Kendrick Lamar’s latest album ‘GNX‘ features a cover with the artist posing on a ‘black Grand National’.
This becomes a symbolic celebration of black culture, heritage and politics, which characterizes the album in particular and his discography in general. General Motors produced 547 cars of the GNX, or the 1987 Buick Grand National model, which has many layered meanings entwined with the long history of car appreciation in West Coast rap history. The ‘64 Chevy Impala signified West Coast car culture and it was linked to rap music by Eazy-E’s definitive line “Cruisin’ down the street in my ‘64” on his track ‘Boyz-N-Tha Hood’, while the car also appeared on the music video for Ice Cube’s ‘It Was a Good Day’. The ’63 Impala SS featured in Dr. Dre’s video for ‘Still D.R.E’, and signified the position of cars like the Impala and the Corvette in black music and culture.
Kendrick’s homage to the 1987 GNX is hence a rekindling of a memory of culture and territory, to trigger both exalting and excruciating memories of critical celebration initiated by early rap artists, its centrality in hood politics and the Christian faith, and also its connection to the reality of communal and domestic violence and sexism, as well as capitalist exploitation into what has become “commercial mainstream hip-hop”.
1987 was the year Kendrick was born, just like the all-black, GNX with a V6 engine and rear-wheel drive – it being a limited-edition model symbolises Kendrick himself. Like the GNX, he is also small yet powerful, and a unique and complex celebration of black culture. The car is the newest addition to the series of ‘authentic’ black symbols he has used to define himself as a black cultural icon, particularly in his recent beef with his contemporary, Drake.
The historical beef kept me on the edge of my seat in CRC 101 as Kendrick and Drake went tit-for-tat against each other, dropping criminally powerful diss tracks over five days, tearing each other apart. But the rap battle was also a field of serious allegations, with Kendrick accusing Drake of being a pedophile, sex addict and exploiter of black talent over the tracks euphoria, 6:16 in L.A., meet the grahams and Not Like Us, and Drake retaliating by mocking Kendrick for his physical stature, accusing him of physically assaulting his fiancée, and also of being a false saviour for the black community. So, both violence (domestic and social) as well as black heritage become two central points of the ‘diss-course’.
One major point of difference between Drake and Kendrick, among critics, is the former’s production of catchy and uncritical songs unable to tap into more complex sociopolitical issues of the time, while the latter situated the many convolutions of black collective identity as central to his entire body of work. Kendrick’s critically acclaimed 2022 album ‘Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers’ offered a deeply personal and scathing look into the convolution of male ego and racial and sexual violence in the black community, after which he featured in Future and Metro Boomin’s track ‘Like That’ off their 2024 album ‘We Don’t Trust You’, where he retaliated on fellow rapper J. Cole for placing Kendrick, Drake and himself on the “big three” of modern rap, in his feature with Drake titled ‘First Person Shooter’. What seemed to many as Kendrick dismissing any equation between his peers through a trinity and positioning himself as the G.O.A.T., with the now iconic line “Motherfuck the Big Three, nigga, it’s just Big Me”, only advanced into the historical battle of diss tracks between Drake and Kendrick (with a quick appearance and exit from J. Cole and a Kanye West remix of Like That), producing hard-hitting tracks but also serious fodder for critical thought, in terms of the free use of allegations of domestic violence, racism, sexual trafficking and even pedophilia being exchanged against each other.
With his major hit, ‘Not Like Us’, produced by DJ Mustard, Kendrick certainly sealed his victory lap over the feud. The song kept alive the serious allegations against Drake while also ‘rebuilding peace in LA’, with its 90s’ West Coast style production and the music video that quite literally brought together the people of Compton, Kendrick’s hometown and the home of many great West Coast rappers. Kendrick’s sixth studio album, GNX, thus became the aftermath of a year-long rap battle that only solidified his position firmly in the centre of not just rap, but black culture.
McKittrick and Weheliye in their 2017 paper ‘808s & Heartbreak’ describe the “boom-bap-blonk-clap” bass sound of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, digitally ‘emulated’ after its commercial failure and discontinuation in 1984, as part of a cultural memory of the African American community, inextricably and injuriously linked with physical and social memories of sexual and racial violence. The reverberating bass of the 808s, as they note, “intersects with and interrupts black life discursively and physiologically, as heartbreak”. Kanye West, or Ye’s 2008 album ‘808s and Heartbreak’, very much like the Roland TR-808, was not exactly celebrated widely at its time, but has been astronomically influential since, and is also wound up closely with ‘heartbreak’, not just personal but cultural.
