“This what god feel like, yeah … I got, I got, I got, I got royalty, got loyalty inside my DNA” we rapped over and over again during a cross-Atlantic cipher that found all three of us at the Institute for Philosophical Research in Hannover, Germany, in 2017. DAMN. had just been released, and Lamar was all we could seemingly think about. We wondered if he no longer believed in race, or if he was now claiming to be a Hebrew Israelite, or if there was another album that Lamar would be secretly following up with soon, or whether DAMN. listened to in reverse was another album altogether. In a word, Lamar had us thinking on our feet as much as we were seemingly constructing more and more theories about Lamar and the sheer volume of black meaning in his work. Turns out, we were not alone. All of our thanks to each of our contributors whose perspectives add richness to the volume.
We owe gratitude to Prof. Dr. Jürgen Manemann, Anna Maria Hauk, and all of our colleagues at the Institute for, as always, in hip-hop like spirit, providing a space and home away from home where ciphers of ideas and creativity always seem to take shape. We’d also like to thank our home institutions, colleagues, and students for providing intellectual space and inspiration for our work. We are also mindful of family and friends whose support remains steadfast.
We would like to thank our editor at Routledge, Joshua Wells, and the rest of the Routledge team for moving this project from an idea to a published book. Thank you! Finally, we’d be remiss without sending a big shout-out to hip-hop culture – especially to Kendrick Lamar Duckworth for providing dots of inspiration, brilliance, and lyrical genius by which we’ve been able to ponder something new, and something different, of black life and culture, something still unfolding. We hope this volume contributes to conversations that have amassed energy in recent years regarding hip-hop’s shape-shifty and prodigious construction of meaning to blackness and the blackness of its meaning-making constructions.