The Unbearable Wackness of Kendrick Lamar

The waning light (and mental health) of the Obama-HOPE-poster-era

I am a great imbiber of Haterade™. Surely, one imagines that I must find a brother in Kendrick Lamar, a man so soaked in Haterade it’s like the National Hate League team he coaches just won the Hater Bowl and dumped it on him.

Yet, watching Kendrick Lamar’s beef with Drake—his multiple diss tracks, his turning a Juneteenth celebration into a celebration of his own beef by playing “Not Like Us” six times, uniting the fucking Crips and the Bloods to dab on Drake with him, trotting out Drake’s ex-girlfriend to join in clowning him, trotting out the former star player of the NBA team Drake reps—has been extremely sad. I couldn’t help feel anything but pity as I watched the man on the biggest stage on earth get the Super Bowl audience to effectively shout out in chorus that his personal rival is a pedophile.

It’s all so pathetic on so many levels. Kendrick obviously doesn’t care about whether or not Drake is a pedophile since Kendrick features Kodak Black, a man who has done things infinitely worse than anything Drake has ever been accused of, including violently raping an underage girl, so Kendrick’s sanctimoniousness on that issue is obviously disingenuous, and the beef is probably more personal than anything else.¹ It’s also rather sad from a guy who made an album featuring an extended dialogue with Tupac, a man whose story is largely defined by its tragic end, the death of one of the greatest artists in music history, and that death’s connection to stupid petty hip hop beef (and, of course, the LAPD, but we’ll likely write a piece on that another time). Add to that that in spite of performing in front of the president of the United States as the country sponsors a live-streamed genocide, and performing for an organization (the NFL) that famously cracks down on anti-racist activism, he chose to make his primary target a fucking rapper from Canada. Instead of trotting out, say, Colin Kaepernick, someone whose inclusion could provide an actual coherent political statement in-context with the NFL, he trotted out Serena Williams, Drake’s aforementioned ex-girlfriend. Any criticism of America in the performance was kept firmly within the realm of the plausibly deniable—Uncle Sam (who is also Black) chastises Kendrick for being “too ghetto,” there’s an American flag made of Black people, whatever. It was all very indicative of a sort of vague cliche protest aesthetic you could call “Critical Americana,” the rendering of Americana slightly-askew to present a semblance of a critical attitude while critiquing nothing specific. All of this, regardless, played second fiddle to this annoying tabloid conflict between two celebrities.

What’s more, this beef at the center of his performance is probably doing less to hurt Drake than it is helping to hurt hip hop. Take a look at this graph from YouGov concerning people’s feelings about Drake and Kendrick since this feud started, taken in 2024 (blue is positive feelings about the artist, red is negative, grey is “don’t know”):

Among people who have heard “a lot” about the feud—read, people who are thereby very invested in hip hop—Kendrick has clearly won. However, those who have heard “a lot” represent 12% of those polled:

What this means is that those who have “heard a little” can be considered a more general hip hop “audience” (those who haven’t heard about it at all can be discounted), the audience mainstream rap is actually “for,” the big streaming numbers, those who listen because it’s “catchy,” those who are less committal and less invested in the “identity” of being a rap fan—the “undecided voters” of music, and who this feud is in effect actually about winning over. Neither Drake nor Kendrick held a majority positive consensus for these listeners. In fact, Kendrick, the feud’s supposed “winner,” has racked up over a quarter of “negative” opinions among casual rap listeners, and the indifference perception is creeping pretty close to the positive one.

This beef is bad for hip hop in the public eye, at least hip hop’s “relevance” in the public eye. Mainstream rappers like Drake and Kendrick rely on that public relevance in order to maintain the goal of their careers, which for them is clearly major material success. Kendrick, blinded by the myopia of his immediate circle being within the tiny minority of people who are invested in this feud, believes he is “winning” when in fact he is “losing” what this very conflict is clearly actually over, which is chart dominance—again, Kendrick’s insinuations about this being about some kind of “appropriation” by a Canadian are bullshit because he evidently doesn’t consider The Weeknd to be appropriating RnB (The Weeknd was at that fucking Juneteenth show), and his comments about sex pestery and his hollow comments about women are bullshit again because of the aforementioned Kodak shit. When we consider that hip hop has been on the decline in the stream wars as country goes up (and several rappers try to jump ship), none of this can help in the long term, even if 2024 saw the genre get a dead cat bounce.

