“And facing the world of artistic representation, we are always helpless; a fictional person dying of thirst has no mouth into which we can pour anything.” - Eric Griffiths
"I have saved a thousand souls
They cannot even save their own
I'm soaked in blood but always good
It's like I drunk myself sober
I get better as I get older."
- The Fall (from ‘Spectre vs. Rector’)
“Let us change the subject.
Pause.
For the last time.
Pause.
What have I said?”
- Hirst in No Man’s Land, by Harold Pinter.
Side A
Let’s start with something universal.
On his astonishing 2017 album, DAMN., Kendrick Lamar concludes a string of experientially-titled songs with ‘FEAR.’, a nearly 8-minute interrogation of a feeling that Lamar wants to argue is a primal inevitability of the post-lapsarian condition. Adopting multiple personas, he leads his listeners through a lyrical maze of painfully evocative images and clever rhetorical about-turns, about which I intend to discuss what might seem the most boring aspect: repetition.
Each verse finds Lamar at a different life stage, contemplating, respectively, his biggest fear at ages 7 (his mother), 17 (death), and 27 (to be discussed), and each verse plays different games of call-back and flash-forward with the audience, decreasing in ostentatious redundancy as the narrative comes closer to the present. We move from the sophisticated, nested repetitions of his mother’s scolding in verse 1:
Better not hear you got caught up
I beat yo' ass, you better not run to your father
I beat yo’ ass…1
… through the more straightforward, depressive anaphora of 17-year-old Lamar in verse 2:
I'll prolly die anonymous, I'll prolly die with promises
… to the more conventionally organised verse 3, which contains only two obvious repeated constructions. I want to argue that this third verse is in fact the one with the most to say about repetition and congruence, as Lamar surgically deploys his now-limited lyrical duplications to reframe the repetitive operations of the previous two verses.
The first repetition draws attention to related ideas roughly one-third and two-thirds into the 24-line verse. Nine lines in, Lamar tells us:
At 27, my biggest fear was losin' it all
… an admission that’s intriguingly qualified at line 20 with:
At 27 years old, my biggest fear was bein' judged
In addition to providing listeners with the aural satisfaction of hearing the kind of patterning the repetition-heavy album has talked them into expecting, I suggest that this cracked couplet gives us an insight into the particular way Lamar understands fear:
Earlier on DAMN., Lamar proclaimed himself “Mr. One through Five”, and here he exhibits a similar spirit-not-word approach to ranking. It is not actually possible to have two biggest fears - if one fear were as big as another, it would not be the biggest. The superlative logically excludes comparison, and Lamar takes advantage of this linguistic impossibility to subtly hint that, for him, being judged and losing it all are one and the same. From the perspective of the 27-year-old Lamar, if his fans, his God, perhaps even his mother, could see him in the judgemental light he worries his actions have cast, he’d lose everything that matters.
Understanding Lamar’s fears in this fashion - so personal and perspectival as to approach contradiction - retroactively accentuates incongruous expressions in the earlier verses, inviting us to consider Lamar’s hidden authorship in narrative quotations such as verse 1’s crescendoing:
I beat yo' ass if I beat yo' ass twice and you still here
… from the Old Testament figure of Lamar’s mother, in whom we might now detect a compassionate (if roughly expressed) concern, filtered through childhood terror.
So, too, are we encouraged to ask ourselves about Lamar’s investment in the over-arching fears that dominate the song’s structure. The song is bookended by a voicemail from Lamar’s cousin, Carl Duckworth, who implores him (and, by transitivity, the song’s listeners) to consider the justified anger and retribution of God. But verse 3’s linguistic trickery, with its equation of distinct fears joined at deep roots, should compel us to read this production quirk in light of the lyrical outro delivered by Lamar himself. Verse 3’s second run of repetition frets over the possible ways Lamar could be betrayed by his listeners, concluding with the ultimate poetic damnation:
What they hear from me would make 'em highlight my simplest lines
… a frightening possibility that serves as the springboard for the Lamar of the here-and-now to jump into a metadiscussion of his discussion of fear, pulling together ideas and song titles from across the record until he lands on a critical question for the album he namedrops in the song’s final rapped line:
And I can't take these feelings with me, so hopefully, they disperse
Within fourteen tracks, carried out over wax
Wonderin' if I'm livin' through fear or livin' through rap
Damn
The music Lamar produces becomes, in this telling, his case against judgement, a distillation of honest expression that will prevent him from becoming a latter-day Job, punished by God and fan alike. This is not the first time Lamar has considered the impact of his own work as commodity, as something listeners can consume to get inside his thoughts. Fittingly, though, ‘FEAR.’ finds Lamar with much shakier faith in his albums’ word than the bravado he displays, for instance, en route to his now legendarily provocative attack on the mediocrity of mainstream rap in his guest verse on Big Sean’s ‘Control’:
Bitch, everything I rap is a quarter piece to your melon
So if you have a relapse, just relax and pop in my disc
Even this Lamar-in-Control saw risks to his music, comparing its compulsive listenability to the drugs he has long disavowed. No surprises, then, that the impeachable Lamar of ‘FEAR.’ worries that his song will lead listeners down the wrong path, immortalising rather than transcending the fears he tries to dispel.
