Not sure how I got to Part VII of this series, but here we are… trying to get back in the swing of thinking and writing now that I have the time to do so.
In this post, I want to try to tie together some of the ideas from my previous posts. This is a bit more think-out-loud than the previous ones, and I’ll start with a summary of where we’ve been. Kendrick Lamar and Macklemore were both up for a number of awards at the 2014 Grammy Awards. Macklemore walked away with the wins, but made a point of publicly apologizing to Lamar via social media. Several months after the Grammys, Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO, which increased scrutiny of how people of color were treated by law enforcement. The protests and actions following the shooting led to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement. Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, and the album was a critical and commercial success, and was touted as a watershed in the history of Black music and politics. Macklemore laid low for a while, and returned later in 2015 with “Downtown,” a song and video that worked really hard to connect him to the origins of rap and hip hop culture. Is Macklemore really a guest in the house of hip hop, or does he have a true claim to stake? Pretty soon, Kendrick Lamar starts showing up in all kinds of spaces that were pretty much off limits to rappers: a special session at the Society for Music Theory conference (which led to a forum in Music Theory Online) and winning the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2018 for his third studio album, DAMN. This got me to thinking about interest convergence, as summed up in the title of this series: “why Kendrick, why now?”
The way Lamar’s music sounded Blackness at that particular time made it ideally suited for co-option by white people who wanted to express their commitment to the calls for anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion that were in the air following the Ferguson uprising (and similar ones around the country). Most of the work done on Lamar’s music by music scholars was done by white scholars using tools designed for (or descended from) tools developed to study European concert music. Lamar’s sudden appearance in “legit” music circles did little for rap music but did serve as a marker of the kinds of performative diversity common in neoliberal institutions. The choice to include Kendrick and not, say, Drake is significant, given the overtly political nature of much of the former’s music. Lamar’s inclusion into university curricula recalls the early days of rap scholarship, when Public Enemy’s music was overrepresented in the literature, as Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton write about in their contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music. Rivers and Fulton also raise the issue of canon formation as a result of the scholarship focus.
(A few brief asides: there’s something to be said about evaluating music in terms of what sells and what’s popular vs. what is held in high regard by scholars/critics. It’s important to note that the way we consume music has changed significantly since Public Enemy’s heyday. And—full disclosure—I think Kendrick is fine. I personally don’t think I would call him “great”; he’s far from my favorite rapper and I’m not likely to study his music in any real depth beyond what I’m writing here—research is a kind of fandom, after all, no? So maybe my ambivalence toward his music is clouding my judgment here. Wouldn’t be the first time, I suppose—probably won’t be the last.)
Anyway… I’m not sure Kendrick’s music is broadly representative of the sound of rap in 2016, or 2018, or 2022, so the choice of these institutions to focus on him and his music is significant, and the enduring legacy that comes with such attention has the potential to distort what the rap landscape really looked like in these years. Furthermore, I’m not convinced that canons in general are a good idea, and in the case of rap music, I would contend that they’re anathema to the very localized nature of the music.
I think I’ll stop here for now. Your thoughts, as always, are welcome.