Ye played a critical role in innovating aesthetic and affective soundscapes subverting prototypical symbols of the ‘Gangsta Rapper’ epitomised by the rise of hip-hop moguls and gatekeepers but also maintained by exploitative corporate commercialisation of rap to carer to the consumption of a dominantly white audience. Therefore the contemporary debate on the Kendrick-Drake beef draws much from older tensions of exploitation and authenticity in representation of black culture. A separate article could be written on Ye’s influence as a creator, in terms of sampling, sociocultural commentary, musical and artistic aesthetics leading even into new fashion ventures and more, but more importantly on how he fractured the ‘Gangsta’ representation of rap with an alternate rap aesthetic influenced by high art,, designer fashion, architecture and more. This helps contextualise the rise of Drake and the tension now between him and Kendrick, but it also problematises certain assumptions on the history of hip-hop, house music that with the introduction to a wider market, evolved into Gangsta Rap under gatekeeper change. Kanye has travelled on a more inconsistent and problematic than politically informed path of late, while his tracks like ‘Diamonds From Sierra Leone’, ‘New Slaves’, ‘Black Skinhead’ and ‘Jesus Lord’ offer strong critiques of racial exploitation of black labour and creativity under neocolonialism worldwide. His influence and presence is always evident in a conversation the marketing and aesthetics of modern hip-hop, and the tensions between faith and violence, counterculture and conservative expressions in rap.
All the tracks in Kendrick’s GNX are fundamentally connected to black politics and culture, but different to the very personal style of his works hitherto addressing himself primarily. GNX addresses the audience and their cultural values instead. This is a transition from the more introspective tone of Mr. Morale, and has started to emerge over his beef with Drake, which was also largely about the appropriation and commodification of rap into producing a culture of fetishizing black women and glorifying violence in black communities. In both ‘euphoria’ and ‘Not Like Us’ he accuses Drake of using black artists like Future, Lil Baby, 21 Savage and Young Thug like a “colonizer” to build up his reputation as a black artist.
Kendrick’s constant reminder that the message of rap precedes everything echoes in the diss tracks and extends to GNX. He proclaims his message to be a “revelation” and not a “song” in ‘tv off’, while ‘man at the garden’ and ‘reincarnated’ feature his use of Biblical symbols alloyed with allusions from rap history, to talk about the different personal and collective crises within modern black culture. Hence, the symbol of the GNX is once again a reminder of authentic representation of rap and black culture, sieved and separated from the “Gangsta, Pimp, Ho Trifecta” of commercial, mainstream rap which sociologist Tricia Rose argue cater rather to a predominantly white audience and consequently instigate existing racial fears against the black American community. This resonates both in contemporary artists like Ye and Kendrick but also in rap pioneers like 2Pac, whose tracks like ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ and ‘Hail Mary’ celebrate black women and black culture, while also critically engaging with the politics of state incarceration and entrenchment of territorial and sexual crime in black neighbourhoods. Kendrick’s ‘The Heart Part 5’ from Mr. Morale emerges here as a powerful and painful love letter to the hip-hop and the hood, addressing all its heroes and villains.
In GNX, Kendrick brings together multiple artists like SZA and LA rappers like Dody6, Lefty Gunplay, Roddy Rich, AzChike and others while also making symbolic, lyrical and stylistic references to giants of black music culture like Luther Vandross, 2Pac and Nas, but also to some highlights of modern black culture, like referencing the famous 2011 YouTube video of Supa Hot Fire’s rap battle parody, in ‘peekaboo’. On the first track ‘wacced out murals’, he launches a ‘fuck off’ in “plural”, while also proudly positioning himself as a seminal link to the past of whacked-out murals of the rap greats. He goes one step further to say, “fuck your hip-hop”, to emphasise the need to literally and figuratively adopt sobriety against propaganda and corporate appropriation of hip-hop culture and in his vision, by industry plants like Drake, which also corroborates with the ending of ‘euphoria‘ where he says “fuck the industry too”. The next track ‘squabble up’, along with its music video, is a party anthem celebrating Compton, much like his ‘Pop Out: Ken & Friends’ concert on Juneteenth this year, where he celebrated the significance of June 19 in black cultural history by bringing together all black neighbourhoods of California and concluded the show through a symbolic unity of famous L.A. street gangs like the Crips, Bloods and Pirus. His song ‘DUCKWORTH.’ from ‘DAMN.’ references his father’s involvement with the street and prison gang ‘Gangster Disciples’, which also has a significant place black political and cultural history.