The comparison-contradiction manoeuvre carried out by his two ‘biggest’ fears in verse 3 repeats itself at the song’s macro-level. The fears Lamar catalogues seem to spring from different sources: his mother’s constant brow-beating, an epidemic of youth mortality, the fickleness of the music industry, the righteous, unpredictable wrath of God, the limitations of music as a redemptive art form. Attentiveness to how Lamar draws ideas towards each other, though, shows us a single tap root: Lamar’s own fearful perception.
But this perception is only a problem when it perceives a world with real threats to distinguish from those imagined. The surface reading that I’ve tried to complicate remains a reading. Indeed, as my phrasing implies, it’s the reading closest to us - surfaces are the first thing we encounter. Depending on which end of the telescope we look through, this song is all about Lamar, or all about the world at large. The genius of its construction is in how it keeps us guessing about how to hold our scope.
To conceptualise this song, emblematic of Lamar’s body of work, we can imagine a crude image of a bowtie, as might be drawn by a data-comfortable political risk analyst. Two triangles meeting at a shared point in space, like so:
Positioned at the bow, listeners can see both sides. And if we’re willing to look carefully, maybe we can see how it all ties together.
Side B
To witness the full spectrum of Lamar’s mirroring techniques we will need to consider the lightest of his lyrical touches. The various reflections in his guest verse on ‘Darkside/Gone’, from Dr. Dre’s Compton, are instructive.
We can pick up about a third of the way through the verse. Lamar has been detailing the realities of his success to a hypothetical listener, but, nine lines in, he pivots to a characteristically anxious examination of his abiding insecurity:
But still, I got enemies giving me energy
I wanna fight now
Subliminal, sending me all of this hate
I thought I was holding the mic down
I thought I was holding my city up
I thought I was good in the media
You think I'm too hood in my video?
But really, no clue, you idiot
Also characteristic is his use of multiple vocal tracks: my bolded emphases in the lines above highlight the words and phrases that are delivered as if accompanied by a chorus, though actually accompanied only by the digitally manipulated sound of Lamar’s own voice. A devoted listener (and, released just five months after the stratospherically popular To Pimp a Butterfly, ‘Darkside/Gone’ played to many such devotees) will recognise this willingness to mask and augment his natural voice with pitch-shifting and looping effects, but, as is his wont, Lamar uses this technique to new ends with every iteration.
Here, the vocal effects correspond exactly with line-end rhymes which tighten as the lyrical paranoia intensifies, Lamar’s assonance-spotlighting delivery accentuating the eventual contraction to four consecutive rhymed line endings. As the lyrics warn the listener of subliminal messages and hateful energy, the vocal production implicitly impels focus on the rhymes as conveyer of meaning.
The listener should take note, then, when the rhymes and their production underliners start operating differently, as they do in the next four lines:
I just can't help myself
Even when that record spin
Every now and then
you hang yourself
It would be a mistake to think that rhyming is abandoned in these lines. If anything, the rhymes intensify (for instance, Lamar’s syllable manipulation bundles “just can’t help”\“record spin”\“now and then”\“you hang your…” into a dense assonant block, before we even get into the “when”\“spin”\“then” triangle and the alliterative “eve”s that start two temporally related ideas). Nonetheless, the comfortable AA end rhyme of the immediately preceding section is frustrated by Lamar’s lingering pace as he switches to an ABBA pattern.2 When he finally closes the loop started at “I just…” he rhymes “myself” with “yourself”, a cruel joke at the expense of the eager rhyme-seeker, and a wily hint at the fracturing of identities that will dominate the rest of this verse and essay.
