That's what you're telling me: Penitentiary would only hire me.” His only solace is the classic hip-hop kind: trumpeting his blackness and flaunting his personal success, calling himself a "proud monkey" driving a “muscle car like pull ups.” The Lamar of "The Blacker the Berry" may not be a hypocrite, but the world has made him to feel like one.īut there’s a twist at the end of the song. In one devastatingly concise couplet, Lamar describes the psychological baggage placed on so many black men: “I mean, it's evident that I'm irrelevant to society.
This is no-filter, cathartic venting, part of a long tradition that includes Public Enemy and Kanye West. This revelation forces the listener to a deeper and broader understanding of the song’s “you”, and to consider the possibility that “hypocrisy” is, in certain situations, a much more complicated moral position than is generally allowed, and perhaps an inevitable one.I'm African American, I'm African I'm black as the heart of a fuckin' Aryan I'm black as the name of Tyrone and Darius Excuse my French but fuck you-no, fuck y'all That's as blunt as it gets, I know you hate me, don't you? Common’s “her” is not a woman but hip hop itself Lamar’s “I” is not (or not only) Kendrick Lamar but his community as a whole. Here, Kendrick Lamar reveals the nature of the enigmatic hypocrisy that the speaker has previously confessed to three times in the song without elaborating: that he grieved over the murder of Trayvon Martin when he himself has been responsible for the death of a young black man. In “H.E.R.”, Common reveals the identity of the song’s “her”-hip hop itself-forcing the listener to re-evaluate the entire meaning and intent of the song.
Next, the Chabon analysis: In this final couplet, Kendrick Lamar employs a rhetorical move akin to-and in its way even more devastating than-Common’s move in the last line of “I Used to Love H.E.R.”: snapping an entire lyric into place with a surprise revelation of something hitherto left unspoken. First, the Lamar couplet: "So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street? When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!" Kendrick Lamar - The Blacker The Berry By way of Genius, here's the newest Chabon work, released under the handle "Vanzorn" in a likely allusion to a 1914 comedic play about New York artistic life called Van Zorn. Chabon is on his new releases game, it would seem. That's because Chabon has just released his third annotation on the site, this one for "The Blacker the Berry," a Kendrick Lamar track that dropped yesterday.
Regardless, more folks will be learning about or buzzing about Genius today, especially fans of works like Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city. Or you could have heard from Genius when they admitted to SEO cheating and tweeted "I'mma rape you in your mouth" out of context (it was a lyric!). What would make one of America's best-read, best-employed, and just plain best music critics jump a particularly nice ship, wondered many? But maybe you were already aware of Genius for its $40 million dollar funding round or its Yale-bro founders. Perhaps you heard of the website formerly known as Rap Genius when it recently hired Sasha Frere-Jones from The New Yorker. The above account on the lyrics and text annotation site Genius will serve as proof. Michael Chabon, the Bay Area-living, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Telegraph Avenue just became a verified genius.
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