Kendrick as a person seems to suffer from “Arcade Fire Syndrome.” What I mean: Arcade Fire hit it big in the 2000s making beautiful albums that perfectly captured the wistfulness of nostalgia and the sense of wonder that comes from youth. As music critics are wont to do, praise was heaped onto these records and the band members were acclaimed as “geniuses,” but it seems as though when these accolades fell upon the ears of the members of the band, the musicians made a category error that was likewise being made by many of these same critics. As a result of this, Arcade Fire made the album Reflektor, a seventy-five-minute-long constipated nightmare infused with references to fucking Søren Kierkegaard and Jean Baudrillard, as the band desperately tried to Say Something philosophically profound and failing all the while. Next they made an album about “modern culture” called Everything Now and, man, I don’t need to say any more than that title says in itself about how fucking dumb and hackneyed it was. See: Arcade Fire mistook being called the meaning of “genius” here as dubbing astounding intellect and insight rather than its other usage as being used to dub astounding creativity and intuition, falling prey to the often held erroneous assumption that brilliant artists are always inherently “smart” people. Arcade Fire’s “genius” was in their musical intuition when it came to provoking the right emotional responses, and their ability to vaguely gesture at emotional realities in just such a way as to make them all the more vivid, to write with what Keats called “negative capability.” What Arcade Fire’s “genius” was not was a savviness for making poignant philosophical and social critiques. Reflektor was lauded because the critics were habitually used to lauding them. Everything Now saw the shine come off a bit with the exception of a few holdouts. I don’t expect that either of these albums will wind up sitting very highly in the band’s canon when all is said and done (the same procession of habitual praise followed by eventual spite can be seen with what happened to Oasis’ likewise-bloated Be Here Now).

Kendrick is the same way. good kid, m.A.A.d City was a brilliant record, an instant hip hop classic, that was rightfully dubbed “genius.” I wouldn’t be surprised if this praise contributed to the wider scope of his next record, To Pimp A Butterfly, which was likewise praised. But what made good kid, m.A.A.d City great was not some sort of brilliant and incisive analysis of American sociopolitical reality, it was how deeply personal and confessional the record was. To Pimp A Butterfly garnered even more praise, and much of this was heaped on its “political” merits, but I think that what truly made To Pimp A Butterfly great as well was that it was still a very confessional record in spite of its grander social pretensions. Yes, it’s steeped in social critique, but at its center sits an uneasy Kendrick Lamar, “the biggest hypocrite of 2015,” the titular butterfly who is being “pimped,” turning to Tupac for answers and receiving none. He returns to modified versions of the same questions in songs like “Mortal Man” that preoccupied him on songs like “m.A.A.d city.” Where he once asked “If I told you I killed a n*gga at sixteen, would you believe me / Or see me to be innocent Kendrick you seen in the street…?” he now asks “if I'm tried in a court of law, if the industry cut me off / If the government want me dead, plant cocaine in my car / Would you judge me a drug-head or see me as K. Lamar?” Ironically, he also asks whether we might “question [his] character and degrade [him] on every blog?” Maybe not every blog, Kendrick, but certainly this one.

Kendrick has yet to release anything that comes close to his apotheosis on TPAB—DAMN was merely boring, but Mr. Morales and GNX are just bad. It’s pretty clear, for instance, that one of the biggest influence’s on Kendrick’s flow is Eminem—once you hear it you won’t unhear it—with everything good or bad that comes with that influence, such as his growing insistence on using extremely stupid fucking voices on his songs. Like listen to this shit—what is that, fucking Hunter S. Thompson?

