Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning PDF
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Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning Kendrick Lamar has established himself at the forefront of contemporary hip-hop culture. Artistically adventurous and socially conscious, he has been unapologetic in using his art form, rap music, to address issues affecting black lives while also exploring subjects fundamental to the human experience, such as religious belief. This book is the first to provide an interdisciplinary academic analysis of the impact of Lamar’s corpus. In doing so, it highlights how Lamar’s music reflects current tensions that are keenly felt when dealing with the subjects of race, religion, and politics. Starting with Section 80 and ending with DAMN., this book deals with each of Lamar’s four major projects in turn. A panel of academics, journalists, and hip-hop practitioners show how religion, in particular black spiritualties, take a front-and-center role in his work. They also observe that his astute and biting thoughts on race and culture may come from an African American perspective, but many find something familiar in Lamar’s lyrical testimony across great chasms of social and geographical difference. This sophisticated exploration of one of popular culture’s emerging icons reveals a complex and multifaceted engagement with religion, faith, race, art, and culture. As such, it will be vital reading for anyone working in religious, African American, and hip-hop studies, as well as scholars of music, media, and popular culture. Christopher M. Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Religion, Africana, and American Studies at Lehigh University. Driscoll is also cofounder and former chair of the Critical Approaches to Hip Hop and Religion group at the American Academy of Religion. Much of his work attends to hip-hop culture, including editing a 2011 special issue of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion on the topic; he is coauthor of Breaking Bread, Breaking Beats: Churches and Hip Hop – A Guide to Key Issues (Fortress, 2014). Driscoll is also author of White Lies: Race & Uncertainty in the Twilight of American Religion (Routledge, 2015) and coauthor (with Monica R. Miller) of Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion (Lexington, 2018). Monica R. Miller is Associate Professor of Religion, Africana Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lehigh University, USA. She is the author of Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012); The Hip Hop and Religion Reader, coedited with Anthony B. Pinn (Routledge, 2014); and Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the New Terrain in the US, coedited with Anthony B. Pinn and Bernard “Bun B” Freeman (Bloomsbury, 2015), coauthor (with Christopher M. Driscoll) of Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion (Lexington, 2018), among other books, numerous essays, and book chapters on the topic. Miller is cofounder and cochair of the first ever American Academy of Religion group on hip-hop entitled Critical Approaches to Hip Hop and Religion and has presented nationally and internationally on the topic over the past ten years. Miller is also a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies (IHS), and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association (AHA) in Washington, DC. Anthony B. Pinn is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University. He is the founding Director of Rice’s Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning. Pinn is also the Director of Research for the Institute for Humanist Studies (Washington, DC). In addition to courses on African American religious thought, liberation theologies, and religious aesthetics, Pinn co-teaches with Bernard “Bun B” Freeman a popular course on religion and hip-hop culture. The course received media coverage from a variety of outlets, including MTV. He is the author/editor of over 30 books, including Noise and Spirit: Rap Music’s Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities (NYU Press, 2003); The Religion and Hip Hop Reader, coedited with Monica R. Miller (Routledge, 2014); and Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the New Terrain in the US, coedited with Monica R. Miller and Bernard “Bun B” Freeman (Bloomsbury, 2015). Routledge Studies in Hip Hop and Religion Series editors: Anthony B. Pinn and Monica R. Miller Australian Indigenous Hip Hop The Politics of Culture, Identity, and Spirituality Chiara Minestrelli Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning Christopher M. Driscoll, Anthony B. Pinn and Monica R. Miller For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RSHHR Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning Edited by Christopher M. Driscoll, Anthony B. Pinn, and Monica R. Miller First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Christopher M. Driscoll, Anthony B. Pinn and Monica R. Miller, individual chapters, the contributors The right of Christopher M. Driscoll, Anthony B. Pinn and Monica R. Miller to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-54151-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-01085-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction: K.Dotting the American cultural landscape with black meaning 1 ANTHONY B. PINN AND CHRISTOPHER M. DRISCOLL PART I Section.80 (2011) 17 1 Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80: Reagan-era blues 19 RALPH BRISTOUT 2 Can I be both? blackness and the negotiation of binary categories in Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80 25 MARGARITA SIMON GUILLORY 3 Hol’ up: post-civil rights black theology within Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80 album 37 DANIEL WHITE HODGE 4 Singing experience in Section.80: Kendrick Lamar’s poetics of problems 51 MICHAEL THOMAS PART II Good kid, m.A.A.d. city (2012) 67 5 The good, the m.A.A.d, and the holy: Kendrick Lamar’s meditations on sin and moral agency in the post-gangsta era 69 JUAN M. FLOYD-THOMAS vi Contents 6 ‘Real is responsibility’: revelations in white through the filter of black realness on good kid, m.A.A.d. city 99 ROB PEACH 7 ‘Black meaning’ out of urban mud: good kid, m.A.A.d city as Compton griot-riff at the crossroads of climate-apocalypse? 