings – elude ordinary logics and frameworks of meaning.25 While these rhythmic cries defy the image of happy, content slaves, they also challenge the contrasting notion that joy, beauty, and intimacy were not experienced by slave communities. To put it differently, Hartman reflects on the “subterranean and veiled” character of the spirituals in order to gesture toward a notion of escape and pleasure (through singing, hand-clapping, prayer, illicit gatherings, and dance) that is always traversed by the duress and terror that made these fleeting moments of reprieve necessary.
What is crucial for Hartman is that we consider the slave’s relationships and practices as neither reducible to domination, or explainable outside this structure of power.26 She urges us to think simultaneously through strategies of flight or stealing away and the overwhelming conditions that made acts of transgression dangerous, evanescent, and punishable. Consequently, one might think of the practices that enable black endurance across time as haunted and punctured by the violence that presses upon black life – violence that is devastating but never completely successful. Part of the excess that slips through is expressed in bodily practices that display and rearticulate the wound that is blackness. On this reading, one interprets the dances and songs performed in secret bush arbor meetings as “an articulation of … tensions, limits, fissures, wounds, and ravages”27 rather than a triumphant moment of freedom. Instead of viewing these practices as an occasion to forget and escape the horrors of slavery, we should remember that the pleasure derived from these interactions “was infected with despair, fear, dissatisfaction, and a desire for freedom.”28 Similarly, as Hartman points out, the rituals that involved remembering the ancestors and African traditions should not be perceived as maintaining some direct line to a premodern past or precolonial ‘home.’ Remembrance for the slave was primarily directed toward the “point of rupture,” the fissures, losses, and discontinuities brought about by the Middle Passage.29 Freedom, remembrance, resistance, and home all become ‘wounded,’ incoherent categories. And by remaining in the proverbial hole/d, by fastening our thoughts and imaginaries to modes of black sociality born out of death and terror, we can gesture toward a notion of flight that is not incompatible with descent, falling, and being dirt-bound. This possibility resonates with Spillers’s description of a sermon by a 19th century black preacher: “In this case the sermonic words does not soar; it does not leap, it never leaves the ground. It scatters instead through the cultural situation, and like the force of gravity, holds us fast to the mortal means.”30 Taking note of the connections between the preacher and the emcee,31 the next section of this chapter examines how Kendrick’s music performs this flight that remains within the wound that stays attached to the black hole/d of time. This is queer kind of flight that attempts to escape the prevailing fantasy of becoming whole, pure, and unscathed.
On “Mortal Man,” the last track of To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick recites a poem (written by an unnamed friend) that helps explain the title of the album. We hear the recitation at the end of an imagined dialogue between Kendrick and Tupac, a dialogue that includes edited conversations and interviews of the slain icon. There is both a bringing together and a separation of two hip-hop generations in this fabricated conversation. The conversation is a kind of conjuring, a way of speaking with the dead, a practice of testifying to the life after death – and the death that inhabits life. In fact, Tupac reminds Kendrick “We ain’t really rappin, We just letting our dead homies tell stories for [and through] us.”32 Perhaps this is why Kendrick ends the album with a poem from his absent, un-named friend, a poem that contrasts the caterpillar and the butterfly. The former position, according to the excerpt, is characterized by confinement and abjection; while the caterpillar is a product of the larger environment, the outside world ‘shuns’ the caterpillar. As the caterpillar finds ways to survive and endure within a harsh lifeworld, s/he also becomes trapped and institutionalized within a sticky cocoon, unable to see and move differently. The butterfly is praised by the prevailing social order for its creativity and beauty but accused of being weak [and unmasculine] by the caterpillar even though the butterfly represents potential within the caterpillar. The butterfly might break free of the cocoon-like state (a state of both confinement and gestation, life, and death) but part of this escape involves “going home,” “shedding light” on painful predicaments, and creating new ideas with those who have been marked as outcasts. The movement of the butterfly – which is more like a hesitant unsteady flutter than a triumphant ascension – leads to a realization that “although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same.” The caterpillar, ostensibly confined to the cocoon, develops strategies and habits of flight within and beyond the cocoon’s hold. Similarly, the fluttering gestures of the butterfly are tethered to, and inflected by, the practices of endurance associated with the caterpillar, even as the social world disciplines us to imagine a chasm between the creative and the abject. One way to pimp a butterfly is to entice blacks into thinking that freedom and progress require them to leave the hole/d, to separate themselves from those qualities and signifiers that get in the way of progress, those bodies that are shunned for the sake of order, meaning, and coherence.33 Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album offers an alternative line of flight … or flutter, the latter term alluding to the unsteady, erratic movements of the butterfly.
