Kendrick Lamar’s Music Reflects The Trauma Of The Forced Relocation Of Black People
Barefoot babies with no cares
Teenage gun toters that don’t play fair, should I get out the car?
I don’t see Compton, I see something much worse
The land of the landmines, the hell that’s on earth
Kendrick Lamar, Complexion (A Zulu Love)
Travel has been at the center of the African-American struggle with itself since African-Americans were invented. The African-American was literally born traveling — seeing American sunlight for the first time while stepping out of the hellish artificial womb constructed by people who only expected a third of its inhabitants to survive. As a people, we’re constantly relocated, forced to uproot families to find opportunity in America or avoid the end of a noose. And when we’re not physically moved, the city literally moves around us as districts are reformed to keep us out of schools or to prevent us from affecting an election. The Black family in America has never been allowed to grow roots because roots are stability and stability is too much of a threat to a system that has found little use for us since the end of slavery.
Travel as trauma is still with us. The idea of success and “leaving the hood” has often been conflated with the idea of “selling out.” The concept of mobility — upward or otherwise — has always brought unease. The basis of iconic shows like The Jeffersons and Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air center around the struggle to stay close to our roots while enjoying the fruits of our achievements.
And then there’s Compton — a city ravaged by travel. Believe it or not, Compton was a relatively safe neighborhood throughout the first half of the 20th century. Then the African-American middle class moved in…and the White people fled. Because White people can do that. The Shelley v. Kraemer Supreme Court decision of 1948 reinforced the 14th amendment and struck down housing discrimination based on race, allowing middle class African-Americans to move into Compton. Almost immediately, White neighbors put their For Sale signs in their front yards. Compton soon became segregated with White Flight crippling the city.
Sadly, when White Americans travel, they can take resources and opportunity with them. And that’s exactly what they did when they left Compton. White Flight — evasion from Black neighbors — decimated Compton. Resources left. Schools deteriorated and ultimately Compton became “the hood.” The erasure of the Black middle class and the neighborhoods they occupied led to the Compton we saw in Boyz n The Hood. A once-quaint suburbia became one of the landmarks for crime and violence in America.
This is the Compton we see in Kendrick Lamar’s music — a veritable wasteland of violence left behind when the White population took their resources and White America’s care and attention with them. Like the American slave, Compton (and its residents) became a victim of relocation.
The acts of traveling and forced relocation have impacted the Black community from slavery to Compton, and Kendrick holds on to these themes in his music.These themes of relocation’s impact play themselves out in the way Kendrick treats methods of travel in his music. He pours every lyrical sin and fault into the act of traveling — thus cars and hotel rooms are presented as versions of Hell that he can’t escape from. In Good Kid, Maad City, the now-iconic van represents a metaphorical Sodom and Gomorrahs where he indulges in sin and transforms into an immoral, worst version of himself. In To Pimp A Butterfly, his car becomes a literal Hell; the one thing keeping him from coming in contact with God. And hotels, airplanes and the separation from “home” are all used to symbolize his distance from happiness and Heaven itself. Sin and turmoil are all represented in the vessels Kendrick uses to travel in his music, and this literary tapestry is woven throughout the stories he tells in his albums.
In GKMC, the van Kendrick Lamar and his friends rode in became one of the central characters in story of the rapper’s journey from one side of town to the other to see Sherane. On the surface, it would appear that it’s Kendrick’s friends who are the reason for the devilish turn he makes in the White Toyota (“We on the mission for bad bytches and trouble”). However, the car is as much of a culprit of the immorality as the friends are. The air conditioner is broken, exacerbating Lamar’s hunger. The ventilation is such that even with the windows rolled down the car is a hot box for him to get high even though he’d chosen not to smoke…yet. The radio is blasting their gospel, Jeezy — perhaps a coy play on the muffled word of Jesus reaching their own hell of a car. Lamar is masterful at painting the picture of his car as a chaotic den of bad decisions — the haze is palpable and his lack of control is infecting. The refrain of Lamar saying that he’s usually not like this only highlights the fact there’s a negative influence at work.
