Michael Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, has annotated the final lyric of Kendrick Lamar’s new track The Blacker The Berry for Genius. The line in question goes: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street?/ When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?/ Hypocrite!” You can read Chabon’s interpretation – in which he refers to Common’s track I Used to Love H.E.R – below.
Genius (which was formerly called Rap Genius) has hired New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones. The website occasionally sees artists explain their own lyrics, and Rick Rubin recently provided commentary on Jay Z’s 99 Problems and Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt.
“In this final couplet, Kendrick Lamar employs a rhetorical move akin to—and in its way even more devastating than—Common’s move in the last line of “I Used to Love H.E.R.”: snapping an entire lyric into place with a surprise revelation of something hitherto left unspoken. In “H.E.R.”, Common reveals the identity of the song’s “her”—hip hop itself—forcing the listener to re-evaluate the entire meaning and intent of the song. Here, Kendrick Lamar reveals the nature of the enigmatic hypocrisy that the speaker has previously confessed to three times in the song without elaborating: that he grieved over the murder of Trayvon Martin when he himself has been responsible for the death of a young black man. Common’s “her” is not a woman but hip hop itself; Lamar’s “I” is not (or not only) Kendrick Lamar but his community as a whole. This revelation forces the listener to a deeper and broader understanding of the song’s “you”, and to consider the possibility that “hypocrisy” is, in certain situations, a much more complicated moral position than is generally allowed, and perhaps an inevitable one.”
