Penn: Morning Album Reviews — Kendrick Lamar (Finale Part three, day three) (Patreon)

1/19 Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 good kid, m.A.A.d city

It’s hard to feel like Lamar is a proper returning character, as I really only wrote about him the once, but man if it wasn’t nearly 2000 words covering both his feud with Drake and his surprise drop of GNX. My sister-in-law gave me a hard time for writing about it, on the logic that there are Black critics who can be writing about rap feuds. She had, apparently, read other white critics saying that no one should be coming to them for information about the feud, and fair enough, backing our Patreon for that would be weird, but... it got under my skin a bit. Cause, like, I’m well aware of my race, and try to be aware of its implications. I was raised in a pointedly and purposefully racist household. Hell, my whole country is pointedly and purposefully racist. I’m certain I’ve not shaken off all the damage that has done; I’d be suspicious of anyone who said they were sure they had. Unexamined biases are, by their very nature, unexamined. 

But I think it’s especially important for a critic to be as aware of their biases as they can be. Look at Robert Christgau, the critic after whom my Bluesky reviews were roughly modeled: short capsule reviews ending with a letter grade being perfect for a character-capped platform. He’s a really interesting man, in that he’s just reviewed a lot of records. No, like a lot of records. He starts in 1967, where his only A+ was the Beach Boys’ Wild Honey, which he praises for its “whimsy, candor, and carefully modulated amateurishness.” (If you’re guessing we rarely agree, you are correct.) I can’t actually find work from this 82 year old man from last year, so perhaps he’s finally retired, but he was still going at least until 2023, if not quite at his “455 records from 2009” pace. Anyone who writes that many reviews has to be some kind of interesting to me, but dear god that man is a solid mass of unexamined biases. His are primarily sexism, and over his nearly 60 years of criticism he sure has said some astonishingly sexualized and dismissive things about women artists. Of Nicki Minaj for Pink Friday he opens with the irrelevant and massively classy  “Not only are those not her breasts, at least not the ones her biologicals gave her, but her hair isn't really pink or, wink wink, straight,” (ooh, bonus racism!) which I suppose is an improvement from the record before where he praises her lack of “undue popping of coochie.” Or perhaps you prefer Tori Amos, of whom he only bothers to review Little Earthquakes, where he’s ”sure she's her own person and all,” giving the four subsequent records he lists only bomb or scissors emojis. Or his commentary about who Gwen Stefani ought to marry, or how many records Ani DiFranco has “hanging from her nose ring.” Which, yes, are all gross, but equally: it’s not good criticism anymore. “Ah yes, that old guy still doesn’t like women” isn’t actually interesting.

Anyway, I desperately wish neither to be gross nor uninteresting, and so my sister-in-law’s criticism stuck in my head a bit. Should I not have written about the Drake/Lamar feud? I didn’t think so, but I needed to stop and examine the question.

So, let’s talk about Kendrick Lamar. Pitchfork eventually decided they also wanted to esoterically feud  with Lamar and panned Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers with a 7.6 (while giving “Mother I Sober” best new track), and subsequently GNX with a 6.6 (while putting “Not Like Us” at #1 in their Best Songs of 2024). My professional opinion is that this is hilarious, but before that neurotic ambivalence, Pitchfork treated Lamar as a golden child, giving Best New Album to everything after his debut studio album, Section.80, and even that got an 8.0. Which, lol, cute. In my professional opinion, of course.

Meanwhile, my canonical favorite Lamar record is Mr. Morale though GNX is making moves on it, which would make Lamar one of the few artists that El and I share a favorite for, and that does amuse me. Anyway, I have love for Mr. Morale—it’s him doing confessional style storytelling steeped in jazz and soul. This is a mode he plays in throughout his career, but Mr. Morale just kinda runs along at a constant swagger. And, man, Pitchfork ain’t wrong about “Mother, I Sober.” 

But in terms of his Pitchfork-approved era, my pick is good kid, m.A.A.d city: a short film, no question. (I mean, it has a subtitle, who doesn’t love a subtitle?) I suppose this just means I’m a man of consistent preferences, as it basically Mr. Morale: Part One. (Yeah, his subtitle is better. I know.) 

I hadn’t actually realized that until today, though. I was looking at it on Apple Music and I didn’t recognize the cover art I kept seeing, but it was great. Cue me pulling the record off our shelf to discover that the vinyl edition has a boring photo of a vehicle as its cover. ugh.