In many ways, the van in GKMC is a slave ship on wheels, as Kendrick uses imagery to connect the two. The van is smoky, and he and his friends are “crammed” tightly in every seat. They’re hungry but only able to eat junk food. And the idea of time is fleeting, with the trip feeling like it lasted for eternity. When Kendrick and his buddies flee the home they burglarized, they take a rather straight path in one direction (a right, a left, a right and another left) that still somehow felt like a circular route to the MC (we was just circling life).
From “Peer Pressure” on through the rest of the album, we see the car as a character that invites images of sin and bad luck. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the climactic “Sing About Me/I’m Dying Of Thirst.” The song comes after an interlude in which Kendrick’s friend, Dave, gets killed when a bullet enters the van. The irony here is that the boys are firing out of their van and shot at before they can escape, dying before they can escape Hell.
The second verse of “Sing About Me” expands Lamar’s Tarantino-like world of self-references and multiple universes as it comes from the perspective of Keisha’s relative. Keisha is from Section.80’s story of a prostitute who was killed in the backseat of El Camino. “Keisha’s Song” culminates in the prostitute getting killed in the back of a car. Throughout the entire song, Keisha is victimized and treated as subhuman as she hops from car to car where men use her and discard her. The song begins with seven car horns honking (“The seven cars start honking, she start running like Flo-Jo”), mimicking the seven trumpets found in Revelations to signal the coming apocalypse.
Each verse of “Keisha’s Song” ends with a refrain of seeing a car parked and “In her heart, she hate it there but in her mind she made it where/ Nothing really matters,” the loss of morals found in the car so similar to Kendrick’s own fall from grace once he goes into the van in GKMC.
GKMC is all about death and how it follows the characters especially once they start traveling. Kendrick Lamar’s sophomore masterpiece, To Pimp A Butterfly, by contrast, is about surviving the travel and how it changes and destroys the survivor’s soul. Kendrick struggles throughout the album to maintain his sanity and desire to be successful despite the fact people back home are dying and suffering. K. Dot’s entire meltdown centers around his guilt for leaving the hood — an essential and classic side effect of the stress of relocation in the Black community.
Barefoot babies with no cares
Teenage gun toters that don’t play fair, should I get out the car?
I don’t see Compton, I see something much worse
The land of the landmines, the hell that’s on earth
Kendrick Lamar, Complexion (A Zulu Love)
Travel has been at the center of the African-American struggle with itself since African-Americans were invented. The African-American was literally born traveling — seeing American sunlight for the first time while stepping out of the hellish artificial womb constructed by people who only expected a third of its inhabitants to survive. As a people, we’re constantly relocated, forced to uproot families to find opportunity in America or avoid the end of a noose. And when we’re not physically moved, the city literally moves around us as districts are reformed to keep us out of schools or to prevent us from affecting an election. The Black family in America has never been allowed to grow roots because roots are stability and stability is too much of a threat to a system that has found little use for us since the end of slavery.
Travel as trauma is still with us. The idea of success and “leaving the hood” has often been conflated with the idea of “selling out.” The concept of mobility — upward or otherwise — has always brought unease. The basis of iconic shows like The Jeffersons and Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air center around the struggle to stay close to our roots while enjoying the fruits of our achievements.
And then there’s Compton — a city ravaged by travel. Believe it or not, Compton was a relatively safe neighborhood throughout the first half of the 20th century. Then the African-American middle class moved in…and the White people fled. Because White people can do that. The Shelley v. Kraemer Supreme Court decision of 1948 reinforced the 14th amendment and struck down housing discrimination based on race, allowing middle class African-Americans to move into Compton. Almost immediately, White neighbors put their For Sale signs in their front yards. Compton soon became segregated with White Flight crippling the city.
Sadly, when White Americans travel, they can take resources and opportunity with them. And that’s exactly what they did when they left Compton. White Flight — evasion from Black neighbors — decimated Compton. Resources left. Schools deteriorated and ultimately Compton became “the hood.” The erasure of the Black middle class and the neighborhoods they occupied led to the Compton we saw in Boyz n The Hood. A once-quaint suburbia became one of the landmarks for crime and violence in America.
