Kendrick Lamar, the most lethal warhead in rap\u2019s disruptive echo chamber, is ever blazing new territory.<\/p>\n
He has ego-tripped on Uncle Sam\u2019s toes, emerged as the Pope in a genre not known for its Bible-thumbing, outfoxed Rupert Murdoch\u2019s talking heads and jazzed up black self-love.<\/p>\n
If hip-hop is the CNN of the black community as Public Enemy hardcore rapper Chuck D puts it, then Kendrick is its Fareed Zakaria, the heavy-duty intellect in the room.<\/p>\n
The philosopher-king of hip-hop is currently the world\u2019s highest rated musician, according to Metacritic, a website aggregating critical reception across genres.<\/p>\n
As if the musical kingdom is not enough, 30-year old Kung Fu Kenny\u2019s unsettling jeremiads are coming up for consideration among the generation\u2019s most important literature.<\/p>\n
Kendrick has been installed into English courses, along with James Joyce, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and others, both for the novelistic ambience of his bildungsroman, good kid m.A.A.d city, and the prophetic energy of his major label sophomore To Pimp a Butterfly.<\/p>\n
In 2017, DAMN. flared up think pieces bent at parsing the political, psychological and theological strata underlying the record, and its introspective trajectory plays convincingly into the growing recognition of Kendrick as a serious poet.<\/p>\n
DAMN. is set to the cyclic notation of James Joyce\u2019s novel, Finnegans Wake, with the outro of the thematically sequenced record feeding seamlessly into the opening, but the more Joycean tendency of Kendrick\u2019s work is theUlyssean drift of good kid m.A.A.d city.<\/p>\n
When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 \u2013 103 years after another singer-songwriter, Rabindranath Tagore, was awarded the flagship accolade for the written word \u2013 gatekeepers cried out the Old Testament question: Is Saul also among the prophets?<\/p>\n
Permanent secretary for the Swedish Academy Sara Danius forestalled scepticism, comparing Dylan to Sappho and Homer whose songs were originally meant for performance rather than for print.<\/p>\n
Pop aficionados considered the recognition long overdue and called on the panel to extend its interest to other dial-shifting songwriters. Others specifically directed the Swedish Academy to emerging poets of black heritage in hip-hop.<\/p>\n
Kendrick, who has been called the Bob Dylan of this generation, immediately came up as a prospective laureate.<\/p>\n
The two streets poets closely compare, not just for the pictorial facility and hyperliterate allusiveness of their songs, but also their place as the foremost prophets of their generations.<\/p>\n
With DAMN. consolidating Kung Fu Kenny\u2019s position atop the creative scheme of things, it is interesting to ask whether he is also knocking on Nobel\u2019s door. The crucial parallel is how ideology bleeds into artistry, politics into pop sensibility.<\/p>\n
Responding to the \u201cBlack Dylan\u201d designation on the eve of good kid m.A.A.d city, Kendrick spelt out his work ethic to MTV: \u201cI always said, \u2018If I\u2019m going to do this, I\u2019m going to say something. I\u2019m not going to just rap a bunch of verses. That was Dylan. He\u2019s a legend and he said something. He voiced his opinion and the world gravitated towards it and I want to do that with my music.\u201d<\/p>\n
From spirited responses to police brutality and gang violence like \u201cAlright\u201d, \u201cThe Blacker the Berry\u201d and \u201cSing about Me\u201d, and black self-love anthems like \u201ci\u201d and \u201cComplexion (Zulu Love)\u201d, to coming-of-age stories like \u201cFear\u201d, \u201cCartoons and Cereal\u201d and \u201cMoney Trees\u201d, Kendrick\u2019s literary mantle stretches to the floor.<\/p>\n
His black heritage overtly runs the thread of his work from philosophical manifestos like \u201cHiiiPoWeR\u201d to ear candy braggadocio like \u201cKing Kunta\u201d. During the making of his 2015 album, Kendrick looked back to black icons like Tupac Shakur, Marcus Garvey, Huey Newton and Nelson Mandela for inspiration.<\/p>\n
But his work is more than strong-handed, name-checking black pride, set to an iron cast template. The controversy surrounding the closing lines of \u201cThe Blacker the Berry\u201d: \u201cSo why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street when gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!\u201d misses a core element of Kendrick\u2019s workflow, the vulnerability and street intelligence overlapping static ideology, the willingness to question himself and his community.<\/p>\n
Kendrick\u2019s sense for immortality bleeds into aggression. He notoriously alerted 11 contemporaries by name \u2013 notably J. Cole, Pusha T, Drake and Big Sean \u2013 that they are not his league and he is out to annihilate them, in a guest verse on Big Sean\u2019s 2013 \u201cControl\u201d.<\/p>\n
While he places his name among the genre\u2019s immortals, Nas, Pac and Eminem, in the ungenerous verse, his ambition overlaps hip-hop. Speaking on To Pimp a Butterfly, he said he wanted the album to be talked about \u201cthe way Bob Dylan or The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix are talked about. When my time has come on earth, I want it to live longer than me, for the grandkids and their kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
