Lamar’s self-proclaimed “film in three acts” is a “secular spiritual” which takes place on the streets of Compton, a neighborhood in South Central L.A. that is emblematic of the postindustrial urban space from which hip-hop, as a cultural movement and form of critical discourse, emerged. GKMC is a consummate new-school appropriation of an old-school hip-hop form: the narrative. A veritable hip-hop bildungsroman, it tells in twelve tracks the tale of a young man, who navigates the rugged territory of an urbanscape riddled with violence. Throughout Lamar engages in conversation with his own psyche to strategically remap the American landscape[1] and thereby offer insight into an experience specific to life in a postindustrial city.
Lamar’s is a confessional narrative that begins with the musty recording of male voices offering a prayer of supplication: “Lord God, I come to you a sinner and I humbly repent for my sins. I believe that Jesus is Lord. […] I receive Jesus to take control of my life and that I may live for him from this day forth. Thank you Lord Jesus for saving me with your precious blood. In Jesus name, Amen.” It is with this invocation of God’s mercy that Lamar tells “a true mothafuckin’ story” full of sexual intrigue (e.g., “Sherane, a.k.a. Master Splinter’s Daughter” and “Poetic Justice”); hedonist fantasy (e.g., “Backseat Freestyle”); criminal activity (“The Art of Peer Pressure” and “Money Trees”); teenage antics (“Swimming Pool [Drank]”); social commentary on the nature of L.A. gang violence (“Good Kid” and “m.A.A.d. City”); hood representin(g) (“Compton”); hip-hop bravado (“Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe”) and existential self-reflection (“Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and “Real”).
Songs that bear close attention within the scope of this blog series and in light of what they bring to bear on the stated topic are “Good Kid,” “m.A.A.d. City,” and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.” They are culled from the second half of the album, which, as the full, artist-verified annotations of the LP reveal at rapgenius.com—indispensable to the interpretive work I do below, where I sample insights offered through the website, and to which I am indebted for aiding me in deciphering some of Lamar’s more coded language and in establishing the LP’s narrative context—deals explicitly with the “secular spiritual” theme of self-realization and the difficulties of negotiating life in a violent culture.
The Good Kid in a Mad City
In “Good Kid” Lamar speaks to the sense of being trapped, bound in by gang violence on one side and police brutality on the other. The hood is a pressure cooker and suicide, the safety valve: “I got animosity building / It’s probably big as a building / Me jumping off the roof is me just playing it safe.” Alluding to the colors of the L.A. gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, as well as to police car strobe lights, he asks in the first verse: “But what am I supposed to do / When the topic is red or blue?” Lamar then recalls an instance of being jumped by some gang members:
Just a couple that look for trouble
And live in the street with rank
No better picture to paint than me walking from bible study
And called his homies because he had said he noticed my face
From a function that tooken place
They was wondering if I bang
Step on my neck and get blood on your Nike checks
Despite being trapped inside a figurative prison and against the temptation to kill himself or run away, he turns to hip-hop as a source of empowerment, claiming that one day these “homies” will “respect.”
If Lamar was jumped for being innocent in the previous account (verse one), then he is jumped for being guilty in the second (verse two) in which he describes an instance of being profiled by the police. While recognizing the importance of police in light of the gang violence on the streets, he engages them in their contradictions:
I can never pick out the difference and grade a cop on the bill / Every time you clock in the morning, I feel you just want to kill / All my innocence while ignoring my purpose to persevere as a better person / I know you heard this and probably in fear / But what am I supposed to do with the blinking of red and blue / Flash from the top of your roof and your dog has to say woof / And you ask, “Lift up your shirt” cause you wonder if a tattoo / Of affiliation can make it a pleasure to put me through / Gang files, but that don’t matter because the matter is racial profile
Blinded by fear, the police cannot see past their own prejudice. As a result of their racism, Lamar’s body is objectified, automatically assumed to be branded with a mark of gang affiliation. In light of this, Lamar can’t “pick out the difference” between good or bad cop. And unlike the gang members who jumped him in the first verse, these officers will only ever see him as a “black thug” and “never respect the good kid, m.A.A.d. city.”
Rapping from the margins of a society tripped out on paranoid hallucinations that stem from an experience of being systematically dispossessed, Lamar concludes his rap by admitting “it’s entirely stressful upon my brain.” Quietly hoping for change, he confesses to the temptation of numbing the existential hurt with “grown-up candy for pain”: the oft-overused antidepressant Xanax and psilocybin “magic” (mu)shrooms. He then closes on a note of triumph: “The streets sure to release the worst side of my best / Don’t mind, cause now you ever in debt to good kid, m.A.A.d. city.”
