"i," the lead single from Kendrick Lamar's second Interscope album, is destined to be a hit. This is a given. Released last Tuesday, the song has a cheery, upbeat message of self-love and familiar funk backdrop (a replayed version of the Isley Brothers' "That Lady"), which are broadly appealing, even inspiring comparisons (perhaps a bit overstated) to Andre 3000's "Hey Ya." And Kendrick Lamar is already one of hip-hop's few true crossover stars, an artist as apt to make an impact in kitchen table conversation as hip-hop circles. His Interscope debut was one of the best selling hip-hop records of the past few years, a rare critical and commercial success. While "i" wasn't universally beloved online upon release, few seem to doubt its popular potential.
But in 2014, this kind of success is hardly a measure of quality; if anything, for your average hip-hop head, mainstream enthusiasm has become a sign to steer clear. Not since the mid-'90s has middle America's taste in rap seemed so suspect. Maybe it's not surprising, then, that snap reactions to "i" were so divided. For a certain hardcore base, Kendrick stands in the role of hip-hop messiah, his music less art than religion, existing mainly to push dogmatic Positivity in the face of hip-hop's default "ignorance." The reaction to this kind of boosterism is generic cynicism—comparing "i" to Pharrell's "Happy" or "Hey Ya" or Macklemore (yeesh, guys), belittling it not for what it is—after all, these songs bear few similarities to each other in strategy, purpose, or aesthetics—but for what it represents—and by extension, the people it supposedly appeals to. Or as Jeff Weiss recently argued in his anti-"i" piece "The King & “i”: Hip-Hop’s Savior Complex & Kendrick Lamar’s New Single": "It’s genetically modified for the basics starting their Pandora station with 'Robin Thicke.'"
In this conflict, for both sides, the music exists as a caricature of positivity. Maybe this is unavoidable; Kendrick's catalog is already so freighted with Historical Importance that anyone who isn't 100 percent on board is made to feel a contrarian, further polarizing opinion. But even then, it's difficult to envision a less polemical record than "i." Certainly nothing about it screams "divisive." If there's one group its warm, chunky sound recalls most precisely, its '90s critical favorites Arrested Development. Like "Tennessee" or "Everyday People," it makes the most of a shining, pop-friendly, one-track-jack while embracing a message of transcendence in the face of struggle. It's part of why it's hard to imagine anyone taking issue with the message or music presented here. For this reason, those stuck on the record's supposed corniness are going to look ridiculous as "i" climbs the charts and infiltrates DJ playlists. Not because the song will be huge (corny and huge are hardly mutually exclusive), but because of the strategy used to get it to that point.
In other words, what is curious about "i" isn't that it's "positive," but how it sells positivity to an audience otherwise jaded by these appeals to our better selves. For Jeff Weiss, it fails. But his concerns about Kendrick's newly "saccharine" direction elide some of the ways in which this record is entirely contiguous with his past, and how "i" marks a significant step forward.
this record is entirely contiguous with his past, and marks a significant step forward.
When listening to the early Black Hippy work from around 2010, it is immediately apparent how exceptionally guarded each of the members were, bar for bar. The Internet is rarely mentioned in their music; imagery in Kendrick's is tied up in his past, in revolutionary iconography, in indirect phrasing and deft lyrical architecture. But nonetheless, his sound was shaped by this new interconnected world, an age of Twitter and comments sections and renewed levels of scrutiny. Rappers' bars today are vulnerable to meme-ification; Kendrick's seriousness was in part a byproduct of his refusal to make work that could be easily nailed down. He was purposefully oblique—a musical strategy that he began to leave behind on good kid, m.A.A.d. City, as his story snapped into focus. The album's autobiographical conceit forced our attention to each line.
By contrast, "i"'s concept is even more direct and purposeful. "I love myself," it says simply, unadorned by misdirection or mediated through metaphor. It makes him vulnerable, in a way he wouldn't have allowed himself previously—vulnerable to charges of corniness, to allegations that he's trying too hard to reach the suburbs. But though different in approach, the overall inspirational message isn't at all new to Lamar; "HiiiPower" pushes a similar line, albeit with a subtler poetic touch and more loaded cultural references and imagery. The political radical of "HiiiPower" has inverted his stance, hiding a subversive message in plain sight. He no longer needs to explicitly reference Huey P. Newton; the core fanbase that supports him is already on board. Now he's taking his moral argument to the broadest possible audience.
This explains why dismissing or cheerleading "i" for its outsized "positivity" is so shortsighted. Kendrick's explicit argument for self-love is a radical one, a method of coping with the worst the world can throw your way. Historically in hip-hop, the critique of "positivity" was that it whitewashed the realities that confronted black Americans daily. In a world of income disparities and violence, a carceral society that imprisons more of its own citizens than any developed country in the world, where Michael Brown's shooter still receives paychecks, and police tear gas protesters in the streets, Kendrick doesn't provide escapism; he offers a coping mechanism. It's in the record itself, the bulk of which is taken up by Kendrick's description of a chaotic and uncertain world—"There's a war outside and a bomb on the street/And a gun in the hood and a mob of police"—and the flawed, vulnerable humans within it, with references to depression, scars, and suicide. When he finally shouts, "I love myself!" after verse three, his voice has distorted into a shattered scream.
This is substantively different than Pharrell's "Happy" one-dimensional Paxil-burst—not that there's anything wrong with escapism. Nothing about "i" is inherently better than "Happy"—it's more concerned with the underlying necessities to reach the point Pharrell sings about so freely. Macklemore's neo-liberal approach is somewhat closer to Kendrick's, but focused less on the core problems than their symptoms, on preaching positivity. Perhaps all in all, "positivity" is not the most insightful lens through which to see Kendrick Lamar.
So what is? Two years ago, when KONY mania was flooding social media, writer Teju Cole wrote a piece for The Atlantic on "The White-Savior Industrial Complex." Like a continuation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s concerns about the "white liberal" in the "Letter From the Birmingham Jail," Cole tackled the counterproductive approach of oblivious white would-be do-gooders. But one of his most interesting points was an argument in favor of particular rhetorical gambit:
"There's a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights…People of color, women, and gays—who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before—are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as "racially charged" even in those cases when it would be more honest to say "racist"; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse."
Art is not the best place to articulate a complex political doctrine, nor is it an ideal space for didacticism or propaganda. Art is, however, particularly good for cultivating strategies that can overcome particularly complex problems. In a time when our behavior is overly guarded, when people are afraid to speak out except in veiled, compromised form, it's not positivity that is in short supply; you can find positivity everywhere. Instead, we have an urgent need for directness. A real peer of Kendrick Lamar's "i" is Lauryn Hill's "Black Rage (Sketch)," a direct argument in favor of black rage as the only possible strategy for certain forms of injustice. It's not 'positive' in a traditional sense; no one will confuse it with "Happy." But it is very much direct. Earlier Kendrick Lamar singles, like "Swimming Pools (Drank)," seem hedged in comparison: a trojan horse for a progressive message. "i" feels like a bold move in 2014 is because it dares to come right out and say it.
David Drake is a writer living in New York City. Follow him @somanyshrimp
