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This long-standing relationship to subjectivity gives us a keen black eye for America’s undying love for black death.Įmbodying Nina Simone’s paranoia, Kendrick frames the multifaceted trauma of black death by dumbing his perspectives down to astrology.
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But skinfolk been having to deal with their subjugation since Plymouth Rock landed on us. In 2016, mainstream audiences couldn’t run away from the bloody reality of institutionalized black violence. Kendrick’s brilliance relies on his willingness to interrogate himself as both a political actor and a black arts leader. The differentiation that Kendrick makes between the races on this song is reductive - stereotypical, even - but the lessons he’s learned and rehashed about whiteness, power, and stolen freedom are worth the gripes.Īs much as the album breaks form - kicking in the door of established genre norms and throwing jazz and funk into the hip-hop gumbo - it’s even more about breaking out of a singular notion of cultural and political discourse. The white man in the song answers the black-ass concern of selling out by saying that it “don’t even matter,” speaking to not only the speaker's cultural obtuseness but his desire to reduce powerful black art to useless commodity.
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The black man, in this song, is painted as both lustful - “pussy is power” - and clear-eyed: “We do it all for a woman, from haircut to war.” But encountering whiteness, for Kendrick, meant giving up a part of himself or the fruits of his labor. In search of “peace of mind,” an unspecified “Asian” puts Kendrick on to the practice of meditation, because the rapper is “thinking too much” an equally vague “Indian” breaks Kendrick off on the importance of land equity, reminding him, “These tangible things expire / Don’t you expect income with so much outcome.” “Untitled 03 | ” articulates the paths by which knowledge is traded like trinkets from one perspective to another, echoing the Socratic model of discourse. The way he talks about and to whiteness illuminates the oppressive power dynamics that characterize not only the streets, but his own place in the music industry. Answers of a kind lie within Untitled Unmastered, where Kendrick (re)prophesied the untenable struggle between capitalism, otherness, and democratic discourse with clever precision. Today, as Trump’s racist regime takes form, many communities are facing the “how did we get here?” question. He was also forewarning us of 2016’s inevitable tumult. Not everyone heard it at the time, but Kendrick was drawing back the curtain on the various perspectives vying for speaking time within his own inner psyche. The new album put forth the most emphatic argument for how the making of the masterpiece is just as important as the final product - that the inner discourses, loose ends, and premonitions at the center of TPAB didn’t just spring up from nowhere. If TPAB matched the passionate disillusionment of today’s youthful protests, then Untitled Unmastered is the intimate backstory. At James’s behest, Lamar and his label, Top Dawg Entertainment, gifted the masses with Untitled Unmastered this March - an unexpected handful of unused song sketches from the magnum opus’s sessions, widening the scope of an already wide-angle vision. While we chewed on To Pimp a Butterfly’s brain-food smorgasbord, another king - LeBron James - starved for more music from Kendrick. Dot’s flippancy toward mainstream sensibility forced audiences to meet him right there in the black before he returned back to his reclusive state.Ī year passed. Yet the album stood alone, vast, more than the sum of its singles. In a year when it often seemed the only people screaming about the ills of negritude were the black youth protesting in city streets across the country, Kendrick matched their fervor the youth responded in kind by adopting “Alright” as the preeminent protest song of a generation. Originally published at MTV News on December 14, 2016