Scarred Homes: Kendrick’s Righteous Groanings
“Christ crucified. Pens dipped in angel tears. Painting with blood. The hood has eyes”
The arch of Kendrick Lamar’s career bends toward his fight to remain righteous in an industry whose politics are irreconcilable with integrity and rectitude. An industry that begs for his artistry yet risks being stripped of its veneer whenever he speaks. Less than a minute into “wacced out murals,” the opening project of his recent project, GNX, Kendrick raps, “It used to be fuck that nigga, but now it’s plural. Fuck everybody. That’s on my body.”
Since a long-awaited exchange back in May with fellow rap industry titan Drake, Lamar’s vitriol has reignited as he’s struck blows to the structure of the rap industry while simultaneously recalibrating rap’s expectations. Lamar postures Drake as an earmark for the industry’s depravity and an enemy who parades in a cloth Dot has stitched himself into.
Kendrick reorients the rap game when we believe it’s drifted too far from its center. His disdain for fame has fastened mystique and enigma to his “boogeyman” persona and further widened the distance between himself and the public. Later, during the opening track, Lamar raps, “I pay homage, and I always mind my business. I never lost who I am for a rap image.” Even given how demanding fans are of his presence, he seems to move on time outside of this temporal space we occupy where artists are readily accessible, and content is cyclical.
Kendrick’s music has been consistently reflective, narrative, and condemnatory, from 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, to his unanticipated release last Friday, GNX. Parable-like stories and anecdotes signify his grievances and love-hate relationship with American capitalism and politics, industry sins and pleasures, and love for his hood. Lamar has stamped his art with his West Coast identity. More than this, his survivor’s guilt is an unsettling theme in his music.
One can hear Dot lamenting LA’s troubles, dead flesh and bullets, and friends who’ve fallen victim to a life he escaped are all wounds in Compton for which his absence is to blame. In The Heart Pt 5, he mournfully references “Water in between us” as he highlights his distant locality when Nipsey Hussle was killed in 2019. There is tension between saving home and escaping it, between healing the sickness in something that almost killed you. Death and distance are both possibilities.
Kendrick’s music reveals an attempt to recoup Compton for everything corrupted politics snatched from it and reflects on the city’s moral deterioration that picked at his innocence. In doing so, he makes an indictment against the music industry as a microcosm of America’s debauched landscape and other artists who’ve subjected themselves to its expectations. Righteous groanings. Since To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, with songs like “For Free?” and “For Sale?”
Dot has openly denounced America’s commercialism and Satan’s desire to entrap him with riches. He raps as one who’s unburdened himself through confession and is now, in his new freedom, on the warpath to reap judgment on everything that threatened his commitment to truth-telling and being a model for Compton.
2017’s DAMN was a folk-tale-ish and chilling prophecy of America’s judgment lingering as eternity closes the distance. An album heavily laced with Black Isrealitic symbols and imagery. But he also wrestles with his fragility and contradictory life rhythms while attempting to grasp what is beyond himself through cyclical storytelling that usually ends with his demise. 2022’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is a public display of Kendrick turning inward to purge himself of the worst parts of Compton and seizing secrets that have survived for generations. Secrets no one dared expose because people kill and get killed over secrets.
There are moments in GNX when Kendrick celebrates his commitment to Compton and ability to remain grounded, like in “man at the garden,” when he raps, “did it all with integrity. And niggas try and hate on me.” Adjacent to this track is “Reincarnated,” a sampling of Tupac’s “Made N****z.” Lamar channels the spirit of the deceased Pac, rapping with the same cadence and inflection of his predecessor, allegedly from the perspective of John Lee Hooker and Billie Holiday, two black entertainers who, throughout their careers, allowed fame to taint their spirits. He has a heightened awareness of the degenerate aspects of the industry and how they erode an artist’s moral frame.
In his music, Kendrick Lamar bears his imperiled values, dead friends, and everything about Compton. In his body and voice, he holds stories he promised to keep and principles that made him who he is.
What happens to a home when we leave? What happens to a wound when the healing component is removed from it? If Compton is the wound, Kendrick’s voice, talent, and storytelling have been his means of remaining within the wound. Telling stories about Compton is how he keeps his hand on its pulse. With the Juneteenth Ken and Friends, Pop Out show earlier this year, and GNX, which seems to be an album representation of the moment which LA united under sound and performance, both could be Dot’s efforts to tend to his wounded home.
Told by: Kwon