It’s supposed to be a damaged polaroid of… you know, I’m just going to quote Lamar from an interview about it with BET here. “Two of my uncles, that's two of them, to the far right, that's my grandpa and a baby bottle next to a 40-ounce next to a gang sign, holding a kid.” The kid is, of course, a baby Lamar.

“It's not just music to me,” Lamar continues, ”This [record] is a story about the youth and the people that they call delinquents in my city. You look in the background and you see a picture on the wall of me and my pops… that photo just says so much about my life and how I was raised in Compton and the things I've seen through innocent eyes. You don't see no one else's eyes, but you see my eyes of innocence and trying to figure out what's going on."

Jump forward a decade, and we see another family photograph: Mr. Morale wearing his crown of thorns, a gun tucked into his belt, while in the back his partner is busy nursing their youngest child. We can still see Lamar’s eyes, but he’s in profile, looking at the child he’s holding. It’s his daughter’s innocent eyes that are trying to figure out the world this time. 

Both photographs are perfect, and begin the work of telling the story before the needle even drops. And at the end of the day, that’s what I love about Lamar: he’s careful. He’s a storyteller.

El and I saw him in Manchester a couple years ago. I wanted to meet the city before I had to draw her for the comic, and so we went to explore and photograph weird artist things like manhole covers, graffiti, and, inevitably, British pigeons. We had a free evening, El spotted the opportunity basically as we were getting on the plane, and it was just too funny to not go see an American as two American tourists so we made it a last minute addition to the itinerary. It was phenomenal, obviously, and I knew it would be, but I was nevertheless massively anxious about going, for basically the same reason my sister-in-law cited.

Of course, this was Manchester; we were not remotely the only white people at that show, and I knew we wouldn’t be. But, it wasn’t an anxiety about being out of place. Or at least, it wasn’t any more anxiety about being out of place than I have at baseline. It felt like it was a show that was not for me in a fundamental way.

That is, I think, equal parts true and ridiculous. 

I’m thinking about the Kendrick Lamar show where a white fan, Delaney, sings a slur on stage during the song “m.A.A.d city.” Lamar brings this incident up himself in “Auntie Diaries,” further solidifying my observation that it is just m.A.A.d. city part two, where he compares the slur to his own use of faggot as a young man. Ultimately “Auntie Diaries” forgives both Delaney and himself in the record’s last use of either slur. I remember people who got legitimately mad that he used the word faggot in that song, and I just don’t get it. It’s like people don’t understand narrative structure or something.

He was gentle with her about it, reminding her to “bleep one single word,” like he was talking to a second grader, before giving her a second chance to audible booing. People got mad at Lamar for that, too. There’s almost a theme developing here, isn’t there?

But at our show, there was no Delaney. Lamar was all flair and showmanship; silhouette and structure. Literally the opening act got lowered onto stage from above like an angel, and the whole performance was structured like an opera. Storytelling, again: the thing he effortlessly excels at. 

The crowd was invested in the show, and he had a lot of sing along sections for this majority non-Black Manchester audience, whose incomprehensible roar would audibly dip out as it, in unison, bleeped one single word every time. 

There can really only be so much connection at a live show, and it’s nearly completely artifice, but watching that crowd love this music, and loving the music with the crowd, I do think I belonged there. I just… needed to not be a Delaney. I can do that.

Which is where we wind back to my sister-in-law’s suggestion that it was problematic for white critics to write about rap feuds. While there are big, obvious ways a white critic writing about Black music can go wrong, declining to write about Black music at all as a white critic is definitely one of them. My sister-in-law isn’t the first family member to tell me to stay away from rap music, and my abusive cop father just isn’t my model for white allyship. 

Equally, there are, in fact, Black critics out there writing about rap, and if you’re a “reading music criticism” kind of person and not reading them, that’s pretty fucked up of you. So clearly there is a line.  I’m not the person to define that line, but at the end of the day art wants to be seen, studied and understood.  It invites curiosity. That is what criticism is for, when it is good: exploring different ways to experience and evaluate art. It’s reductive to a genre that is as rich and influential as rap to assert that there is only one true perspective to be had on it; that by writing about it as a white critic, one would have to be claiming to understand or trying to explain the Black experience to their readers.  (I don’t want only trans critics talking about Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, you know?)

Writing about art is a way to understand and appreciate it. It’s a way to share that understanding and appreciation with others. It is, as my father-in-law once put it to his other daughter, the only way I know how to worship.

Perfect for: setting up some Poetic Justice