A reflective stop at Robben Island during his South African tour had a profound impact on him, while the people and places starkly contrasted the hellhole image of Africa he was fed in American classes. \u201cI got a whole new perspective on life from going out there, it was refreshing,\u201d he told NME.<\/p>\n
His controversial use of the word nigga is a post-NWA attempt to reclaim the word as a relic of black pride the way Kunta Kinteh, an image of weakness, trends royally on his single. He traces it to an Ethiopian root word capturing black royalty. Some have traced the yams on the funky single to Chinua Achebe\u2019s Things Fall Apart.<\/p>\n
Georgia Regents professor Adam Diehl told USA Today he had to pack a course around good kid m.A.A.d city because of its social currency: \u201cWith Kendrick\u2019s album, you\u2019ve got gang violence, you\u2019ve got child-family development in the inner city, you\u2019ve got drug use and the war on drugs, you\u2019ve got sex slavery, human trafficking . . .\u201d and credited hip-hop as \u201cthe more journalistic art form within pop culture\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat if people had said, we shouldn\u2019t study Toni Morrison or Hemingway or Emily Dickinson because they\u2019re too new? Everything was new or too popular or too risqu\u00e9 at the time, but I just think that great stories last and the story of good kid, m.A.A.d city, is lasting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kendrick\u2019s winding up as a Nobel laureate in the future is being deliberated in the highbrow circles of scholarship. Andrew Warnes of Leeds University worries that Kendrick\u2019s typically rap vices such as profanity and misogyny might stand in the way but cites Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner and T.S. Eliot as politically incorrect Nobel precedents.<\/p>\n
A strong case for cleaning up all the same, if Kendrick is to step up to the challenge of progress. While he may be the Pope of the rappers, K-Dot\u2019s cussing marathons means he cannot qualify even as a doorkeeper at Jimmy Swaggart\u2019s church.<\/p>\n
Judith Peraino of Cornell University welcomes Nobel\u2019s recognition of the artistry of written lyrics, and urges the Swedish Academy to look to hip-hop for its next laureate: \u201cI look forward to the day when our finest rappers such as Kendrick Lamar receive their Nobel Prize for Literature,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Going by the Nobel tradition, decades of disruptive output may have to elapse before Makaveli\u2019s self-installed heir gets the nod.<\/p>\n
One of the Twitter prompts of DAMN. was Kendrick\u2019s sampling Fox talking heads on \u201cBLOOD.\u201d, name-checking of Geraldo Rivera on \u201cYAH.\u201d and tongue-lashing of the far-right Inquisition on \u201cDNA\u201d.<\/p>\n
Kendrick performed at the 2015 BET Awards on top of a vandalised police car with a shredded American flag in the background, with the words, \u201cwe hate popo wanna kill us dead in the streets for sho\u201d, echoing farthest .<\/p>\n
The song morphed into an anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement, with elder philosophers like Cornell West finger-snapping Kendrick as a new generation of the black prophet fire.<\/p>\n
Far from impressed, Fox\u2019s Rivera tore in incredulously: \u201cThis is why I say hip-hop has done more damage to African-American youths than racism.\u201d Kendrick responded on TMZ: \u201cHow can you take a song that\u2019s about hope and turn it into hatred? The overall message is \u2018we\u2019re gonna be alright.\u2019 It\u2019s not the message of: \u2018I wanna kill people\u201d but would wait till DAMN. to lecture back elaborately<\/p>\n
\u201cAs far as Blackness is concerned, Kendrick\u2019s growing militancy is the result of growing consciousness. Militancy is a natural reaction to a world that is out to kill you,\u201d Mensah Demary writes on Lit Hub.<\/p>\n
\u201cKendrick, much like Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane before him, has found a way to give sound to our secret fears of annihilation and dread in the face of never-ending hatred toward our skin colour…\u201d<\/p>\n
Whether Kung Fu Kenny is foreordained to the dynasty of Nobel laureates, time will tell. But where lyrical potency is concerned, even if he quits this season he may still be rap\u2019s greatest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kendrick Lamar, the most lethal warhead in rap\u2019s disruptive echo chamber, is ever blazing new territory. He has ego-tripped on Uncle Sam\u2019s toes, emerged as the Pope in a genre not known for its Bible-thumbing, outfoxed Rupert Murdoch\u2019s talking heads and jazzed up black self-love. If hip-hop is the CNN of the black community as Public Enemy hardcore rapper Chuck D puts it, then Kendrick is its Fareed Zakaria, the heavy-duty intellect in the room. The philosopher-king of hip-hop is currently the world\u2019s highest rated musician, according to Metacritic, a website aggregating critical reception across genres. As if the musical kingdom is not enough, 30-year old Kung Fu Kenny\u2019s unsettling jeremiads are coming up for consideration among the generation\u2019s most important literature. Kendrick has been installed into English courses, along with James Joyce, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and others, both for the novelistic ambience of his bildungsroman, good kid m.A.A.d city, and the prophetic energy of his major label sophomore To Pimp a Butterfly. In 2017, DAMN. flared up think