K Dot Reincarnated: Trapping Evil In Truth
“What is a poem, but the blood of a wound? When we create we are either bleeding, or trying to clean what blood has been spilled.”
Storytelling, in rap, is a method of exposing the perpetrators behind our wounds and hauntings. No matter how much time has crept between the moment a soul is scarred and its day of deliverance, a testimony of the journey from wreckage to redemption ineluctably tethers a villain to the tale. Whoever’s name is etched into your deepest pain or greatest sorrows is bound to your poetry, what I believe is sometimes the voice of a wound. What binds them is their relationship to the wound and its blood. Truth-telling is looking at wounds on our bodies, the unaddressed wounds of history and those of our ancestors, to discover the story of those wounds and the names written on them.
Storytelling traps evil, demons, and the wicked within the tight grip of truth. And lies cannot hold us the way truth does. Lies will drop, fail, and abandon us on paths to false possibilities. Even if the ruggedness of truth’s palms scrapes us, it is only for a moment, however long that moment lasts. My desire to see healing for my friends, our mothers, and our kin will only be fulfilled through fleshing out the tales stuck to their bones and between their teeth.
The stories they’ve kept tucked over the years in fear of having to reorganize relationships and family structures that secrets break out and unsettle. Rap music, in all its vulgarity and grimness, has been a blueprint for running through society’s and even family’s faces with truth, regardless of whose jaw it breaks or lip it busts. Kendrick Lamar developed a successful rap career by crafting portraits of his past, clenching the necks of villains, and keeping a finger on Compton’s pulse by giving artistic shape to stories of house raids, police brutality, and forgone plans of robbing a Church’s chicken.
Exposing the heroes and crooks in his past was his means of offering freedom to himself and his family, as he confesses in “Mother I Sober,” the emotion-filled track in 2022’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.
Exposing anything drags to light what’s made darkness a sanctum. In Kendrick Lamar's music, Compton's tales and vividly detailed accounts of his experiences, over time, unravel his faith and burgeoning relationship with God.
The presence of biblical and Hebraic symbols and motifs is an entry point for probing Lamar’s religious affiliation and consciousness to explore his convictions and curiosities. In his 2015 jazz-infused project, To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick weaves biblical images and emblems, hood-blended Black Panther rhetoric, and a theme of pilgrimage, which all land him in a conversation with Tupac on the outro track, Mortal Man.
Kendrick’s music has always been a poetically religious response to America’s political and social turmoil—turmoil evident in Compton’s troubles. Throughout the album, he juxtaposes America's capitalism with the entertainment industry's offerings, stitching songs like “For Free” and “For Sale,”“
Ultimately, Kendrick’s talent, which brought him to face his riches, conflicts with the anxiety he likely had around reaching the apex of his rap dreams, where Satan awaited him. This dilemma is reflected in For Sale, “What’s wrong n***a, I thought you was keeping it gangsta? I thought this was what you wanted? They say if you scared go to church, but remember, he knows the Bible too.” As Lamar’s life and success progress, Lucifer's or “Lucy’s” voice is more evident and interrogative as he recalls, “You said to me, you said… Then you spit a little rap to me like this; when I turned twenty-six, I was like, "Oh shit," You said to me, I remember what you said too, you said, ‘My name is Lucy, Kendrick. You introduced me, Kendrick. Usually I don't do this. But I see you and me, Kendrick.’“
Lamar renders his talent-driven life as a vessel through which the world witnesses God and Lucifer contesting for influence over Black musical traditions and moral agency. He rebukes and exposes the industry as an extortioner functioning under the influence of Satan. Reincarnated further fleshes out this story. But there is an interesting and spectral link between what Lamar does on GNX that points us back to and is inspired by For Sale, a song from nine years earlier.
For Sale can be interpreted as the initial contact between Kendrick and Lucifer early in his career, when he was caught, as a child, holding dreams and aspirations ripe for manipulation and demonic tampering. Reincarnated, then, told almost a decade later, depicts Lamar having thoroughly studied the patterns of Satan and evil at work in the entertainment industry and the legacy of Black musicians whose lives withered within their journey to musical success.
Kendrick tracks the path of Lucifer, learns his patterns, and slows his rhythms by exposing them in his rap. Dot has found ways to retell scripture, using his life and troubles. In re-penning sacred tales, he believes he is rewriting the Devil’s story and disabusing Black artists of Lucy’s power by wielding him as a character in their narratives. In this frame of thought, the bible is Dot’s backdrop for reworking the story of Black artists and exposing the face of the Devil. Lamar’s storytelling helped him evade tricks that would place him in tension with who Compton, his family, and homies need him to become.
As well as this, Lamar has regrounded himself amid fame through homespun parables told through stories of run-ins with unhoused folks back home, his mother’s voice at the end of GKMC encouraging him, “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. Let 'em know you was just like them, but you still rose from that dark place of violence. Becoming a positive person.” With reincarnated situating the voice of Satan, Lamar, Tupac, and two more Black artists in the same conversation, we will see where he reclaims artistic power to drift out of the haunted trajectory and legacy he has found himself in.
Told by: Kwon