Consider the album cover for instance. Against the backdrop of an image of the White House, we see a multiplication of black men and male children with all too familiar postures: displaying cash in a flamboyant manner, holding liquor bottles, talking on two cell phones, ‘stunting’ with no shirts on in a manner that accentuates black flesh. Lying unconscious beneath the cluster of black male images appears to be a judge – with a robe and gavel – that has two x’s over his eyes. Insofar as the judge represents law and order, the postures and expressions of black maleness, for a moment, overflow the eagerness to circumscribe and surveil these expressions. In addition, the play and contrast between black, white, and gray coloring indicates a kind of oscillation between transparency and opacity that anticipates how the listener might experience – both see and hear – the album. More specifically, the juxtaposition of the White House and black male flesh (that is somewhat whitened by the light and the figure of the building) accomplishes several things. For one, the contrast and blending becomes a reminder that violence is immediately associated with stereotypical black male gestures, while the violence that constitutes the law and political order usually recedes to the background, remains offstage, overshadowed by the violence black men are made to absorb and embody.34 Following Terrion Williamson’s work on representations of black women in popular media, we might add that the album cover urges the listener to rethink the logistics of the stereotype. According to Williamson, abrupt dismissals of black stereotypes, such as “the nappy-headed ho” or the “black male thug,” miss an opportunity to engage the “underside of the stereotype, to think about what is held there, in the image we hate and reject yet continue to battle with and against.”35 To put this differently, the negative stereotype, which is embraced, flaunted, and contested on the album cover, signifies qualities that we are supposed to reject or shed off in the pursuit of acceptable identities and social positions. The understandable effort to combat stereotypes leaves the antagonistic relationship between the acceptable and the abject in place. It does not interrogate the violence that brings the very distinction between the acceptable and unacceptable into being, that reifies the contrast between the validity and propriety of whiteness and the menace of blackness.36 Keeping these complexities in mind, one can look at the album cover as an assemblage of different black male expressions, gestures, dispositions, and affects – aggression, coolness, flamboyance, intimacy, joy, laughter, and even self-mockery. We might see these as both the effect of, and a response to, legacies of containment and antiblack terror.
