The album release is delay, but not his new single 'The Blacker the Berry.' Kendrick Lamar launched the newest track, produced by Boi-1da, on Monday. So far, the song garners rave reviews with its meaty lyrics that apparently all about racism and hypocrisy. In fact, even Pulitzer Prize winner author Michael Chabon cited Kendrick's strong points and trying to convey through this single.
According to The Guardian, Chabon mentioned Lamar's single on the annotation site Genius and particularly cited the stanza, "So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street? When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!"
"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."
Certainly, Kendrick pulls listeners to think about his views not only in The Blacker The Berry's beat and rhythm. Parent Herald reported the title was apparently based from the book 'The Blacker the Berry' of Wallace Thurman published in 1929, while its photo, which showed a mother who breastfeed two babies, came from Italian photographer Giordano Cipriani.
Meantime, Kendrick is slated to perform in 2015 Sasquatch! Festival at George Amphitheater in May. Apart from that, he's also one of the performers at Wireless Festival on July 4.
Join the Conversation