And the cover art hadn’t even been released yet. Lamar’s upcoming album was becoming radically divisive, in the sense of estranging our actual selves from what we thought we knew about ourselves. Some douchebag intelligentsia rep even deigned to annotate, i.e., legitimize and co-opt, the meaning of the song’s self-lacerations on Rap Genius 1. The song turns the tables and goes beyond the limit of the discourse, and the question becomes: “Towards what ends is Kendrick working?' The journalism establishment seemed uneasy as to its implications, but knew celebration was necessary if only for assimilation. The song fully embodies the tactics and rhetoric of Black Lives Matter, until the last line, when it’s not been about that at all. The song’s irony is that Kendrick’s excoriation of White America turns out actually to be one of himself. The song begins with an indecipherable chant, mutter, of which all that can be reasonably deciphered is “Black, black, black.' Then, “Six in the morn, fire in the street burn, baby, burn, that’s all I want to see.' With its industrial wails in the background, no other song has so fully rendered the bitter spectacle that America watched live on television: Ferguson- burning, looted, and rioted.

“The Blacker the Berry' was released during the height of anger and paranoia over the police brutality outrages. We were excited but just where was Kendrick taking us? Nothing could prepare us then, for the shift back to, not just darkness, but apocalypse.

The charts reflected audience’s hesitancy. City of course couldn’t last, but the change seemed hasty, like right answers adopted merely for the sake of their being correct. But with this transformation, there was of yet no backstory.

Was K-Dot going commercial? Not in the sense of hits, Good Kid, m.A.A.d. Its feel-good message of self-love seemed almost too easy to some listeners. “i' had hit the airwaves a couple months earlier. The timing was wrong if only in being a little too perfect. Perfect Sound Forever: Kendrick Lamar- Untitled Unraveled KENDRICK LAMARĪs I lead this army, make room for mistakes and depression-ĭisclaimer: The sequence of events gets shaky from this point on.

Untitled unmastered 2 genius