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[5.83]
Jonathan Bradley: “The Blacker the Berry” is the dark counterpart to Lamar’s prior single “i,” recasting its themes and enriching it in retrospect. When we reviewed that single, Megan asked rhetorically, “Everyone wants Compton’s human sacrifice but no one wants Kendrick Lamar’s self-esteem?” but “i” had the darkness of good kid, m.A.A.d city bubbling beneath its surface; Kendrick said “I love myself” in response to lines like “the world is a ghetto with big guns and picket signs.” “Berry” is a song of violence and protest, but even at its darkest, it punctuates its pervasive nihilism with a self-love extracted from social hatred. “I want you to recognize that I’m a proud monkey” he growls with a resilience borne of 500 years of American history. “I know you hate me, don’t you?/You hate my people,” and here the importance of “i” is thrown into sharper relief. But what of the framing device, where Lamar claims hypocrisy for his universalised African narrator? Is this twice-as-good hectoring or an insistence that Black Lives Matter wherever they might be lived and however they might be ended? Or is it Lamar’s revolutionary asceticism in action: obsessive scrutiny of his own flaws as a path to self-realization? All of this, and more, I think. “Gang banging make me a kill a nigga blacker than me” is borne of the same dread as “if Pirus and Crips all got along, they’d probably gun me down by the end of this song” or Maya Angelou’s soliloquy in “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.” The invocation of Trayvon Martin — and not of Michael Brown, the more recent victim, who comes better to mind as being left “[dead] in the street” than does Martin — is inflammatory but not careless. Lamar is keenly aware of the destructiveness of white racism and spends nearly the entirety of this song discussing it, but he’s also made his career through vivid close-study of the results of institutional abandonment. The parade of death visited upon black people by the caprices of law enforcement and the justice system is viscerally horrifying, but white racism has more ways to end black lives prematurely than with a mere badge and a gun.
[9]
Alfred Soto: Hoarser, even clumsier, Kendrick Lamar is mad as hell — the only job he can envisage getting is in the penal system, if he isn’t sent up the creek first. As a salvo, it’s powerful, but he’s sacrified craft for message’s sake.
[6]
Luisa Lopez: Kendrick Lamar’s voice sounds like it’s being stretched across a grate: it’s full of holes where the wind comes rattling through and where it snags is where it hurts. He shoots out verses like keeping them would be too painful. The only comparison I can think of — not really to compare, but to spin the song in a new context, to see what it looks like when it’s lit by something else — is Kanye’s “Hold My Liquor”, which is a similar exodus of grieving hatred, turning love into gin that won’t stop flowing, the way “The Blacker the Berry” takes the impossibility of leaving behind the stories we’ve already written for ourselves and turns them into a song that feels like a cage and sounds like one, too. Not a pretty thing, but then neither is the truth.
[7]
Micha Cavaseno: It’s a curious thing to see a man who counts among his best friends a Hoover and a Bounty Hunter, both large-scale organizations who are in fact responsible for a tragic amount of lost lives, find the time compare them to Darren Wilson. Such are the mechanics of Kendrick’s tedious little talking point, in which he shifts responsibility of the tragedy of violence in the black community askew. He’s a “writer,” as he described in his last bit of “radical” pandering. He’s just a writer with bad politics. The hypocrisy lies not with your fans, Duckworth, because outrage at injustice is not hypocrisy.
[0]
Brad Shoup: It’s been a little weird to see everyone break out the hardcovers for Kendrick’s tune, when a shelf full of other rappers remain unannotated. But his grain stuns, so. “i” was about fending off the bullshit; this is hosing it into the gutter… it’s less balletic, much more brusque. But the implications of that last couplet haven’t floated away on that fusion outro.
[6]
Michelle Ofiwe: In 2014, way too many thinkpieces pondered upon the supposed lack of activism demonstrated by hip-hop heavyweights; I personally think everyone really meant that not many rappers traded in gold chains for picket signs. Fair enough. Like many Black youths, I feel that my activism is just being unequivocally, unapologetically, and conspicuously Black. Lines like “I want you to recognize that I’m a proud monkey” make sense to me; they feel celebratory. A tentative predecessor to this song is James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” where Brown creates a powerful “tagline” to drown out the social broadcast of negative stereotypes. Kendrick diverts from this tactic to incorporate such messages into his last step of the “emancipation of a real n*gga,” where stereotypes and slurs are carved into your armor. Much like Kendrick’s message, there are still cracks in this armor, but no doubt you still feel a little stronger behind it.
[7]