The root of this fracturing is revealed in the two lines highlighted above in bold and in the song by Lamar’s vocal editing. These lines - the most aggressive invocation yet of the imagined listener Lamar has been courting - are the hinge around which the verse turns. I’ve seen them interpreted as referring to Lamar’s competition in the rap industry, convinced to give up and “hang themselves” by his evident superiority.3 On this reading, Lamar can’t “help himself” in the same way Elvis can’t help falling in love - he figuratively can’t resist the temptation to deliver career-ending verses.
I don’t intend to argue against this reading. Rather, I want to argue with it, considering a complimentary, mutually-enriching interpretation. Lamar’s earlier discussion of video controversies keys us in here,4 as does the fact that he’s spent much of the verse trying and failing to relish in the spoils of his status. As he tries to “help himself” to what he deserves, and “help himself” live a better life, Lamar gets criticised, misrepresented and denied by the conservative (white) audience that baulked at his ‘Alright’ video. This listener considers his “record” (polysemic in its own right),5 and condemns him without needing more encouragement. The brutal wordplay here can be appreciated by imagining the final line with an extra object pronoun, elliptically left silent in Lamar’s delivery:
I just can't help myself
Even when that record spin
Every now and then
you hang [me] yourself
“You” is the first word Lamar speaks in this verse, and the staggeringly precise wording of these lines allows that word to refer simultaneously to those he considers his contemporaries and those who consider him their enemy. These layered puns create a superposition where polar opposites are united at the site of diverging interpretations in an identification of antitheses perhaps targeted most acutely at Lamar’s sizeable listenership of liberal white rap fans,6 who have one foot on each bank, appreciatively unpicking his lyrical elegance while contributing to the racist systems those same lyrics elucidate and attack.
‘Darkside/Gone’ shows us a Lamar at the peak of his ability to meld and metamorphose his subjects, pulling the listener from premise to conclusion with a rope of subtle semantic implications. Always the investment of the listener is paralleled with Lamar’s own investment in his topics of choice, as his stance unsteadies itself with each new interpretive postulate.
So what happens when the subject becomes what it has always already almost been: himself?
Side C
Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is a double album so awash with overt, structural repetitions and recognitions across its discs that pointing it out feels redundant (nonetheless, a favourite example: the title ‘The Big Steppers’ is first spoken on the third track of disc 1, while ‘Mr. Morale’ lends itself to a song-title on the third-from-last track of disc 2). By now, though, we’ve seen Lamar’s ability to précis his preoccupations on a granular level, and I shall suggest that the techniques I’ve been observing throughout this essay - lightly-emphasised lyrical ambiguities, thought-provoking repetition, open-ended puns - reach an apotheosising density across the album’s 73 minutes. In a suitably Lamarian pseudo-contradiction, though, this album-wide technical accomplishment can be best understood by considering key sentence-level moments.
The first critical line, for our purposes, occurs 109 seconds and one beat change in, as Lamar introduces a curious refrain that will dominate ‘United In Grief’, the album’s opener:
I grieve different
This line will be repeated another five times, with a further two variations that replace “I” with “everybody” and pluralise the verb. Clearly, Lamar wants us to pay attention to what he’s saying here.
And rightly so, because in three words Lamar has transmitted a multitude of possible meanings. The crucial ambiguity here comes from the use of the grammatically ill-agreeing adjective “different”, rather than the more obvious choices of the adverb “differently” or the noun “difference”. In a move he’s been perfecting since the beginning of his career, Lamar uses slang construction in a deliberate and expressive fashion, opening up possible interpretations and trusting that his listeners will intuit sensible rather than literal meanings.
In this specific instance, the word “different” fragments the sentence, forcing us to imagine a break in intonation, like so:
I grieve | different
The question we are left to ask is this: Does “different” act on “I grieve” (as in, “I grieve differently”), or does “I grieve” act on “different” (as in, “I grieve difference”)? Is Lamar saying he grieves differently from his listeners, or that he and the listeners share the burden of mourning a loss of difference? And since the sentence is constructed such that both possibilities will always be in play, could he be saying that he and his listeners all grieve the concept of difference, but in different ways?