The subsequent tracks address different obstacles of modern life, in love, community, selfhood and mental health. ‘luther’, featuring SZA, is a soulful dialogue (sampling Luther Vandross in the intro) envisioning a world of mutual love and partnership defeating personal and collective pain. But with tracks like ‘man at the garden’ and ‘reincarnated’, Kendrick integrates biblical symbolism to explore how social injustices of the time create a chaotic selfhood and fractured spirituality. An interesting parallel to ‘man at the garden’, musically and lyrically, is Nas’ 2001 song ‘One Mic’, which similarly tackles spiritual conflicts and identity crises amidst police brutality and systemic racism. Nas and Kendrick both thank God for their unique talent of songwriting and rapping, through which they believe in bringing forth a cultural revolution. Both tracks start with a quiet, muffled beat to ascend into a tight lyrical section with a hard beat.
‘reincarnated’, perhaps the lyrically and politically most impactful track of the album addresses the systemic exploitation of black culture and expression by the capitalist and consumerist market culture. Sampling 2Pac’s song ‘Made Niggaz’, Kendrick also introduces vocal inflexions and lyrical flows very similar to Pac. Kendrick’s ‘emulation’ of Pac also responds to Drake’s attempt earlier in the year to diss Kendrick with an AI-generated feature of 2Pac. Kendrick’s ‘reincarnated’, on the other hand, is an exquisite reimagination of Pac’s political vision stylised by biblical references to the Book of Isaiah, while also engaging in a conversation with God addressing his deeper and egotistical desire for power, something he must overcome to find true forgiveness and compassion. He refers to Isaiah 14 which elaborates the fall of Babylon and the restoration of biblical Israel. He alludes to black artists like John Lee Hooker and Billie Holiday, and possibly others, who he believes to reincarnate as him to produce a truly authentic, celebratory yet critical expression of black social, cultural and creative realities. The song, like its successor, ‘tv off’, also referencing Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, is in a way an address to the black community, to look inwards, towards faith, love and sobriety, by ‘turning the tv off’ and shutting out the toxicity of mainstream culture. Kendrick interestingly reminds me here of John Milton, in not only his possible recontextualization of Satan’s fall in ‘reincarnation’ as Milton did in ‘Paradise Lost’, but also in producing a simultaneously religious and political work with universal acclaim.
As Milton scholar Stanley Fish argued, his epic is a spiritual ‘intangling’ with the Christian and specifically Puritan spirit of resurrecting the fallen man through labour and love, and thus its subject is the Christian reader, not God, Adam or Satan. Similarly, in GNX, the subject is the black community, and the album is a cultural and political reminder against the exploitation of black voices under mainstream discourses.
Kendrick’s ‘Watch the Party Die’, released on Instagram in September, which is referenced in ‘wacced out murals’, also addresses the replacement of violent and misogynist representations in rap music through more spiritual explorations of the self, name-dropping Christian rappers like LeCrae and Dee-1 in appreciation for their upholding of Christian values against mainstream media and commercialised hip-hop culture. But like many Gangsta rap songs, as Robert Tinajero notes, the Christian rhetoric in rap is an exploration of Jesus’ sufferings, not an endorsement of the institution of the Church, which is instead linked with the history of colonial enslavement of African people brought into North America.
But as scholars like Tricia Rose, Katherine McKittrick and Alexander Weheliye and others have studied, mainstream rap is also intricately connected to the realities of sexual and racial exploitation, and there must also be caution in celebrating artists like Kendrick Lamar, who while accusing Drake of being a sexual predator, drew much flak for collaborating with Kodak Black on Mr. Morale and performing on Juneteenth with Dr. Dre, both of whom have had sexually abusive records with women. The free-use accusations of abusing women hurled against each other during the Kendrick-Drake feud also raise concerns about how women are viewed in the discourse, which corresponds to Tricia Rose’s critique of mainstream rap representation. Rap legends often have complicated records of criminality and abuse, whether it is 2Pac, Ye, Jay-Z and others, and thus their appreciation demands criticality and caution. As McKittrick and Weheliye notes, the 808s are ’emulations’ of the physical and cultural memory of violence and exploitation that disrupt black social lives.
Therefore, the takeaway from Kendrick’s discography would be to adopt a sincere dismantling of one’s gluttonous ego and to embark on a spiritual transformation of the individual and the community, while the horror would be an uncritical crowd that, contrary to Kendrick’s beliefs, is in fact ‘slow’ and ‘dumb’ when they celebrate the bars and the beats over the message. The horror is the violence, sexism and exploitation that persists in the fleeting frames of fame where the spiritual and political message of the rhetoric is lost under the content rush that is allowed only a superficial impact, so that a haunting track like ‘meet the grahams’ accusing Drake of serious sexual crimes can be immediately replaced by ‘Not Like Us’ as audiences sing along credulously to “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor”. But with major cracks such as these in the bedrock of culture, there is always a light of hope beaming through.
Edited by Yatin Satish
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