116 JAMES W. PERKINSON 8 Rap as Ragnarök: Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, and the value of competition 137 CHRISTOPHER M. DRISCOLL PART III To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) 157 9 Can dead homies speak? the spirit and flesh of black meaning 159 MONICA R. MILLER 10 Loving [you] is complicated: black self-love and affirmation in the rap music of Kendrick Lamar 175 DARRIUS D. HILLS 11 From ‘blackness’ to afrofuture to ‘impasse’: the figura of the Jimi Hendrix/Richie Havens identity revolution as faintly evidenced by the work of Kendrick Lamar and more than a head nod to Lupe Fiasco 191 JON GILL 12 Beyond flight and containment: Kendrick Lamar, black study, and an ethics of the wound 212 JOSEPH WINTERS PART IV DAMN. (2017) 229 13 “Real nigga conditions”: Kendrick Lamar, grotesque realism, and the open body 231 ANTHONY B. PINN Contents vii 14 DAMNed to the earth: Kendrick Lamar, de/colonial violence, and earthbound salvation 245 BEN LEWELLYN-TAYLOR AND MELANIE C. JONES 15 Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. as an aesthetic genealogy 262 DOMINIK HAMMER 16 ‘I’m an Israelite’: Kendrick Lamar’s spiritual search, Hebrew Israelite religion, and the politics of a celebrity encounter 274 SAM KESTENBAUM 17 Damnation, identity, and truth: vocabularies of suffering in Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. 300 ANDRÉ E. KEY 18 Hebrew Israelite covenantal theology and Kendrick Lamar’s constructive project in DAMN. 321 SPENCER DEW Conclusion: KENosis: the meaning of Kendrick Lamar 334 MONICA R. MILLER References 345 Contributors 368 Index 373 Acknowledgments “This what god feel like, yeah . . . I got, I got, I got, I got royalty, got loyalty inside my DNA” we rapped over and over again during a cross- Atlantic cipher that found all three of us at the Institute for Philosophical Research in Hannover, Germany, in 2017. DAMN. had just been released, and Lamar was all we could seemingly think about. We wondered if he no longer believed in race, or if he was now claiming to be a Hebrew Israelite, or if there was another album that Lamar would be secretly following up with soon, or whether DAMN. listened to in reverse was another album altogether. In a word, Lamar had us thinking on our feet as much as we were seemingly constructing more and more theories about Lamar and the sheer volume of black meaning in his work. Turns out, we were not alone. All of our thanks to each of our contributors whose perspectives add richness to the volume. We owe gratitude to Prof. Dr. Jürgen Manemann, Anna Maria Hauk, and all of our colleagues at the Institute for, as always, in hip-hop like spirit, providing a space and home away from home where ciphers of ideas and creativity always seem to take shape. We’d also like to thank our home institutions, colleagues, and students for providing intellectual space and inspiration for our work. We are also mindful of family and friends whose support remains steadfast. We would like to thank our editor at Routledge, Joshua Wells, and the rest of the Routledge team for moving this project from an idea to a published book. Thank you! Finally, we’d be remiss without sending a big shout-out to hip-hop culture – especially to Kendrick Lamar Duckworth for providing dots of inspiration, brilliance, and lyrical genius by which we’ve been able to ponder something new, and something different, of black life and culture, something still unfolding. We hope this volume contributes to conversations that have amassed energy in recent years regarding hip-hop’s shape-shifty and prodigious construction of meaning to blackness and the blackness of its meaning-making constructions. Introduction K.Dotting the American cultural landscape with black meaning Anthony B. Pinn and Christopher M. Driscoll The cultural worlds we create provide cartographies of our individual and collective anxieties, hopes, dreams, and perceptions about our existence. In a general sense, all this points out our effort to render life meaningful – to make meaning – and, thereby, develop orientation for navigating life cir- cumstances. And those “maps” have a hand in shaping our worlds too. By meaning-making, we intend to express the way humans work to pro- vide a ‘coherent’ and ‘continuous’ narrative of our significance, the way we occupy time and space and through this occupation foster substantive and dynamic markers of belonging and purpose. Some label this meaning- making ‘religious,’ and while there might be merit to such labeling, for our general purposes in the pages that follow, we suggest these senses of and references to the religious are engulfed in larger processes of mapping out the significance and ‘weight’ of movement between life and death. The scope of this effort shifts and changes in light of the particular contextual dynam- ics of our location in time and space, the place we inherit from others and make for ourselves, even if only in fits and starts. Religion, and so many other non-unique aspects of human social life, accounts for the content and grammar/vocabulary used to describe our cultural worlds. Without a doubt, one of the most compelling cultural worlds to emerge in the last half century has been hip-hop culture. As the increasingly well- known story of its birth goes, the workings of urban life in New York City during the economically troubled and politically explosive 1970s served as its genesis as a soulful phenomenology and philosophy of life in the postin- dustrial north, marked by the destruction of black and brown bodies.1 Disil- lusionment with the rhetoric of the American Dream was occurring because so few seemingly had access to social mechanisms for making that dream an existential reality, along with the policing of any effort to trouble this arrangement, fueled a metaphysical revolt against a common discourse of blame. Hip-hop emerged as an alternate mode of meaning-making – a new ‘map’ highlighted by deep descriptions of urban decay as part of the poli- tics of racial disregard. In fact, hip-hop celebrates animosity toward these circumstances, and it valorizes industrious efforts to not succumb to such
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