Is Kendrick Lamar also knocking on Nobel’s door? Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar

Stanely Mushava Literature Today
KENDRICK LAMAR, the most lethal warhead in rap’s disruptive echo chamber, is ever blazing new territory.

He has ego-tripped on Uncle Sam’s toes, emerged as the Pope in a genre not known for its Bible-thumbing, outfoxed Rupert Murdoch’s 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’s highest rated musician, according to Metacritic, a website aggregating critical reception across genres.

As if the musical kingdom is not enough, 29-year old Kung Fu Kenny’s unsettling jeremiads are coming up for consideration among the generation’s 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 album “To Pimp a Butterfly”.

This year, “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’s novel, “Finnegans Wake”, with the outro of the thematically sequenced record feeding seamlessly into the opening, but the more Joycean tendency of Kendrick’s work is its modernist drift.

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year – 103 years after another songwriter, Rabindranath Tagore, was awarded the flagship accolade for the written word – 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’s position atop the creative scheme of things, it is interesting to ask whether he is also knocking on Nobel’s door. The crucial parallel is how ideology bleeds into artistry, politics into pop sensibility.

Responding to the “Black Dylan” designation on the eve of “good kid m.A.A.d city”, Kendrick spelt out his work ethic to MTV: “I always said, ‘If I’m going to do this, I’m going to say something. I’m not going to just rap a bunch of verses. That was Dylan. He’s 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.”

From spirited responses to police brutality and gang violence like “Alright”, “The Blacker the Berry” and “Sing About Me”, and black self-love anthems like “i” and “Complexion (Zulu Love)”, to coming-of-age stories like “Fear”, “Cartoons and Cereal” and “Money Trees”, Kendrick’s literary mantle stretches to the floor.

His black heritage overtly runs the thread of his work from philosophical manifestos like “HiiiPOWER” to ear candy braggadocio like “King Kunta”. 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 “The Blacker the Berry”: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street when gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!” misses a core element of Kendrick’s workflow, the vulnerability and street intelligence overlapping static ideology, the willingness to question himself and his community.

Kendrick’s sense for immortality bleeds into aggression. He notoriously alerted 11 contemporaries by name – notably J. Cole, Pusha T, Drake and Big Sean – that they are not his league and he is out to annihilate them, in a guest verse on Big Sean’s 2013 “Control”.

While he places his name among the genre’s 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 “the 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.”

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. “I got a whole new perspective on life from going out there, it was refreshing,” 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’s “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 relevance: “With Kendrick’s album, you’ve got gang violence, you’ve got child-family development in the inner city, you’ve got drug use and the war on drugs, you’ve got sex slavery, human trafficking . . .” and credited hip-hop as “the more journalistic art form within pop culture”.

“What if people had said, we shouldn’t study Toni Morrison or Hemingway or Emily Dickinson because they’re too new? Everything was new or too popular or too risqué at the time, but I just think that great stories last and the story of ‘good kid, m.A.A.d city,’ is lasting.”

Kendrick’s 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’s 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.

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’s cussing marathons means he cannot qualify even as a doorkeeper at Jimmy Swaggart’s church.

Judith Peraino of Cornell University welcomes Nobel’s recognition of the artistry of written lyrics, and urges the Swedish Academy to look to hip-hop for its next laureate: “I look forward to the day when our finest rappers such as Kendrick Lamar receive their Nobel Prize for Literature,” she said.

Going by the Nobel tradition, decades of disruptive output may have to elapse before Makaveli’s self-installed heir gets the nod.

One of the interesting points of “DAMN.” is Kendrick’s sampling Fox talking heads on “Blood”, name-checking of Geraldo Rivera on “Yah” and tongue-lashing of the far-right Inquisition on “DNA”.

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, “we hate po po wanna kill us dead in the streets for show”, echoing farthest .

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.

Far from impressed, Fox’s Rivera tore in incredulously: “This is why I say hip-hop has done more damage to African-American youths than racism.” Kendrick responded on TMZ Live: “How can you take a song that’s about hope and turn it into hatred? The overall message is ‘we’re gonna be alright.’ It’s not the message of ‘I wanna kill people” but would wait till “DAMN” to lecture back elaborately.

“As far as Blackness is concerned, Kendrick’s growing militancy is the result of growing consciousness. Militancy is a natural reaction to a world that is out to kill you,” Mensah Demary writes on Lit Hub.

“Kendrick, 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, as well as to our secret fantasies of a world stripped of whiteness, an afro-future carved from crags as old as this nation fused with a Afrocentric present.”

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 the season he will still be the greatest.

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