This splitting of phrases into self-complicating, mutually reinforcing parts becomes a trend throughout the album, particularly when a sentence starts with “I”. The most obvious and confessional example - an example crucial to Lamar’s developing arc - comes in the second song on disc 2. On ‘Crown’, a song so repetitive it makes ‘FEAR.’ seem like it was written by Tristan Tzara, Lamar tells his listeners ad nauseam:
I can't please еverybody
In the context of a song about coming to terms with his inability to be an all-encompassing leader, this line could feel clichéd. That a leader can’t please everyone is the oldest lesson in the book. But ‘United In Grief’ showed us how seemingly simple sentences can morph into something more complex when they’re put under the microscope. Representing this line in a similar fashion to the grief fragments above, we get:
I can’t | please everybody
What if this line is not, as it initially seemed, one sentence, but two? Rather than imperiously telling his listeners that he has learned a trite lesson, Lamar would be begging them for help (“please everybody”) as he openly admits that he can’t wear the crown of the song’s title, can’t fill the role he’s been cast in, can’t exist without the help he’s supposed to deny (“I can’t”). This line breaks down even more fundamentally than ‘United In Grief’s repetition: depending on where listeners choose to divide it, it can be one sentence or two; hubristic pontification or desperate vulnerability. And because it can always be either, it becomes, somehow, both.
When Lamar openly rejects the greatness thrust upon him in disc 2 highlight ‘Savior’, he has been preparing the way for some time, a fact he acknowledges in an opening run of lines dazzlingly redolent of meaning:
Mr. Morale, give me high-five
Two times center codefendant judging my life
Back pedaler, what they say? You do the cha-cha
I'ma stand on it, 6'5" from 5'5"
Beyond being a worthy successor to the long tradition of jokes about Lamar’s short stature, this quasi-numerological passage encourages us to consider the difference between the last two stated numbers: a foot. In the context of the verse, this is the foot that backpedals, cha-chas and heightens Mr. Morale’s five. But in the context of the album, this is also the metrical foot - the core unit of sense and sensation, independent of and critical to the whole, out of which the record’s quicksand-rooted postures have been constructed. The unit Lamar has been playing with since disc 1 track 1, and, really, since the beginning of his career.
In a fashion we should expect by now, this identification is reinforced and problematised in equal measure, as ‘Savior’ closes out with an affirmation of the attention to detail Lamar demands from his listeners by expanding the body of consideration to include what, in poetry, is the foot’s opposite:
And they like to wonder where I've been
Protecting my soul in the valley of silence
This is where Kendrick-as-narrator - the outside, discursive identity - sits, in the silent resonances between and within lines. Through all the pauses, the beat switches, the metrical irregularities, Kendrick has told us what he really thinks. But how to listen?
Side D
Let’s start at the end.
Disc 2 concludes with a two-punch of public apologies. The first is ‘Mother I Sober’ (formatted on Spotify such that you could almost mistake the “I” for a vertical bar separating two songs, ‘Mother’ and ‘Sober’), a centrepiece of the album’s consideration of complicity and complex trauma. This song, which explicitly discusses his mother’s domestic abuse and his own compulsive womanising, sees Kendrick reckon with his need to contribute something positive to the world, a longing that he explicitly links to his complicated public role as a saviour:
I'm sensitive, I feel everything, I feel everybody
One man standin' on two words, heal everybody
But this remarkably (and, unlike many of the songs we’ve discussed, straightforwardly) honest examination of Kendrick’s contribution to the traumatic systems he is striving to reject lacks, for all its openness and contrition, the critical word “sorry”. Closer ‘Mirror’ rectifies this, with a calling card phrase that completes our triangle of fractured sentences and becomes the final line of the ‘Mr. Morale’ disc of the album:
I choose me, I'm sorry
We saw Kendrick starting down this road as early as ‘Crown’, and this line finally sees him accept that he does not want to be the saviour he’s positioned himself as, does not want to heal everybody, to please everybody. Kendrick apologises to his listeners for thinking he could lead them, and the cost of this apology is removing himself from the stage, taking off the crown.
Or is it?
We know the script by now. Breaking the claim down, we get two separate ideas:
I choose me | I’m sorry
On another line reading, just as available as the different castings of “different” in ‘United In Grief’, Kendrick is sorry - for the pain he so eloquently describes, for his role in the systematic wrongs he documents, for the grief we all share in our own particular way - but that has nothing to do with prioritising himself. If we apply the fragmentary approach we’ve been directed towards throughout the album, splitting the line into two discrete dactyls, Kendrick’s apology becomes much less specific but much more profound. Once again, contradictions are held in conjunction as Kendrick simultaneously apologises only for his emphasis on self-care, and apologises for everything on the album but caring about himself.