pieces bent at parsing the political, psychological and theological strata underlying the record, and its introspective trajectory plays convincingly into the growing recognition of Kendrick as a serious poet. DAMN. is set to the cyclic notation of James Joyce\u2019s novel, Finnegans Wake, with the outro of the thematically sequenced record feeding seamlessly into the opening, but the more Joycean tendency of Kendrick\u2019s work is theUlyssean drift of good kid m.A.A.d city. When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 \u2013 103 years after another singer-songwriter, Rabindranath Tagore, was awarded the flagship accolade for the written word \u2013 gatekeepers cried out the Old Testament question: Is Saul also among the prophets? Permanent secretary for the Swedish Academy Sara Danius forestalled scepticism, comparing Dylan to Sappho and Homer whose songs were originally meant for performance rather than for print. Pop aficionados considered the recognition long overdue and called on the panel to extend its interest to other dial-shifting songwriters. Others specifically directed the Swedish Academy to emerging poets of black heritage in hip-hop. Kendrick, who has been called the Bob Dylan of this generation, immediately came up as a prospective laureate. The two streets poets closely compare, not just for the pictorial facility and hyperliterate allusiveness of their songs, but also their place as the foremost prophets of their generations. With DAMN. consolidating Kung Fu Kenny\u2019s position atop the creative scheme of things, it is interesting to ask whether he is also knocking on Nobel\u2019s door. The crucial parallel is how ideology bleeds into artistry, politics into pop sensibility. Responding to the \u201cBlack Dylan\u201d designation on the eve of good kid m.A.A.d city, Kendrick spelt out his work ethic to MTV: \u201cI always said, \u2018If I\u2019m going to do this, I\u2019m going to say something. I\u2019m not going to just rap a bunch of verses. That was Dylan. He\u2019s a legend and he said something. He voiced his opinion and the world gravitated towards it and I want to do that with my music.\u201d From spirited responses to police brutality and gang violence like \u201cAlright\u201d, \u201cThe Blacker the Berry\u201d and \u201cSing about Me\u201d, and black self-love anthems like \u201ci\u201d and \u201cComplexion (Zulu Love)\u201d, to coming-of-age stories like \u201cFear\u201d, \u201cCartoons and Cereal\u201d and \u201cMoney Trees\u201d, Kendrick\u2019s literary mantle stretches to the floor. His black heritage overtly runs the thread of his work from philosophical manifestos like \u201cHiiiPoWeR\u201d to ear candy braggadocio like \u201cKing Kunta\u201d. During the making of his 2015 album, Kendrick looked back to black icons like Tupac Shakur, Marcus Garvey, Huey Newton and Nelson Mandela for inspiration. But his work is more than strong-handed, name-checking black pride, set to an iron cast template. The controversy surrounding the closing lines of \u201cThe Blacker the Berry\u201d: \u201cSo why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street when gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!\u201d misses a core element of Kendrick\u2019s workflow, the vulnerability and street intelligence overlapping static ideology, the willingness to question himself and his community. Kendrick\u2019s sense for immortality bleeds into aggression. He notoriously alerted 11 contemporaries by name \u2013 notably J. Cole, Pusha T, Drake and Big Sean \u2013 that they are not his league and he is out to annihilate them, in a guest verse on Big Sean\u2019s 2013 \u201cControl\u201d. While he places his name among the genre\u2019s immortals, Nas, Pac and Eminem, in the ungenerous verse, his ambition overlaps hip-hop. Speaking on To Pimp a Butterfly, he said he wanted the album to be talked about \u201cthe way Bob Dylan or The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix are talked about. When my time has come on earth, I want it to live longer than me, for the grandkids and their kids.\u201d A reflective stop at Robben Island during his South African tour had a profound impact on him, while the people and places starkly contrasted the hellhole image of Africa he was fed in American classes. \u201cI got a whole new perspective on life from going out there, it was refreshing,\u201d he told NME. His controversial use of the word nigga is a post-NWA attempt to reclaim the word as a relic of black pride the way Kunta Kinteh, an image of weakness, trends royally on his single. He traces it to an Ethiopian root word capturing black royalty. Some have traced the yams on the funky single to Chinua Achebe\u2019s Things Fall Apart. Georgia Regents professor Adam Diehl told USA Today he had to pack a course around good kid m.A.A.d city because of its social currency: \u201cWith Kendrick\u2019s album, you\u2019ve got gang violence, you\u2019ve got child-family development in the inner city, you\u2019ve got drug use and the war on drugs, you\u2019ve got sex slavery, human trafficking . . .\u201d and credited hip-hop as \u201cthe more journalistic art form within pop culture\u201d. \u201cWhat if people had said, we shouldn\u2019t study Toni Morrison or Hemingway or Emily Dickinson because they\u2019re too new? Everything was new or too popular or<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":163,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-side-effects"],"yoast_head":"\n