This segues into a song of dramatic self-assertion, “m.A.A.d. City,” that recalls memories of witnessing brutal violence as a means of protesting gang lifestyle. The song is prefaced by the intro: “If Pirus and Crips all got along / They’d probably gun me down by the end of this song / Seem like the whole city go against me.”
He thus indicates to his listeners that the message he’s soon to deliver renders, or will render, him a common enemy of the Crips and the Bloods. In this way, he plays the role of scapegoat and an ironic sort of peacemaker. “Compton’s human sacrifice,” he reconciles differences by dint of his heroic willingness to refuse participation in gang life.
With the Schoolboy Q-intoned onomatopoeia of gunshot blasts, “YAWK! YAWK! YAWK!,” Lamar sets the tenor for a “trip down memory lane” with the help of guest rapper MC Eiht, who appropriates gang-speak in order to claim ownership of the city: “Man down / Where you from, nigga? / Fuck who you know, where you from, my nigga? / This m.a.a.d. city I run my nigga.”
From there Lamar narrates a story about riding down Rosecrans Avenue—one of the major through-streets of Compton and a signifier of gang territory, as well as the “memory lane” to which he refers in the first bar of the verse. Using his memory as his figurative vehicle for navigation, he takes his listener through a dystopian wasteland where pictures of a traumatic past pass by like scenery outside of car windows. He thus recalls witnessing “a light-skinned nigga with his brains blown out” at the tender age of nine. He also speaks to the death of his cousin in 1994 as the result of a broken truce between the Bloods and the Crips. Lamar admits that with “Pakistan on every porch,” the inhabitants of Compton adapt to crime by becoming criminals themselves: “Pickin’ up the fuckin’ pump / Pickin’ off you suckers, suck a dick or die a sucker punch.”
Lamar thus lives in a “dog-eat-dog” world caught up in a vicious cycle of violence and drug-trafficking. There is no peace, as Lamar says, “just pieces” (read guns) and disposable “bodies on top of bodies” about which those with political power could care less. Lamenting the government’s failure to provide assistance to disenfranchised urban communities such as Compton, Lamar raps: “They say the governor collect, all our taxes except / When we in traffic and tragic happens, that shit ain’t no threat / You movin’ backwards if you suggest that you sleep with a Tec / Go buy a chopper and have a doctor on speed dial, I guess / m.a.a.d. City.”
In saying that “You movin’ backwards” if you sleep with a Tec (read gun), Lamar is essentially offering the moral adage: “He who lives by the sword (read gun), dies by the sword.”
MC Eiht intones the second verse, readying the listener for “some lessons about the street” that are specific to growing up in Compton: “It ain’t nothin’ but a Compton thang.” This leads to an account in which Lamar raps about being fired from a job as a result of succumbing to pressure from his peers to stage a robbery. He did so in a drug-induced haze wrought by smoking a blunt laced with cocaine that had him “foaming at the mouth.” MC Eiht further contextualizes the account with signifiers of hood-life and metonyms of hyper-masculine manhood—“IV’s” (i.e. handguns), “bird” (i.e. crack cocaine), “whip” (i.e. car) and “a strap in the hand” (i.e. handgun)—that call attention to the dangers of living life in Compton, and the ease with which one can slip into a criminal lifestyle: “The hood took me under so I follow the rules.”
In the final verse, Lamar challenges his audience with the question, “If I killed a nigga at the age of 16, would you believe me?” Implying that he is no innocent bystander to the violence he has heretofore described, Lamar poses the question as a means of absolving the sins of his past—of “mashing all my skeletons”—so that others may learn from his mistakes and thereby fulfill “dreams of being a lawyer or doctor / Instead of a boy with a chopper [i.e. gun] that hold the cul de sac [i.e. neighborhood or, more symbolically, a “dead-end” life] hostage.” By telling his story and thus confessing his sins, Lamar is making an agency claim and an expression of freedom to be a somebody where he was once a nobody.
As though the biblical prophet Jonah once swallowed by a whale before delivering his prophetic message to Nineveh, Lamar delivers his own message of sin and redemption live and direct from the “belly of the rough Compton, U.S.A.” A self-proclaimed “Angel on Angel Dust,” Lamar is one who has gained a hard-earned wisdom through his experience; he is one who has learned what it means to live righteously by dint of his own flirtations with unrighteous behavior, and life as it’s lived on the streets of a “m.a.a.d. city.”
