The other day, I had a friend tell me hip hop was deep. I laughed — the hip-hop jams I had heard up until that point had dwelled in the shallower parts of the puddle. I mean, yeah, I’ll dance to the stuff (the bass is popping, quite frankly). But am I beckoned by some hidden form of intellectual insight? Mm, nope.
You can’t blame me — my hip-hop listenings are, quite honestly, few and far between. Neither Lil Wayne’s “she lick me like a lollipop” or Sage the Gemini’s “wiggle like you trying to make your ass fall off” leave much to think about. That was hip hop for me: “pussy on my mind” and “ganja in my sweat glands.” Pumping, thumping, sensual and shallow.
And then I heard Kendrick Lamar.
The first song I listened to from To Pimp a Butterfly was “i.” It starts off with a magical texture — light guitar over intricate rhythms. “I done been through a whole lot,” Lamar dives in. “Trials, tribulations, but I know God.” The words are genuine, spoken with hope for the future. Electric guitar wails out over the mix; I feel it deep inside me, happy and free.
“And I love myself.”
Intricate rhythms leap as the chorus unfolds. The song is rapping, tapping in my ear drums with an irrevocable fervency that shakes in your bones.
“I love myself.”
Lamar speaks again, and I breathe in the words. It’s a contagious sense of movement, of vitality.
“I love myself.”
Lamar declares a third time. It’s drums, guitar, and confident, absolute self-acceptance — and it’s beautiful.
But beneath the lightheartedness, I hear something else. “Life is more than suicide,” the rapper spits in the chorus. The guitar and tapping percussion continue. “The world is a ghetto with big guns and picket signs,” Lamar raps. It floats out of smiling rhythms and strums, and I hear it: pain. Pure and brazen, lifting out of a chorus of happiness and hope. I hear lines of torment, woven into the words like scarlet thread in a tapestry. “It’s a war outside, bomb in the street, gun in the hood, mob of police,” Lamar persists. The electric guitar wails out once more, but the strings scream no longer in joy, but in anguish. It’s Lamar’s world — the land of big guns, picket signs, gang violence and suicide. It goes on and on, the pain in this song, masked in a spinning melody of acceptance and aspiration.
It’s “i” that disproved my belief that hip hop was strictly shallow, lollipop-licking music. Yes, some songs embody this style (the frat party-esque songs of Lil Wayne and B.o.B.). But in “i,” Lamar makes a statement. It’s a sharp juxtaposition that embodies the artist’s point — the piercing starkness of harsh brutality against unadulterated self-love. Lamar’s is a message of optimism in the midst of struggle. We must love ourselves despite those that stand in our way. We can’t let others bring us down. It is a message of strength and confidence, one that opened my eyes to a world of hip-hop unlike the shallow verses I had known before. In the words of Lamar, “The sky can fall down, the wind can cry now, The strong in me — I still smile.”