{"id":31460,"date":"2017-10-04T06:00:47","date_gmt":"2017-10-04T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=31460"},"modified":"2017-09-26T13:40:42","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T18:40:42","slug":"kendrick-lamars-damn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/kendrick-lamars-damn\/","title":{"rendered":"Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When fans say Kendrick Lamar is the Tupac of our time, it’s an understatement that his music has already made a profound socio-political\u00a0and aesthetic impact. Let’s not forgot that “Alright,” a song from\u00a0his 2015 masterpiece album\u00a0To Pimp A Butterfly <\/em>(TPAB) became a rallying cry for unity within\u00a0the Black Lives Matter Movement and acknowledges the epidemic of police shootings that disproportionately targets\u00a0 Black Americans.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0TPAB\u00a0fuses multiple-genres and voices while the finely-crafted DAMN<\/a><\/strong>, by contrast, is am exercise in minimalism. Repetition\u00a0and reverse\u00a0instrumentation perfectly reinforce the cyclical\u00a0 format of the album and the album’s themes after which the songs are named (BLOOD, DNA, FEAR, LOVE, GOD, HUMBLE, LOYALTY, etc).<\/em> \u00a0Where some artists overcomplicate and muddy their waters, Lamar expertly tells stories that perfectly accentuate the cerebral\/mundane & sacred\/profane\u00a0dichotomies present\u00a0in his lyricism. And he often does so with painful self-awareness and contradiction (good & evil, dark and light).\u00a0Check out some of the\u00a0reviews<\/a> of Lamar’s 2017 masterpiece, easily my favorite album of 2017.<\/p>\n

The process of listening to DAMN. \u00a0has been both discursive and linear, which is to say I’ve listened from\u00a0beginning to end, end to beginning<\/a>, and most points in between\u00a0. The rewards of mindful listening –keener insights into social and cultural references, for example–inspired me to look\u00a0further into\u00a0the literary references <\/a>in Lamar’s work. As an album, DAMN. is particularly circular as well, which is to say the album doesn’t have a definitive beginning or end.\u00a0\u00a0 DAMN<\/a>.<\/strong> is a departure from the ventriloquism of TPAB,\u00a0 but it nonetheless\u00a0features what could be construed as\u00a0Lamar’s conscious and subconscious “voices”. For example, “FEAR”–easily one of my top 3 favorite tracks on the album–\u00a0is an examination of life told from a few different standpoints. Charles Edward Sydney Isom Jr’s voice can be heard early on in the song asking: “Why God, why God do I gotta suffer? \/ Pain in my heart carry burdens full of struggle\/ Why God, why God do I gotta bleed? \/ Every stone thrown at you restin’ at my feet.” One fan noted that this particular stanza\u00a0could function\u00a0to represent\u00a0Lamar’s subconscious inner dialogue. But there is a second movement in the tune in which Lamar shape-shifts into the\u00a0persona\u00a0of\u00a0(his) mother: “I beat yo’ ass, keep talkin’ back\/I beat yo’ ass, who bought you that?\/You stole it, I beat yo’ ass if you say that game is broken\/I beat yo’ ass if you jump on my couch\/I beat yo’ ass if you walk in this house with tears in your eyes”. This movement in the song continues for 23 more stanzas before transitioning into another “movement” wherein Lamar lays bare his anxieties about how he might die: “I’ll prolly die from one of these bats and blue badges \/ Body slammed on black and white paint, my bones snappin’ \/Or maybe die from panic or die from bein’ too lax \/ Or die from waitin’ on it, die ’cause I’m movin’ too fast.”<\/p>\n

