With a baby, daisies, and other flowers burning in destruction The ground is shaking, swallowing young woman The tallest building plummet, cracking and crumbling In disbeliefs our beliefs the reason for all this We all nervous and crying, moving in caution No birds chirping or flying, no dogs barking With apocalyptic lyrics and a tone that can only be described as a funky-dirge, Kendrick sets the mood, Both poets’ writings also reveal a deep conflictedness not only with their own inner life but with the realpolitik of their day. Kendrick is navigating us through the loss of black life in a “post-racial” America. Jeremiah was a prophet tasked with guiding the people through the loss of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. What I want to do here is suss out a comparison between the life, times, and texts of the prophet Jeremiah and Kendrick Lamar. first the Book of Jeremiah then the Book of Lamentations.) Usually a prophecy comes before a lament-e.g. I don’t think it’s an accident though that tracks from UU didn’t make it on TPAB. (It should be noted that if the title tracks of UU are representative of when he recorded them then it would seem that Kendrick was wrestling with his prophetic vocation even when he was recording TPAB. If To Pimp a Butterfly (TPAB) is where Kendrick accepts his prophetic vocation and divulges a fiery word, then UU is Kendrick’s Jeremiad.
But more specifically I am going to be interacting with Kendrick’s UU as a prophetic text of lamentation-it is a text which, like all texts of lament, reveals something about the author as well as society. Also, I live on the Westside of Chicago where my neighbors are well acquainted with the visceral reality Kendrick’s lyrics speak to. Kendrick’s lyrics reflect existential questions authors like Kelly Brown Douglas and I have been wrestling with post-Trayvon. Kendrick Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered ( UU), surprise-released at the beginning of this month, paints an intimate portrait of the artist’s emotional, psychological and religious pro/digression. And it came to pass after the captivity of Israel and the desolation of Jerusalem that Jeremiah sat mourning and he lamented this lament.
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