Kendrick Lamar Is My Therapist: My Cali Upbringing Revisited Via ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’
pop! pop! pop! tak! tak! tak!
We get in position — our bodies faced down on the carpet of our duplex. It was LA in 1994.
I can’t remember how many times I heard guns firing in my neighborhood, but on this day it was different. A bullet flew through my parents’ bedroom window and made its way to my bedroom closet.
The damage to our home was of little consequence when the police found the body of a teenage boy in front of our garage.
The number of bullet holes in the garage door didn’t match up to the holes in his body. I will never forget, after all had gone quiet, the sight and sound of my father using a garden hose to clear away the puddle of blood in the alleyway.
The violence on our corner raged on with no end in sight. The LAPD even asked my parents if they could put us up in a hotel and use our home as surveillance.
My mother and father gave a look to the police that was similar to when I asked them if I could stay up longer. That was my first lesson on no snitching.
This was LA in the early nineties. Gang-related violence was at an all-time high and our house, the corner house, was one of many that witnessed the carnage.
My father, mother, brother, and I lived on the corner of McKinley Ave. and E. 120th st. It was in a neighborhood with Watts to the north and Compton to the south. The Magic Johnson Park was within walking distance and the only place I was allowed to go besides my neighbor’s house. I was in middle school and we were in the middle of a war zone. The Bloods down McKinley and the Crips down 120th.
At the age of 12, this was my normal. A couple of years earlier, the LA riots were spurred by the acquittal of the police officers charged in beating Rodney King.
I remember sitting in my mother’s yellow Toyota Corolla with my 1 year old brother in his carseat. She wanted to make a quick stop at a bank to withdraw money.
She didn’t see the scene happening at the Circuit City behind the bank. It was being raided. My brother and I sat in our parked car as people ran by with TVs, radios, whatever they could get their hands on.
From the LA riots to the gang violence by our home, it was hard for me at age 12 to articulate what was happening. For years, gang members fired shots around and eventually into my home, killed innocent people, and terrorized my neighborhood. How is it possible that I could see the very personal and very real tragedy of violence while learning to see social injustice?
For me, this wasn’t some theory in a textbook, but something to really grapple with in my own life. This is what Kendrick Lamar’s album is all about. The complexity of what it is to be human and, more specifically, to grow up black in hood America.
Kendrick Lamar’s latest album, To Pimp A Butterfly, got me thinking about my Cali upbringing again — the tension between seeing the error in an individual’s ways and the larger societal context that would lead to a negative outcome. I learned that multiple truths can exist at the same time.
I could have succumb to the belief that if only the gang members in my hood would pull themselves up from the bootstraps, lift their pants up, stop the “black-on-black crime” then everything would be right with the world. Even my 12 year old self knew that was bullshit and there was more at stake.
Kendrick Lamar’s music helps to further tie it together for me. To Pimp A Butterfly is a story about growing up black in the hood, reaching a level to escape the trappings of the hood, realizing we still need to fight to get truly free and defining what freedom looks like.
Here are just some of the lines that resonated with me the most:
Hood Politics:
From Compton to Congress/it’s set trippin’ all around/Ain’t nothin’ new, but a flow of new DemoCrips and ReBloodicans/Red state versus a blue state, which one you governin’?
Hood Politics [Outro]:
So I went running for answers/Until I came home/But that didn’t stop survivors guilt/Going back and forth/Trying to convince myself the stripes I earned/Or maybe how A-1 my foundation was/But while my loved ones was fighting/A continuous war back in the city I was entering a new one
Blacker the Berry:
And man a say they put me inna chains, cah’ we black/Imagine now, big gold chains full of rocks/How you no see the whip, left scars pon’ me back/But now we have a big whip parked pon’ the block
Blacker the Berry:
So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street?/When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?/Hypocrite!
Alright:
When you know, we been hurt, been down before, n***a/When my pride was low, lookin’ at the world like, ‘Where do we go, n***a?’/And we hate po-po, wanna kill us dead in the street for sure, n***a/I’m at the preacher’s door/My knees gettin’ weak and my gun might blow but we gon’ be alright
Kendrick got me thinking again about my childhood in LA. As my Grandma would say, I became who I am by the grace of God. Yet, Kendrick reminded me that the revolution won’t be graceful. We can’t wait to be perfect first before we address social injustice.
Even Tupac, who shows up in a clever way at the end of Kendrick’s album, could express this tension in a line from his song “Dear Mama”:
And even as a crack fiend, mama/you always was a black queen, mama.
For me, Kendrick’s album is an invitation to see multiple truths in him as a person. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
This is exactly what Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly did for me. Prompted me to reflect on my own complexities and those of others while imagining what freedom can look like for all of us. Thank you, Kendrick.