I’m astounded by how\u00a0Lamar\u00a0crafts songs that build great intensity and ferocity through the sheer volume of lyrical stanzas alone: strip away all of the layered instrumentation and the lyricism–poetry<\/em>–would stand independently of its own accord.\u00a0“FEEL” is another standout song on this album because Lamar utilizes a “stream-of-consciousness” approach set against a dreamy, synth-n-bass backdrop. Lamar is righteously vulnerable in this\u00a0song and lays bare his anxieties, summons his heroes, and appears to turn his anger inward for a moment. On a really simple level,\u00a0“FEEL” is a song\u00a0about anxieties: “Look, I feel like I can’t breathe
\nLook, I feel like I can’t sleep\/Look, I feel heartless, often off this\/Feelin’ of fallin’, of fallin’ apart with\/Darkest hours, lost it\/Fillin’ the void of bein’ employed with ballin’\/Streets is talkin’, fill in the blanks with coffins\/Fill up the banks with dollars\/Fill up the graves with fathers\/Fill up the babies with bullshit\/Internet blogs and pulpit, fill ’em with gossip\/I feel like this gotta be the feelin’ what ‘Pac was
\nThe feelin’ of an apocalypse happenin’…I feel like the whole world want me to pray for ’em \/ But who the fuck prayin’ for me?” \u00a0Something that is conceptually remarkable about DAMN<\/strong>.<\/a> is that it is an honest exploration of what it means to be human. It is considerably difficult\u00a0for an artist to not only tap into but to\u00a0give voice to the wide spectrum of emotion without\u00a0censoring oneself. \u00a0Lamar goes into the depths of his soul in this album, which is an act of bravery unto itself. When asked what he would do differently the second time around?: “I’d go deeper”,\u00a0\u00a0he\u00a0tells Rick Rueben in a fantastic interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“DNA” is my favorite song on the album because of it’s unapologetic boldness in which Lamar attacks the microphone and takes no prisoners. For the reason that hip -hop allows the artist to re-fashion him or herself into\u00a0the larger-than-life master of her own destiny, I am perpetually drawn back into its magic again and again. Unlike other musical genres, the best hip-hop acts as a springboard\u00a0not only for reflection but for personal (and thus social) revolution and transformation not lost on Lamar: “I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA\/ I got hustle though, ambition, flow, inside my DNA.”\u00a0\u00a0If you watch the\u00a0official\u00a0music video for “DNA”, you’ll see an incredible performance between Don Cheadle and Lamar that features Lamar administering a lie detector test to Cheadle. A sample of a Fox news brief\u00a0features\u00a0two news pundits\u00a0mocking Lamar’s massive hit song “Alright” that calls out police brutality. I personally love how Lamar takes these two news pundits to task and challenges their snap-judgements and assumptions.\u00a0 Like Nina Simone said, it is an artist’s job to “reflect the times.” Lamar does just that.<\/p>\n

DAMN<\/strong>. <\/a>becomes more revolutionary the more you listen and allow yourself to be awash in the poetry, politics, and existential philosophy.\u00a0Having listened to\u00a0DAMN<\/strong>. <\/a>at least <\/em>twenty-five times,\u00a0I am amazed by Lamar’s “fast and furious” lyricism. A\u00a0Pitchfork reviewer who gave the album a\u00a0heavy-weight champion score of 9.2\u00a0opines that \u00a0“Lamar\u2019s recitation is so effortless you wonder where he breathes, or if he does at all.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/u><\/a>\u00a0Indeed, I also wondered when<\/em>, exactly, he would find the space to take a breath during the recitation of his lyrics. If you haven’t heard this album yet, just listen with an open mind, which is to say with a neuroplastic<\/a> mind, since we now know that the brain is not fixed but rather capable of change and charting new territory.<\/p>\n

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When fans say Kendrick Lamar is the Tupac of our time, it’s an understatement that his music has already made a profound socio-political\u00a0and aesthetic impact. Let’s not forgot that “Alright,” a song from\u00a0his 2015 masterpiece album\u00a0To Pimp A Butterfly (TPAB) became a rallying cry for unity within\u00a0the Black Lives Matter[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[4354,4353],"class_list":["post-31460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-black-americans","tag-music-cd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-8bq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31460"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31680,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31460\/revisions\/31680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}