Join Los Angeles Review of Books Newsletter


What Lamar does differently is to tell us of what it means to grow up as an observer and witness to an under-discussed inner-city war, while remaining for the most part uninterested in joining the battle. He instead sings a tender blues for the permanently underclass.

Good kid m.A.A.d city is a memento mori haunted by dead and living ghosts. It is constructed out of them: there are old messages left by his mother and his father on his phone warning Lamar to focus, to come home, to stay out of trouble. There are the vivid images clipped from his childhood in Los Angeles: that the one in front of the gun lives forever, bodies on top of bodies, Pirus, Crips, Rosecrans, Warriors, Techs, AKs, Leadshowers, Dunk!, Homies, Drank, Church’s Chicken, Steppin’, Bible Study, Red and Blue, Racial Profile, Bullets, The Hood, a smart boy as a human sacrifice. When they are pieced together as a sequence they act like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope: they give of us the impression that from these clips we are watching a black boy learn to fly above it all.

Read the rest of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s “When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative”

  1. alexcantfly reblogged this from rzbnasty
  2. tayjanellebee reblogged this from theoreticallyspeakin
  3. thrillaj96 reblogged this from thefemalepharaoh
  4. theoreticallyspeakin reblogged this from naturalmannequin
  5. naturalmannequin reblogged this from thefemalepharaoh
  6. darn-that-mokuba reblogged this from nowhitit
  7. nowhitit reblogged this from lonestark20
  8. lonestark20 reblogged this from sweet-honeyyy
  9. rzbnasty reblogged this from theyoungandtheswagless
  10. chekovsgun reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  11. theyoungandtheswagless reblogged this from sweet-honeyyy
  12. sweet-honeyyy reblogged this from mobetterlove
  13. canadianinfluenced reblogged this from trueplayashit
  14. trueplayashit reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  15. johnny5187 reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  16. mauriciochavez reblogged this from lareviewofbooks and added:
    Kendrick Lamar’s Lyrical Lecture
  17. rplteens reblogged this from bookstacks
  18. whitelines reblogged this from eywhatsgood
  19. knowyourgoat reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  20. ch3ty0ub3tcha reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  21. gabcc reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  22. eywhatsgood reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  23. elibrumley reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  24. morgieebo0 reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  25. wiederkunft reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
Comments
blog comments powered by Disqus
Search