If there is something about the album cover that invokes the distinction between the respectable black and the nigga, the album opens up with Boris Gardiner singing, “Every Nigga Is a Star.” We hear the sample emerge slowly, prior to the introduction of the main beat underlying “Wesley’s Theory.” One also notices the sound of the Gardiner record rotating in a manner that underscores hip-hop’s indebtedness to the past, its reliance on other genres of music and previous technologies. This sense of tradition, or what Imani Perry refers to as call and response,37 is reinforced as we hear George Clinton’s voice interspersed in the chorus. The presence of George Clinton and the legacy of funk are fitting for an album that oscillates between flight and being dirt-bound, or elevation and descent. As this musical genre conjures images of motherships and outer space, the term funk is also associated with melancholy and sorrow (in a funk) as well as sweat, must, and odor. Funk refuses sanitizing imaginaries and yearnings; it also refuses to stay in bounds. The explicit inclusion of funk and jazz throughout the album is a testament to intertwined modes of black sociality that, as Moten argues, are not reducible to the social death that forces black music and art into existence.38
It is important to linger a bit on the phrase, “Every nigga is a star.” On the one hand, this excerpt from Boris Gardiner appears to resonate with Kendrick’s claim that the caterpillar contains a potential butterfly. One could consider the light, recognition, and prominence attached to “star power” as qualities that overcome the position of the nigga, a position that is an enduring reminder that blackness exists at the edges of being and non-being, or the Human and the animal. (Perhaps, therefore, Kendrick wants the listener to “recognize” that he is a “proud monkey.”39) But according to astrologists, the light from a star reaches us millions of years after the light is initially emitted; furthermore, light from the star can be swallowed by a black hole. Consequently, by aligning ‘nigga’ and ‘star,’ Kendrick compels us to think about untimeliness, lateness, deflected light, and the play between radiance and opacity in the context of black life and existence. In addition, the alignment of these two terms invites us to invert the subject and predicate of the phrase in question. If every nigga is a star, then every black star is (still) a nigga or, depending on the context, can be made to instantiate the threatening qualities and characteristics exhibited by the black male bodies on the album cover. Well-recognized black athletes like James Blake and Colin Kaepernick know this all too well. When Milwaukee Bucks player Sterling Brown was forced to “hit the dirt” by police officers responding to a parking incident, he experienced the reversibility of black ascent and acceptance. Even Oprah Winfrey could not escape the fact of blackness when she was unrecognized and mistreated at a clothing store in Switzerland. The juxtaposition of nigga and star/dom is one indication of Hartman’s claim that the conditions and sensibilities that brought slavery into being get rearticulated in slavery’s afterlife.
Therefore, a grouping that is similar to nigga and star involves the positions of sovereignty and enslavement on “King Kunta.” The title of this track resonates with Kendrick’s controversial claim on “Control” that he, a West Coast emcee, has replaced Biggie and Jay-Z as the King of New York. Throughout “King Kunta,” Kendrick proclaims that he “runs the game” while expressing suspicion toward admirers who were not present before he acquired fame and recognition.40 His sense of accomplishment even leads him to ponder the possibility of running for mayor of Compton someday. He has gone from a “peasant to a prince to a king,” a gradual ascent from the “belly of the beast.” He started at the bottom and now he has arrived, so to speak. At the same time, Kendrick assumes the name of the well-known enslaved character from Alex Haley’s Roots. Invoking the scene in which Kunta Kinte gets his foot chopped off as punishment for attempting to escape the plantation, Kendrick claims “everybody wants to cut the legs off him.” The allusion to this punishment and severing of black body parts under slavery is one of the many instances within hip-hop where one hears the afterlife of the plantation, or when the plantation becomes a useful metaphor for responding to strategies of containment and violence in the present.41 Even as the song has a buoyant beat and the video is replete with dance, joy, and celebration, one of the victories that Kendrick celebrates, and flaunts at the judge, is making it past 25 years old. As Hartman points out, the afterlife of slavery includes “premature death” in addition to statistical regimes that predict black death and impose limits on black male life, particularly in spaces like Compton. By screaming at the judge, the figure of law and order, Kendrick exalts his escape from premature death, but this exaltation is traversed by the conditions and realities that inspire flight. Similarly, his movements and creations are inspired and haunted by “the dead homies.”42 Consequently, one should mourn and be vigilant toward those who continue to be captured by the statistical expectations that Kendrick has eluded … for the time being.
