The graphic shows how drug use has bewildered young people in society. The conflict view, in particular, affirms that people typically run to become better known and rich. The line shows a black man who has little prospect of success, and the pain medicines show how the use of drugs has damaged their chances of success. Though the song's Isley Brothers sample makes it seem breezy, Lamar has said in interviews that the track's supposed to be a tool to use against one's own self-hatred it's not an expression of contentment, but of struggle.The view of conflict is linked to the song’s lyrics since it highlights the spread of poverty and drug usage in society. His recent single “I” was a jaunty self-affirmation that struck some listeners as corny and others- Grammy voters-as charming. Lamar has long rapped about loving yourself in a culture that degrades you, but he's exploring that theme more and more lately, it seems. Ambiguity and internal conflict are as much his muses as inner-city life is.īut those muses don’t have to be separate, and the most interesting interpretation of “The Blacker the Berry” comes from fusing them. City, where he continually insists that he’s the good kid of the album title even as he's dragged into a world of drugs and crime. Complex's Justin Charity hears Lamar as "wondering whether police brutality and gang violence aren't overlapping tragedies." And at, Michael Chabon (yes, that Michael Chabon) suggests that the final couplet makes listeners “consider the possibility that ‘hypocrisy’ is, in certain situations, a much more complicated moral position than is generally allowed, and perhaps an inevitable one.” This reading lines up with the rest of Lamar’s output, from that “dead fucking center” lyric I mentioned to the narratives on 2012's Good Kid, M.A.A.D. National Cuisine Is a Useful Illusion Reem Kassis
But when we don't have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us?”), it at first comes across like an attempt to invalidate complaints about police aggression in Ferguson and elsewhere by raising the issue of “black-on-black crime.” Which is an empty attempt to change the subject, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others have argued:
Echoing divisive comments Lamar made to Billboard recently (“What happened to should've never happened. At the beginning of each verse he confesses to being “the biggest hypocrite of 2015,” but we don't understand what he means till the closing words: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street, when gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!” The surface message: The narrator of the song has killed black people: What right does he have to be mad at whites who have done the same?
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.
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?
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