Why Kendrick Lamar Is a Great Artist (and Why Black People Have a Right to Be Wary of Him)
“using race as a sickle in subjects where a scalpel was needed”
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Last month, Kendrick Lamar waded into the respectability politics debate at one of the most inopportune times in African American History. While his idea that revolution comes from within are laudable and agreeable, the idea that we should lessen the focus on the burgeoning civil rights networks struck a false note with a lot of people aware of the civil rights we have lost in the last 15 years. Also, while I strongly believe that Iggy Azalea should not be ashamed of her gender, her history of racist actions and gruesome minstrelsy is fair game for critique. While the subtext of Lamar’s remarks showed that he believes these things as well, in the interview he came off as a Jamesian Aesthete in a time when that is the last thing people want to hear right now.
In this age where, to quote critic Dan Weiss, “Iggy Azalea has received louder booing for cultural appropriation than Eminem [did] for threatening to rape her” the outrage toward Lamar’s conservatism struck some false notes as well, however. As much as I cringed at the fatuous aesthetics of his personal philosophy, I initially couldn’t muster rage at Kendrick for sounding like a corny black grandpa. I also initially couldn’t muster the rage toward “The Blacker the Berry”, one of the most powerful political pieces of music I ever heard; and my first instinct was that the critical response to it was even more harsh than the feedback he got for his Ferguson remarks. The more I thought about it, however, the less indignant and contrarian I got about the response to Kendrick Lamar, and the more that the truth seemed to be in a complicated middle ground.
This is not to say that I completely agree with Lamar’s critics. Yes, one should talk about root causes and the racist economic/educational policies that created inner cities in America, and yes, a vast majority of white conservatives and moderate liberals only want to talk about black crime to shut down discussions about white racism. But if it is an insidious lie that black people don't care about black crime, a lie that thousands of social networks in inner cities debunk every day, a good deal of the response to this feeds into that myth. At the least, it continues a history of black intellectuals telling folks in the projects that their reality isn't valid and they should be saved and not heard.
As horrible as racism, institutional oppression, and cultural neglect are in the 21st century, it doesn't wash away all of the sins of black folks on the left. It doesn't wash away how Stokely and other civil rights leaders crippled the civil rights movement by marginalizing women's voices. It doesn't wash away how the Panthers didn't need that much help from COINTELPRO to become a psychotic rape culture network that did a lot more harm than good. It doesn't wash away banana republic political systems that protected too many scumbag black mayors and scapegoated Jews when their cities were crumbling. If you can't address the reality of that history, then I'm not interested in you shouting down Lamar for deviating from an "all black folks are good, all the time" script.
And yet. And yet. The more I thought about it, the more I sympathized with why some people are claustrophobically queasy about Berry…and Kendrick Lamar. Respectability politics is just as insidious a hustle as those I just mentioned, and the popularity of such predators as Clarence Thomas, Juan Williams, Kobe Bryant, and Bill Cosby show that a great deal of White America doesn't care how much of a monster you are as long as you make white men feel comfortable. Even in softer core iterations of the hustle, mediocre intellectuals such as John McWhorter and Shelby Steele have made their careers on articles and books that shuffled the same talking points for a white audience regardless if they were true. Just as a generation of scholars and artists before cheapened our dialogue by using race as a sickle in subjects where a scalpel was needed, a modern generation has cheapened the notion of “self reliance” by using respectability politics to damage the black community and get over on whites.
My first response to “The Blacker the Berry” was, “But is Kendrick doing that here?” The track is closer to Many Thousands Gone—James Baldwin's repudiation of both American racism and Bigger Thomas's psycho killer ideal—than any piece of art created by a black man in my lifetime, something that both viscerally critiques and champions black masculinity at the same time. Following the aesthetic highs of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and the Single “I,” the rap song that carries Gil Scott-Heron’s aesthetic of “Survival Kits on Wax” more than any I have ever heard; “Berry” shows a great artist, MC, and writer coming into his prime. At his best, Lamar has transcended modern hip hop conventions to become a storyteller closer to Ralph Ellison than E-40, and I can't think of another MC in my lifetime who has gone deeper into their own mind to create art than he has.
Listening to this over and over, however, I couldn’t get a voice out of my head that said, “The nigga that rapped over ‘How Many Drinks’ is now lecturing Black America.” M.A.A.D City belongs with Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land in that it was a black man’s coming of age story and where macho signifiers were used with a white male audience to become popular. Each author’s genius and flaws stood, they had so many insightful things to say about being black in American that their readers held their nose during the times they were less insightful about women. Kendrick Lamar has been less misogynistic that most rappers, and his gift for self critique—his ability to see his own flaws and make them into art—is the primary corner stone of what makes him a great artist. Yet in his case, you can’t make a single about getting a woman drunk enough to fuck you (“How Many Drinks”) then turn around and lecture Black America in any way without people thinking of Bill Cosby.
Because of a generation and a half of crossover politics, where too many Black Artists either browbeat or flattered white people for guilt or gain, America hasn't really had to deal with the complexities of African American history for a while. Along with Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, and D’angelo, Kendrick Lamar is making the modern American music public deal with things that his parents didn't even deal with. With that, he also has to deal with the complexities of his own life. Though I think Lamar is a genuine artist, I don’t have that many definitive statements as to his impact or what he means to the culture. What I do know is that his story is far from over. Lamar set a staggering bar on “The Blacker The Berry.” Let’s see if he continues to try and clear it. Let’s see if we all continue to try and clear it as well.
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Header image courtesy of Choi Xooang. To view a gallery of his art, go here.
