Kendrick's Big Steppers
John Prine
I always return to this quote from John Prine: "Writing is about a blank piece of paper and leaving out what's not supposed to be there."
Those are not words in vain. No one who has listened the titular song from "Bruised Oranges" forgets this anecdote:
My heart's in the ice house, come hill or come valley,
Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley,
On a cold winter's morning to a church house
Just to shovel some snow.
I heard sirens on the train track howl naked, getting neutered.
An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter
Just from walking with his back turned
To a train that was coming so slow.
Prine understands your shock and responds:
You can gaze out the window, get madder and madder,
Throw your hands in the air and say "What does it matter?"
But it don't do no good to get angry, so help me I know.
For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter,
You'll become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there
Wrapped up in a trap of your own chain of sorrow.
Prine was not necessarily a believer in minimalism. But in four stanzas, 128 words, less than 800 characters Prine captures all of life's irony and complexity. We wonder who his paper provider was.
And Prine sang of the same themes as Kendrick has throughout his career. Prine was occasionally angry at current topics, though in a smolder - listen to "Some Humans Ain't Human".
Albert Murray
Henry Louis Gates once described the 20th century as Albert Murray's century. Reading "Omni-Americans", you wonder if Murray bagged the 21st century as well.
The evidence inside and outside of "Omni-Americans" is incontestable - the contributions of the American Negro (Murray's word, which, though outdated, I will honor here, without intentional malice on my part) have had as equal or greater an impact on American culture than any of the other archetypes which, for simplicity's sake, as we are talking about a Kendrick Lamar album, I will say are White and Native American. The WASPs may have their Constitution, cobbled together from some successful and failed European states, but the Negro has the blues, the first - really, myself having thought it through from antebellum America's literature and art - stylistic idiom. It's not the sole style, but it came first. It is an expression of human individualism that could only come from American law and culture.
So to talk about American White and Black being separate, distinct races on the same soil sharing the same culture, and not in a judicial or economic sense (in a practical sense, essentially), seems foolish to me, especially given the evidence. The topic of "two Americas" has puzzled me for a while, because, regardless of skin color, everyone speaks glowingly of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Basquiat, Run DMC, Sidney Poitier, Michael Jordan and Oprah alike. And to clarify, I speak on the topic of identity specifically, and not of material circumstances. Even if a person identifies as Nubian or Islamic, they are still American - these things are not mutually exclusive, in fact there is certainly space where they meet.
So for Kendrick to talk about race in "Worldwide Steppers" in the way he does, I can't help but think that it's...stupid, to be honest. That he thinks having sex with white women is of significant moment, that he relates the act to vengeance, that he thinks that it serves the point of the song which is to demonstrate that even our minor acts are destructive, the thought process is stupid. It's amateurish. Quite frankly, it's immature. Is he really trying to establish moral equivalency for killing, having sex and eating?
This immaturity pervades the whole album. In order to demonstrate something, Kendrick must be against something: against the system, against other musicians, against women, against himself. From a logical standpoint, how do you create something through negativism alone? Kendrick is always coming to false conclusions in his songs, because he believes that if something is wrong, its opposite must be right. That is really stupid. It's not enough to constitute proof, but when I think of the flaws of this album I glance knowingly at my volume of "Omni-Americans".
Jay-Z
This is all just stuff Jay-Z covered before. It's amazing Kendrick took "4:44", seemingly doubled the word count, and only got halfway through that album's thematic material. Kendrick keeps returning to events of no moment, like arguing with his spouse or taking his daughter to school, so that when he does come to something of moment, like his proximity to sexual abuse, you can only shrug and say, "What does that have to do with the material before?"
No editing and no filter mean there is no narrative. It's not all that different from Tim Robinson muttering to himself that he doesn't want to be anywhere anymore after his prank show fails. This is in stark contrast to "4:44" which is extremely tight. You could possibly leave some material off, but every verse in it is distinct enough that it doesn't matter. As I mentioned in its review, every track forwards an overall character arc, and each track in itself has an arc. Jay does not need to rely on negativism to believe in the happiness of people; he has experienced it through his wife and children, and his entrepeneurial success.
This is a boring album. The night the album dropped, as I listened to it, I declared to a friend this is a pretty bad record and that, given the subject matter, people would give it 7.5 - 9 reviews. Because people think that social media is their lives - hold up, the people in social media think social media is their lives, and so when Kendrick comments about their little lives they think an earthquake is coming. There is no earthquake - you are going to continue doing what you were doing regardless of what he was going to say. Only a few reviews got it right: this is, by all evidence, an incohesive album. He is literally repeating the same subject matter from one song to the next with no resolution to the issue he has presented. And you will say, "Oh Popular Thoughts critic, this shows how wrong you are, he is presenting an issue that can't be solved," so then why does he need to feel the need to keep bringing it up in the same exact way over and over? There is a limit to everyone's patience.
There are really only two songs that are interesting: "N95" and "We Cry Together". "N95" makes the listener unconsciously gulp: awkwardly titled, it reminds one of Trumpian discourse, of almost approaching a controversial topic only to U-turn into something irrelevant. But here Kendrick addresses the concept that we put a mask over our lives; we try to hide our lives in unnecessary shit in order to cover our flaws. He commands the listener to "take off the foo-foo / take off the clout chase, take off the wi-fi", only to declare the listener as "ugly as fuck", admonishing them: "Two ATMs, you steppin' to what?" It's a great monologue that commands the audience's attention, worthy of a single, though after the initial rush it becomes rather routine.
"We Cry Together" feels all too real: it feels like you are in that apartment with that couple feeling awkward as you take sides with one person, then the other. It's pretty fascinating. It demonstrates, along with "U" from "To Pimp A Butterfly", that Kendrick's skill is not really in song-making, but in writing as a pure skill.
Kendrick
Which leads me to the true topic at hand: this album is simply not a good album because the writing is bad.
No one really gives a shit about his "philosophy" on current events. His philosophy is literally no different than what is in the minds of 300 million Americans currently. People are able to convince themselves or pretend to themselves that it is somehow notable or enlightening, but I cannot. (This all of course feels quite similar to The Boondocks' hit single "Dick Riding Obama". On another tangent, what is surely proof of cosmic irony, Drake recently had the balls to say what Kendrick wanted to say for his recent album "Honestly, Nevermind" in the Apple Music release, of note this one particular line: "I can’t remember the last time someone put they phone down, looked me in the eyes and asked my current insight on the times".)
Kendrick is really not a bad writer of prose, of poetry even. Take this, frankly influential, couplet from "XXX.": "Tell me what you do for love, loyalty and passion of / All the memories collected, moments you can never touch." The first line's "of" hangs without a subject directed to it, because it doesn't need one - we know who he is speaking about. That "of" is rhymed with "touch"; the first line transitions from the impersonal "love", "loyalty", "passion" to concepts extremely personal: "memories", "moments". Alliteration is perfect: "love", "loyalty", "passion", the fluidity of the l's and o's is wonderful. I mean, it really remains to be seen if "DAMN." is lightning in a bottle. Kendrick has always been shallow in his "public" albums: "Butterfly", "Big Steppers". "DAMN." does not feel it needs to take on quote-unquote big topics like black culture and society and the like, it focuses largely on human emotions, his own emotions, and boy does it deliver, it feels Tolstoyan.
But the real issue is whether Kendrick can play it cool: to be a novelist without saying you're a novelist, to be a musician without saying you're a musician. That remains to be seen.