Kendrick Lamar: “The Blacker the Berry”
“You hate me don’t you? I know you hate me as much as you hate yourself.” Kendrick Lamar’s first major statement since he released “i” in September is as fierce and discordant as that song was naïve and sweet. But both are flip sides of the same coin—the issue of self-love. It is clearer than ever, as his follow-up to good kid, m.A.A.d city takes shape in public, that Kendrick considers self-love—it’s absence, its persistence even in the face of overwhelming societal discouragement—his great subject, the reason he’s rapping. “i” was the song that gazed at the clouds, that looked deep within for reasons to love oneself. “The Blacker the Berry” balefully surveys world around him.
It begins with a loop, dark and bleary, more Enter The Wu-Tang than Aquemini. His recitation of “blacker the berry, sweeter the juice” instantly brings to mind 2Pac’s “Keep Ya Head Up”, but just as in 2Pac’s song, the line has a wistful, even wishful ring. His voice is angry, ragged, his delivery pitched between near-scream and near-sob, but his words are clear and diamond-cut: “Gangbanging got me killing a nigga blacker than me, hypocrite.”
It’s a performance of abandonment, and part of how it flattens you is with control and discipline: His cadence runs roughshod over the beat, hitting it the way a sprinting foot hints pavement—at angles, irregularly, and with a painful muscle-twisting sense of urgency. His lines cut through everything, abandoning his occasional tendency to fill up lines with melodious filler syllables: “I mean, it’s evident that I’m irrelevant to society/ That’s what you’re telling me, penitentiary would only hire me.” It might be his most focused and upsetting performance, evoking not just the Pac of “Keep Ya Head Up” but the righteous firebreather of “Holler If Ya Hear Me”. We’re listening.
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