Lamar further explores the complexity of life on the streets in a two-part composition, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.” In the first verse of “Sing About Me,” Lamar takes on the persona of a Piru Blood gang member mourning the loss of his brother to a gunfight. Addressing Lamar as though a friend, he thanks the rapper for cradling his brother during his dying moments. In this way, Lamar enters empathically into the thug’s psyche as a means to reveal that even “thugs” have heart. Not only that, but they are acutely aware of their own predicament. A child of his environment, the gang member admits:
I’m behind on what’s really important
My mind is really distorted
I find nothing but trouble in my life
I’m fortunate you believe in a dream
This orphanage we call a ghetto is quite a routine[…]
Everybody’s a victim in my eyes
When I ride it’s a murderous rhythm
And outside became pitch black
A demon glued to my back whispering, “Get em”
I got ‘em, and I ain’t give a fuck
A self-proclaimed “dumb nigga” who will never prosper, this thug diagnoses himself as a “problem child,” asserts his loyalty to his Piru crew in the absence of an actual family, and then asks Lamar to tell his story should he die before the album “drop.” By way of empathy, Lamar explores the psychology of ghetto fatalism (what Cornel West in Race Matters [1994] would call “black nihilism”), internalized racism, and gang violence to suggest that these social diseases are symptomatic of a deeper ill: the break-up of the community and the family in light of racialized oppression. Hence: “This orphanage we call a ghetto is quite routine.” In this kind of shiftless environment, membership in a gang provides access to group-identity in the absence of family. Even without family, however, love finds a way, as in the last bar of verse one in which the gangbanger confesses to Lamar: “I love you cause you love my brother like you did.”
In verse two Lamar adopts the persona of a female prostitute, who is upset with Lamar for rapping about her sister in “Keisha’s Song,” off of his first album, Section .80. Inspired by Tupac Shakur’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby” off of 2Pacalypse Now, “Keisha’s Song” tells a story of a young prostitute who was raped and slain. The female subject of “Sing About Me” reproaches Lamar on the charge that he unfairly judged her slain sister on the Section .80 track. She then goes on to describe the lifestyle of a prostitute through her own eyes. In the same manner of self-awareness as that of the male gangbanger in the first verse, she tells Lamar:
This is the life of another girl damaged by the system
These foster homes, I run away and never do miss ‘em
See, my hormones just run away and if I can get ‘em back
To where they used to be then I’ll probably be in the denim
Of a family gene that show women how to be woman, or better yet a leader
You need her to learn something, then you probably need to beat her
That’s how I was taughtThree niggas in one room, first time I was tossed
And I’m exhausted
Having grown up an orphan who lost her virginity to three gangbangers, she longs for the chance to relive a childhood in a family situation free from the domestic abuse on which she was reared. Again, Lamar plays on the trope of family, suggesting that the “system”—i.e. the government or, perhaps, the welfare system—has been set up only to tear families apart. It signifies a social structure rendered ineffective in the lives of society’s most disenfranchised, in no small part due to their status as racial minorities, who have to hustle just to get by. The verse closes with her threat that Lamar better not make a song about her because there is no story to tell. She feels physically great and if Lamar wants to help her, then he should “sell her pussy.” Locked into a system of economic exchange based on the exploitation of her body and her sexuality, she fatalistically resigns herself to her lot as a sexual escort: “I’m on the grind for this cake.”
Lamar comes back into his own voice in the third verse to offer a “lesson before dying”[2] in which he speculates on his life’s purpose: to tell the aforementioned stories and others like them. Hip-hop is his reason for being alive and his most available resource for engaging with the reality of death and life on the streets. There is no time to sleep when there are lessons to learn and teach. Addressing the two subjects of the previous verses, he raps:
And you’re right, your brother was a brother to me
And your sister’s situation was the one that put me
In a direction to speak of something that’s realer than the TV screen
By any means, wasn’t trying to offend or come between
Her personal life, I was like “it need to be told
Cursing the life of 20 generations after her” so
Exactly what would have happened if I hadn’t continued rappin’
Or steady being distracted by money drugs and four
Fives, I count lives all on these songs
Look at the weak and cry, pray one day you’ll be strong
Fighting for your rights, even when you’re wrong
And hope that at least one of you sing about me when I’m gone
Now am I worth it?
Did I put enough work in?
