Kendrick Lamar is Not Your Savior
From what he’s told us, he himself has not always known this.
The man is gifted. Even his most casual fans will tell you this. On his latest album he tells us that he “feels things others don’t.” His music confirms this for the listener by tapping you into raw nerve endings jutting out of the Compton concrete, zapping you—whoever you are, whatever you’ve experienced—down, through the specific circumstances of the artist’s upbringing, to the depths of emotion and confrontation with life that truly great art can touch.
Kenny knows that he is able to do this, and he knows and cares about what potential it holds for his listeners, his community, and himself. And so, for as long as he’s been able, he has used his gift to try and attain nothing less than salvation for each one of those circles.
If “Good Kid, m.A.A.d City” was an outline and exploration of his deliverance from his upbringing’s challenges, “To Pimp a Butterfly” and “untitled unmastered.” were a broadening of this salvational narrative to American society and beyond. They were also a confrontation with the temptations of Kendrick’s incredible success, and went on to express a new commitment to his own artistic integrity and responsibility.
And, by God, this commitment sure seemed to be paying off. For those of us who felt his music, it was exhilarating to see an artist reach such monumental success while never failing to push their work forward into even more ambitious and personal directions. Just look at his single “Alright,” which became both an anthem for the nascent Black Lives Matter movement and won multiple Grammys. If you have a hard time understanding why the man might feel anointed, I encourage you to look at your own life, and how important your own successes feel to you. How about your failures?
None of this is to say that Kendrick hasn’t ever acknowledged the risks and follies involved in playing the savior, and wrestled with them in his music. (See his song “u”.) “Heavy is the head that chose to wear the crown,” he tells us on the new album, quoting Henry IV.
2017’s “DAMN.”, though, seemed to display Kenny stuck at a real impasse. Though he’d always questioned earthly kingdoms, it was almost as if he was starting to see their tenuousness in a new, stark light. For, as is quietly and heartbreakingly surprising to anyone who’s attempted to pour all they have into a Great Work, the world had not been finally fixed or released from duality as a result of Kendrick’s music—and neither had he. Wandering aimlessly through Gethsemane, Kendrick asks himself throughout the album whether we’ve all been cursed, if he’s ever really been sincere, if his pride has corrupted whatever good intentions began him on his prophetic mission—if the void of samsara that he finds himself in, even after all the success and influence he’s seen, is all there is.
I remember being a little disturbed to hear these questions from Kendrick. Perhaps I had too-readily wanted to believe (as he himself may have) that he had figured it out, that he was somehow immune to feeling lost after seeming so found. Though I didn’t play it as much as his previous work, “DAMN.” became a soundtrack to the times when I, too, felt the projects and stories that fortify my ego against emptiness withering away, without knowing what would come after the silence.
Kendrick Lamar was quiet for years, but the artist has returned to us now with a warm, personal new world of sounds, and—if we have ears to hear—an answer to what comes after silence. He shares it with us on “The Heart Part 5,” the prelude and key to his new album, by channeling the late Nipsey Hussle, an even starker savior figure than he—murdered in the city he spent his life trying to help—as he tells us how love can still exist in the void.
Yes, Kendrick informs us throughout “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers”, life and love is going to “get you killed” no matter what, just as certainly as each one of us is ourselves “a killer,” no matter how we try to convince or wrest ourselves otherwise. Kenny, at any rate, seems to know that he is one; in many ways he is more forthright about his own struggles and flaws than he’s ever been. But while there is palpable pain on the record, he no longer speaks about it all from a place of despair. For even as Kendrick recognizes more explicitly than ever that he cannot be a redeemer of all mankind, in all its imperfection—nor even of himself—this is not to say that there is no redemption to be found at all.
For it is precisely his willingness to release messiah-hood—that is, to accept personal independence from the need to be perfect, and allow others the same—that reveals the presence of redemptive love for Kendrick, his community, and the world. And whatever one considers to be its source (Kendrick himself points to various “powers that be” across the album), such love ultimately exists in the absence of reason. It motivates action; it is not earned by it.
Consequently, after so many years of frustratedly trying to bring us to it, Kendrick breaks it to us on “Mr. Morale” that the journey to this “valley of silence”—where there is nothing left to do but let the spirit “speak through” you—is ultimately and fundamentally a private one. Having experienced it, he’s happy to make us “think about it.” He still cares; he still “wants” us. But he knows now that we have to find it for ourselves.
Indeed, at the end of “The Heart Part 5”, when Kendrick tells us with Nipsey’s voice that he’s “in heaven,” he could be quoting the gospel of Luke: “behold, the kingdom of heaven is within you.” No, Kendrick Lamar is not your savior.