This is the Compton we see in Kendrick Lamar’s music — a veritable wasteland of violence left behind when the White population took their resources and White America’s care and attention with them. Like the American slave, Compton (and its residents) became a victim of relocation.
The acts of traveling and forced relocation have impacted the Black community from slavery to Compton, and Kendrick holds on to these themes in his music.These themes of relocation’s impact play themselves out in the way Kendrick treats methods of travel in his music. He pours every lyrical sin and fault into the act of traveling — thus cars and hotel rooms are presented as versions of Hell that he can’t escape from. In Good Kid, Maad City, the now-iconic van represents a metaphorical Sodom and Gomorrahs where he indulges in sin and transforms into an immoral, worst version of himself. In To Pimp A Butterfly, his car becomes a literal Hell; the one thing keeping him from coming in contact with God. And hotels, airplanes and the separation from “home” are all used to symbolize his distance from happiness and Heaven itself. Sin and turmoil are all represented in the vessels Kendrick uses to travel in his music, and this literary tapestry is woven throughout the stories he tells in his albums.
In GKMC, the van Kendrick Lamar and his friends rode in became one of the central characters in story of the rapper’s journey from one side of town to the other to see Sherane. On the surface, it would appear that it’s Kendrick’s friends who are the reason for the devilish turn he makes in the White Toyota (“We on the mission for bad bytches and trouble”). However, the car is as much of a culprit of the immorality as the friends are. The air conditioner is broken, exacerbating Lamar’s hunger. The ventilation is such that even with the windows rolled down the car is a hot box for him to get high even though he’d chosen not to smoke…yet. The radio is blasting their gospel, Jeezy — perhaps a coy play on the muffled word of Jesus reaching their own hell of a car. Lamar is masterful at painting the picture of his car as a chaotic den of bad decisions — the haze is palpable and his lack of control is infecting. The refrain of Lamar saying that he’s usually not like this only highlights the fact there’s a negative influence at work.
In many ways, the van in GKMC is a slave ship on wheels, as Kendrick uses imagery to connect the two. The van is smoky, and he and his friends are “crammed” tightly in every seat. They’re hungry but only able to eat junk food. And the idea of time is fleeting, with the trip feeling like it lasted for eternity. When Kendrick and his buddies flee the home they burglarized, they take a rather straight path in one direction (a right, a left, a right and another left) that still somehow felt like a circular route to the MC (we was just circling life).
From “Peer Pressure” on through the rest of the album, we see the car as a character that invites images of sin and bad luck. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the climactic “Sing About Me/I’m Dying Of Thirst.” The song comes after an interlude in which Kendrick’s friend, Dave, gets killed when a bullet enters the van. The irony here is that the boys are firing out of their van and shot at before they can escape, dying before they can escape Hell.
The second verse of “Sing About Me” expands Lamar’s Tarantino-like world of self-references and multiple universes as it comes from the perspective of Keisha’s relative. Keisha is from Section.80’s story of a prostitute who was killed in the backseat of El Camino. “Keisha’s Song” culminates in the prostitute getting killed in the back of a car. Throughout the entire song, Keisha is victimized and treated as subhuman as she hops from car to car where men use her and discard her. The song begins with seven car horns honking (“The seven cars start honking, she start running like Flo-Jo”), mimicking the seven trumpets found in Revelations to signal the coming apocalypse.
Each verse of “Keisha’s Song” ends with a refrain of seeing a car parked and “In her heart, she hate it there but in her mind she made it where/ Nothing really matters,” the loss of morals found in the car so similar to Kendrick’s own fall from grace once he goes into the van in GKMC.
GKMC is all about death and how it follows the characters especially once they start traveling. Kendrick Lamar’s sophomore masterpiece, To Pimp A Butterfly, by contrast, is about surviving the travel and how it changes and destroys the survivor’s soul. Kendrick struggles throughout the album to maintain his sanity and desire to be successful despite the fact people back home are dying and suffering. K. Dot’s entire meltdown centers around his guilt for leaving the hood — an essential and classic side effect of the stress of relocation in the Black community.