These are existential questions par excellence, and they inform the underlying motivation for Lamar’s album: to make something worthy of his life through the cultural work of hip-hop. His work as a rap artist is a way not only to immortalize himself, but to affirm himself as a gifted storyteller who has something important to offer the world. Moreover, his “mighty powerful” tongue allows him to “fight for your rights, even when you’re wrong.” It also enables him to reorder reality and deconstruct the Debordian “spectacle” and thereby “speak of something that’s realer than the TV screen.” Indeed, it is his way of confronting reality, of no longer running from it by resorting to illicit activity.
On that note, “Sing About Me” transitions into “I’m Dying of Thirst,” which plays on the trope of spiritual dehydration that runs like a stream through the entire album. Implying that his community of peers is attempting to satisfy its desire for wealth and security in all the wrong ways, he asks:
What are we doing?
Who are we fooling?
Hell is hot, fire is proven
To burn for eternity, return of the student
That never learned how to live right just by how to shoot it
[…]
It’s no discussion, hereditary
All of my cousins
Dying of thirst
Dying of thirst
Dying of thirst
Lamar here equates the culture of violence to a figurative hell while also reminding his listeners that those who play with fire are sure to be burned. He also signifies on the hell of religious imagination to which all those who have not reconciled for their sins are banished for eternity. Those living a life of violence are thus doomed to a hell of their own making. Lamar then admits that violence is in his blood: “It’s no discussion, hereditary / All of my cousins / Dying of thirst.” A product of his environment like his cousins, he is just as liable as they are to a doomed fate.
The track ends with the voice of an older woman (played by Maya Angelou), who is taken to be one of Lamar’s neighbors. She rebukes him and his friends for carrying a handgun: “I know that’s not what I think that is! Why are you so angry?! You young men are dying of thirst! Do you know what that means? That means, you need water, holy water! You need to be baptized with the spirit of the Lord!” She then leads them in the same confessional prayer that opens the entire album, bringing GKMC to near close in the manner of a spiritual.
With this act of contrition, Lamar effectively achieves his transformation into realness, a sense of spiritual wholeness initiated by the figurative baptism he undergoes at the end of “I’m Tired of Running.” It is this re-birth that completes the narrative arc of the “short film” and leads him into “Real”—a testimony to the fact that love saves. Not, echoing music critic Jayson Greene, love of money, power, respect, or the block—as “none of that shit make me real”—but love of Self. That is the only kind of love which will satiate the hunger and quench the thirst that had him running aimlessly toward a doomed fate. It is a disarming love, one that can help the world take off the masks “we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”[3] It is as though Lamar is positing to the human community the same message Baldwin proffers to his nephew in The Fire Next Time: “Well, you were born, here you came […]: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”[4]
The song ends in a similar vein as Baldwin’s familial address with a recording of two separate voicemails—one from his father, one from his mother—that bring the narrative to a triumphant end. His father, offering his consolation to Lamar in light of his friend’s death by a bullet wound, exclaims: “Any nigga can kill a man, that don’t make you a real nigga. Real is responsibility. Real is taking care of your motherfucking family.” As for his mother’s sage wisdom: “If I don’t hear from you by tomorrow, I hope you come back and learn from your mistakes. Come back a man… Tell your story to these black and brown kids in Compton… When you do make it, give back with your words of encouragement. And that’s the best way to give back to your city. And I love you, Kendrick.” As Greene notes, Lamar foregrounds the themes of faith and family that not only tie the album’s songs together, but function as the “fraying tethers holding Lamar back from the chasm of gang violence that threatens to consume him.”[5] In the end, again sampling Greene, the album gives witness to Lamar’s love for his family[6] and serves as an achievement of what his mother encouraged him to do: give back.
The album closes with a tribute to his hood in, “Compton,” which begins with the triumphal bar: “Now everybody serenade the new faith of Kendrick Lamar.” A self-proclaimed philosopher-king, Lamar has transitioned from rags to royalty in attaining the riches of freedom understood as self-respect, self-realization, and self-consciousness. Lamar does so through the art of “secular spiritual” storytelling, so central to black expressive culture and a means by which he rapper/minister/street prophet engages the African-American struggle for existential and social freedom.
[1] Here, I am riffing on Kevin Young in his discussion of the spirituals in The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2012), 81.
[2] A reference I make intentionally to a novel of similar import as Lamar’s LP: Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying (New York: Vintage, 1993).
[3] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell, 1963), 128.
[4] Ibid., 17.
[5] Jayson Greene, review of good kid, m.A.A.d. City: A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar, by Kendrick Lamar, Pitchfork Media, October 23, 2012, http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17253-good-kid-maad-city/ (accessed December 2012).
[6] Made more apparent by the album art, full of old family photos.
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