Fucking trash! But one of the biggest issues with Kendrick is that he just feels like such an anachronism, albeit this is understandably difficult to perceive considering how, in an era saturated with postmodern pastiche, “anachronisms” start to feel almost timely in-and-of-themselves. My friend Pat once put it succinctly this way: Kendrick will never hit as hard again because Kendrick was a definitionally Obama-era artist. Kendrick’s work, like Obama’s politics, are predicated on a vague critique of the consequences of the system but never interrogates their root cause, while rooted in a enthusiastic but vacuous “hopefulness” untethered from any real process of material progress. Kendrick came up during Obama’s first term, making vague promises of how he would “use [his] celebrity for good,” and then seemed stumped by the ascent of Donald Trump soon after. The literary manifestation of the Obama era, the ever-insipid Ta-Nehisi Coates, could not shut the fuck up about this catastrophic event that his Most Favouritest Guy helped cause, drooling copium at every turn, even apparently going full Joker-mode right after the election in order to do anything possible to not hold libs like himself accountable:

…whereas Kendrick, the musical manifestation, kept it simple when he turned around on his next album to give us the exceedingly adroit bar: “Donald Trump’s in office, we lost Barack / And promised to never doubt him again.” Mm. That’s that robust Kendrick political insight the critics love so much.

There’s one fundamental here everyone who was expecting a big “statement” from Kendrick at the Super Bowl is overlooking: no matter how much someone like Kendrick might posture about being “confrontational,” anyone who gets to the level of having the biggest stage in the world is going to be someone who is still fundamentally compliant where it matters. This harkens back, conveniently, to my old Taylor Swift piece (Swift who was also at the Super Bowl, and was viciously booed, which I’m thinking is signaling the end of her height as a pop culture figure). Like Taylor, Kendrick is an industry baby, though he wasn’t groomed from as young of an age: he was signed by Top Dawg when he was about 17-years-old in 2004. By the time his debut album dropped in 2011, he had likely been thoroughly conditioned to work within the business. He has been carefully trained to effectively chase mainstream success, and his “confrontational” nature is all just a part of the packaging, he would never meaningfully challenge anything or anyone if the growth of his career was at stake. Drake is “not like us,” but neither is Kendrick—they’re both just rich industry assholes who simply do not share the concerns that regular people do. Kendrick doesn’t have to worry about where his next rent cheque is going to come from, because he’s the person who collects the rent cheques. His fans believe that he made some “poignant” statement that night because they wanted to see one. No such thing took place. And there’s only so many times you can delude yourself out of successively dashed expectations before you have to confront reality.

Mark my words: Kendrick will eventually let his fans down, sooner rather than later. In fact, praise of Kendrick reminds me a lot of what praise of Kanye used to be like. Like Kendrick, Kanye was brilliant at what he did but, also like Kendrick, fans and critics attributed to him attributes he didn’t have and downplayed certain concerning ones that he clearly did. Kanye was a brilliant musician but not particularly bright—his earnest beliefs, as expressed on Yeezus, that the “new slavery” was buying expensive Alexander Wang clothes, and that alimony for rich Black rappers was basically lynching, should have given more people this impression than it did. That is to say nothing of the fact that Kanye West was very obviously profoundly mentally ill, and yet his defenders would often accuse those who would point to his sporadic eyebrow-raising moments of simply being racist, especially for the times these outbursts had him say things we could reasonably agree with (George Bush doesn’t care about Black people). Time would tell, and time told. Kanye slowly became more and more unhinged, and now he’s Tweeting about how he’s a Nazi. If the aforementioned questions Kendrick asked on albums like Good Kid and TPAB are indicative of the inner-life of the “real” Kendrick Lamar, in conjunction with other lyrics throughout his records about his fears and anxieties, then Kendrick Lamar seems like a man with profoundly debilitating paranoia, someone whose obvious mental problems combined with his overexposure will likely lead to a Kanye-West-level meltdown. I mean, according to Kendrick’s lyrics, he and I, as a Black guy and an Indigenous dude respectively, are the True Children of Israel, because Kendrick is likely a Black Hebrew Israelite, which means he is already completely fucking insane, and it’s not going to get any better from there. But isn’t that just the most fitting end for Kendrick’s career? If he really is the manifestation of the Obama era, a faux-radical empty promise of “hope,” then where else can the man go but into the depths of schizophrenia as the liberal dream of America unravels?

1. I also happen to think that colourism is probably a not insignificant part of this.