Kendrick Lamar Gives the Dead a Voice and Leaves Himself a Problem

A voice in the first half of “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” can have a reason to ask for a song and a reason to distrust whatever song gets made. That seems to me the most demanding thing the record has to live with. A person can want to be remembered and fear having their life turned into supporting material for somebody else’s account of a neighbourhood. The writer willing to articulate that fear still gets the final opportunity to organise the words. Kendrick Lamar’s label edition of good kid, m.A.A.d city.

The track does remarkable work with how much time each voice is allowed. An interruption lets the listener feel the possibility of a sentence surviving its speaker. A fade can make someone’s effort to speak seem to be running against an arrangement that has already decided what it will preserve. Neither event has to be explained as a plot point before it becomes uncomfortable. The record has given the ear a person with an ongoing relation to the beat and then altered the terms of that relation.

Someone still controls the microphone

The continuity of the backing makes it hard to choose an easy moral division between the voices. The same room must accommodate a request, a grievance and an artist trying to account for himself. It would be more reassuring if each perspective were given its own clearly separate music. Shared accompaniment leaves a listener in a position where somebody can demand a hearing within the same space another person has learned to interpret as theirs. The argument has become an arrangement problem.

The turn toward prayer and a communal answer has two effects for me. It is moving because a set of exhausted voices finally receives a form of attention that asks something of living people. It can also feel as if the work has acquired a much more decisive way to understand what came before than the individual speakers had offered. A listener who found the interruption unbearable may welcome that relief. I would want the earlier objections to remain audible inside it.

One achievement of the record is that I cannot give the writer credit for representing the people in it and feel the problem has been addressed. The voices seem to have varying degrees of confidence that representation will do the job. Their doubts belong to the construction of the work as much as the tune does. I hear the song most clearly when that lack of agreement remains inside the decision to make it.