If you listen to the album on Spotify right now, ‘Mirror’ will segue into a final song, listed as featuring on disc 3. This is ‘The Heart Part 5’, initially released five days before the album, and only added to the Spotify listing a week after the full release. Its video, now serving as both prelude and encore to Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, hides a clue to the record’s ever-expanding sentences in plain sight, opening with the following quote attributed to Kendrick’s “oklama” alias:
When I first watched this video, in early May 2022, I considered the mid-sentence full stop, inscrutable on its face, a quirk of punctuation akin to the capitalised and periodalised song titles on DAMN. Now that the video has taken on a new role as recapitulation of the album it once preceded, though, this broken sentence seems to sum up the record’s themes and techniques:
By the end of Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, we can unequivocally say that Kendrick is. But as the full stop implies, he is not all of us.
And nor does he need to be, as the many reversals, recursions and reconsiderations of Kendrick’s outlook throughout the album should give us cause to revise our graphic representation of his music. By ‘Mirror’s last apology, the simultaneously maintained interpretive possibilities shouldn’t be limited to two competing depths joined at the surface. Instead, the many ways of reading Kendrick should look something more like this:
Little wonder that, sorry or not, he chooses himself, perhaps quieting in the process the dread that opened this essay. On DAMN., he articulated his core fears and anxieties as a need from his listeners - the same listeners he now neglects to choose. Concluding his position-stating ballad ‘FEEL.’, he once felt compelled to ask a fateful question:
I feel like the whole world want me to pray for 'em
But who the fuck prayin' for me?
The answer, we are now told, is Kendrick Lamar.
Unless otherwise stated,* all quotations sic, genius.com (the closest thing I can find to a dispositive source on rap transcription), with occasional noted emphases of my own.
*Read: agonised over in the footnotes.
Genius lists “Every now and then\ you hang yourself” as a single line, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why the editors are willing to separate the above-quoted “I wanna fight now” but not the similarly orphaned “Every now and then”, when, as enunciated in the song (Lamar delivers “every” as “ev’ry”) the lines have the same number of syllables.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the “you” before “hang yourself” is unstressed? But the majority of the other uncontroversially separated lines in the verse begin with unstressed syllables (as indeed would be expected in a verse that primarily employs the iambic foot). Maybe this line organisation was in the canonical (for genius.com) lyric booklet? But it’s not clear to me that the physical release of Compton even included lyrics in its booklet - I haven’t been able to track down an online scan and actual physical copies are hard to come by in 2023. Even if label-ordained verse organisational truth was included in the album’s booklet, Compton was much-hyped as a primarily digital release, launching as a promotional crossover with Apple Music. I’m tempted to read the physical release as an afterthought for the hardcore physical media completionists - should its curios dictate our understanding of a text designed, distributed, and (crucially) consumed digitally?
It’s entirely possible (likely, in fact) that the Genius editors (or the Aftermath compilers of their hypothetical Q document) are applying a principle of versification that’s unfamiliar to me. To anyone dedicated enough to still be reading this ceaseless digression of a footnote, I’ll admit here that I’m a relative layman when it comes to analysis of verse. My understanding and terminological array have been gleaned autodidactically from secondary sources, and this has no doubt left chasms into which I might fall at any moment. This alone would be a problem without the slippery complication of applying these English-Lit-undergrad-practical-criticism-exam techniques to a literary medium that only looks like traditional poetic verse. To what extent can principles for the construction and assessment of a medium historically (though not exclusively) bound up with writing be applied uncritically to the transcription of an entirely spoken medium? What (if any) transformations are necessary to ensure that these critical lenses fit the prescription of a medium relevantly different to the one that spawned them? Does any of this matter? I am not the critic to answer these questions.
All of which is to say that I present this section as 4 lines in full awareness of the fact that such a reading throws syllabic consistency out the window and contradicts my best available source, in the hopes that the reader concurs that this organisation makes sense - making the rhyme scheme intelligible and separating discrete ideas in a manner consistent with the verse’s overall arrangement.
In any case, my overall point about the function of delay in these lines should still stand.
E.g. on genius.com, haunter of these footnotes, where the line is annotated thus:
Kendrick really doesn’t know what to do on a track other than completely snap, causing some rappers to consider ending their careers.
From Genius again, annotating the above-quoted “You think I’m too hood in my video”:
…he has come under some criticism, mainly in the form of Geraldo Rivera and FOX News. Kendrick’s song “Alright”, it’s video, and Kendrick’s performance of it at the 2015 BET Awards were misinterpreted by FOX News as encouraging violence against police…. (sic)
Including your present reviewer.