There is a structural relationship between the king and the slave that demands attention. The figure of the king is an example of sovereignty who, as Giorgio Agamben describes, exists in a state of paradox. The sovereign, according to Agamben, is both outside and inside the legal order.43 While the sovereign is authorized by the legal order, this authority enables the sovereign to suspend the law, to act outside the law for the sake of preserving the semblance of order. A similar paradox befalls the slave if we follow authors like Spillers and Hartman. The slave also exists within and outside the law, the sphere of rights, etc. The law dictates that the slave does not have to be treated like other beings, who are protected by the law and sustained by the principle of mutual recognition; the law authorizes the Master (a kind of modern sovereign) to torture, rape, and kill the slave with impunity. The slave is included within the domain of the law in order to be excluded and spurned by it.44 Therefore, the king and the slave both indicate an excess or spillage regarding the order of things; the king’s exteriority is perceived in terms of height and elevation while the slave’s exteriority is located below or underneath the social world. By bringing together the sovereign and the slave and affirming the conjunction, Kendrick encourages us to hear his ascent as also a fall, to see his reign as also an enduring vulnerability to death, anguish, depression, and madness (even as a good kid), and to read his transitions as new ways of inhabiting the hold. The images and sequences in the “Alright” video visualize this play between height and descent. While Kendrick is seen fluttering through the air, there are scenes that depict him, from a high angle shot, moving and dancing with other black bodies on the ground. In addition to a brief image of him hanging upside down, the final scene shows Kendrick being shot by a police officer while teetering on the top of a light pole. After a terrifying stillness and the discharge of blood, he descends in slow motion such that the viewer must linger with the movement downward, a plunge that is precipitated by all too familiar State violence. Kendrick is not exempt from the bullets magnetized toward black flesh. When he finally hits the earth, we see Kendrick smile, an expression that confirms Georges Bataille’s warning not to “link death [too] closely to sorrow.”45 In other words, death, descent, and loss of stature might be occasions for ecstasy and laughter as much as melancholy.
The tension-filled play between flight and plunging or escape and returning to the black hole/d, is exemplified in Kendrick’s riffing on the ‘flying home’ trope. On the track “Momma,” Kendrick admits – after proclaiming that he knows everything – that he realized that he “didn’t know shit” the day he came back home.46 Here it seems as if home is a split signifier, pointing to Compton and South Africa, the site of Kendrick’s spiritual journey in 2014. In the third verse, he recalls meeting and conversing with a “nappy-headed, ashy” black boy with a gap-toothed smile, resembling a younger version of himself. Yet the description of this event leaves the location and site of the encounter undetermined; one could be on either side of the Atlantic. In line with Hartman’s refusal to think of Africa as some unified origin for the slave, the refrain “come back home” in “Momma” registers a split, or gap, between Compton and South Africa, a gap that repeats the event of the Middle Passage. Perhaps to return home is to recognize and embrace what Spillers calls being “suspended in the oceanic”47 to inhabit a “nowhere” that involves movement, flux, and what she names “wild” possibility. Home, on this reading, is not simply a place of comfort and settlement; it is also a break, hole, or wound in which we are unmade, de-formed, and potentially exposed to others through intimacy, vulnerability, and care. Alongside this renewed understanding of home, it is important to note Kendrick’s attunement to the anguish and suffering experienced in South Africa, an elsewhere that is also familiar and close. As he puts it, “While my loved ones were fighting a continuous war back in the city, I was entering a new one.” This sense of entering a new war or being exposed to a different manifestation of the incessant war against black flesh, a war that Kendrick often internalizes, resists (Kendrick’s) romantic yearnings for the motherland as well as progress narratives that assume one can leave violence and terror behind. Antiblackness is inescapable; it is part of the fabric and grain of the world. And while Kendrick tends to internalize and psychologize this violent predicament, a tendency that includes the language of sin, one can read the internal moment as a re-expression of external conditions and configurations – and an acknowledgment of his complicity and hypocrisy.48
