Kendrick Lamar’s "The Blacker the Berry" Gets Annotated for Genius by Pulitzer-Winning Author Michael Chabon

Photo by Ari Marcopoulos

Kendrick Lamar‘s new single “The Blacker the Berry” came out last night. Today, Pulitzer-winning author Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys) has deciphered a portion of the song’s lyrics for the annotation site Genius, as Complex points out.

Regarding the lyrics “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street?/ When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?/ Hypocrite!,” Chabon writes:

In this final couplet, Kendrick Lamar employs a rhetorical move akin to—and in its way even more devastating than—Common’s move in the last line of “I Used to Love H.E.R.”: snapping an entire lyric into place with a surprise revelation of something hitherto left unspoken. In “H.E.R.”, Common reveals the identity of the song’s “her”—hip hop itself—forcing the listener to re-evaluate the entire meaning and intent of the song. Here, Kendrick Lamar reveals the nature of the enigmatic hypocrisy that the speaker has previously confessed to three times in the song without elaborating: that he grieved over the murder of Trayvon Martin when he himself has been responsible for the death of a young black man. Common’s “her” is not a woman but hip hop itself; Lamar’s “I” is not (or not only) Kendrick Lamar but his community as a whole. This revelation forces the listener to a deeper and broader understanding of the song’s “you”, and to consider the possibility that “hypocrisy” is, in certain situations, a much more complicated moral position than is generally allowed, and perhaps an inevitable one.

This is not Chabon’s only recent foray into song lyrics; he also wrote lyrics for tracks on Mark Ronson‘s recent Uptown Special, lyrics he has also annotated for Genius. 

Hear “The Blacker the Berry”:

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