It should not be surprising that Kendrick links home with the black mother. As Spillers insists, “The African-American male has been touched … by the mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape.”49 Here the language of ‘touch’ serves as a substitute for possession and capture; the act of touching is always also an act of being touched and a reminder that activity and receptivity, or doing and suffering, are intertwined.50 Spillers’s use of the word ‘escape’ in the passage introduces an analogy between “escaping the black mother” and Wilderson’s occasional fantasies of fleeing the hold and reaching the domain of legibility and acceptance. Insofar as becoming a good, legible subject requires independence, coherence, property accumulation, masculinity, and linear time, the figure of the black mother seems to signify an obstacle to attaining these values and qualities. Momma is black and female; momma is accused of being overly dependent on government handouts; momma is a reminder of the child’s utter dependence and contingency; momma embodies an enduring legacy of black women being objects of sexual violence and property; momma’s touch prompts the black male to find the “female within itself.”51 At this point, it would be too convenient to conclude that Kendrick becomes liberated by reclaiming his feminine side, by assuming his mother’s voice and wisdom on songs like “You Ain’t Gotta Lie (Momma Said).” Things are a bit more complicated. In fact, on “If These Walls Could Talk,” Kendrick speaks from the space of a woman’s vaginal wall. While he identifies with and experiences female pain and vulnerability, he also claims to have interrogated every nook and cranny. There is a territorial dimension to his exploration and “demolition” of the vaginal wall. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, activities that undermine the very logic of possession, exemplified by Kendrick becoming other, becoming woman, often become ways of creating new territory and property – that pussy is mine.52 In light of the comparison on the song between a vaginal wall and prison walls, one wonders if soliciting the former to talk is more about Kendrick’s liberation, escape, and triumph than intimacy, shared enjoyment, and mutual vulnerability. (So much hinges on whether Kendrick’s being inside a woman is also an internalization of the feminine; touched and being touched.) This uncertainty suggests that intimacy within the black hole/d will be cut by, among other things, gender, and sexual difference. Consequently, black sociality, as Spillers points out, is “a wound,” an indication of painful cuts and an opening toward otherwise possibilities.53
In a 2015 interview on the radio program the Breakfast Club, hosts Charlamagne Tha God and DJ Envy express surprise and shock at Kendrick’s well-known battle with depression. How could someone who is on top of the rap game be sad and melancholic, absorbed in death and loss? When Kendrick mentions the disparity between his recent success and the ongoing trouble “back home,” the hosts indicate that his goal should be to move up and leave that other stuff behind. In many ways, DJ Envy and Charlamagne articulate a popular doxa in our culture about the ends and goals of (racial) progress and mobility. They also reveal a tension within the regime of progress – in order to advance, to gain greater access to capital, wealth, abundance, and life, we are disciplined to separate ourselves from bodily and spatial signifiers of incoherence, lack, and death. This demand is often intensified for blacks raised in what the prevailing order calls the bottom, the hole, or the ratchet/wretched. In this situation, escape from the confinements of the “bottom” often becomes the goal. When accomplished, this flight is perceived as an instance of progress, evidence that the social order works if you trust in it and work hard. The regime of progress is pervasive and elastic.
I have argued in this chapter that black study and aesthetics, demonstrated in the works of Spillers, Hartman, and Kendrick Lamar, offer an alternative practice of escape. This alternative is predicated on a sense that one of the containment strategies that we need to refuse is the pressure to leave the hole/d, the demand to perpetuate the project of the Human by spurning blackness. Spillers’s notion of flesh suggests that we cannot disentangle escape and slippage from what she calls the wound of black culture. Hartman’s use of the opaque smears the distinction between pleasure and anguish, and freedom and slavery’s afterlife. And as I argued in the second half of the chapter, the sonic interplay in Kendrick’s music between flight and containment, height and descent, sovereignty and bondage, and home and anguish prompt the listener to think through a notion of flying away that is also a staying with, a possibility that happens through intimacy with the nigga who is also a star. Ultimately, what I am after is an ethics of the wound, a wound that makes flight look like a trembling flutter, that turns movement into an occasional stillness, that makes going away a kind of return for the first time. We hear this wound on the song “u,” as Kendrick treats himself as object of ridicule in order to voice self-anger, insecurity, and failure. And we hear this wound on the corresponding track “i” as Kendrick’s performance of self-love is interrupted by violence and the remembrance of death. If the conventional grammar of progress is tied to a yearning for coherence and settlement, black study and music testify to a sociality of, and in, the break. And as Kendrick points out in his imaginary conversation with Tupac, “the only hope we have left is in music and [unsettling] vibrations.”54