Something that's come up more than once in our class discussions is the idea of a modern-day prophet in popular music. While we are certainly not the first to say this, Kendrick Lamar has been identified by our class as the musician who comes closest to fitting this mold. Indeed, Kendrick is very much a cultural iconoclast. His albums have managed to be both critically acclaimed and wildly commercially successful. His collection of studio leftovers untitled. unmastered. (2016) was better than most other hip-hop projects that came out that year. He's given legendary performances at the Grammys and was the first NCAA halftime show. And now he has a freakin' Pulitzer. The dude is hot stuff right now. The discussions we've had about Kendrick paint him as a figure that our generation, the millennials, look up to and admire. He's been called a prophet. And when I think of a prophet in hip-hop, there's really only one other person who comes to mind: Tupac Amaru Shakur.
To be clear, I am not all that familiar with Tupac's music. I've heard a few songs and like most of what I've heard ("Keep Ya Head Up" is my favorite). One of the essayists in Secular Music & Sacred Theology, Daniel White Hodge, talks about Tupac as an evangelist in the post-soul context. He agrees with Quincy Jones, who said that "Tupac was touched by God[;] not very many people are touched by the hand of God." In his time, Tupac was the voice for the marginalized, unabashedly talking about growing up and living in life in poor neighborhoods. Sure, he had songs that were just as flamboyantly braggadocious and faux-violent as anyone else (see "Ambitionz as a Ridah" and "Hit 'Em Up"). But he also made songs about where God is in the world of the under-privileged. Songs like "I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto?", "Panther Power", "Lord Knows", and "Only God Knows" deal with the spiritual and the dirtiness of life. Systemic injustice and personal failure come up a lot in Tupac's songs, but also a sense of hope. The way Hodge describes him, Tupac absolutely was a prophet in his day, at least to his fans. Kendrick, I think, is a different kind of prophet. Yes, he invokes God in his songs, and he wields arguably more cultural capital than Tupac did. But I think that where Tupac was a beacon of light for people, helping them to point the way to the Gospel of the ghetto, Kendrick is emblematic of the existential anxieties my generation faces. Take Kendrick's song "u" from his 2015 masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly. In the song, Kendrick gets drunk and berates himself for not doing more to be there for a friend of his from Compton who was murdered while he was living the life of a glamorous celebrity. Kendrick gets downright depressive and suicidal, telling himself that even God thinks he's a failure. Two songs later, on "For Sale? (Interlude)", he feels the temptation by Lucifer to forget his community and lose himself in a life of materialism. On his 2017 album DAMN., Kendrick mentions several times the belief that he and America generally has failed God and that there will be a harsh judgment. In contrast to Tupac, who sought to uplift and evangelize, Kendrick brings a message of apocalypse. Perhaps this makes the idea of Kendrick Lamar as a prophet more true than in the case of Tupac. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible frequently told their audiences that God was displeased with the way they were living their lives and ordering society and that this would be costly. Kendrick follows in this tradition, using his platform to warn everyone that things cannot continue the way they're going, or punishment will come. Talking about a prophet walking among us today can be uncomfortable even for the most devoted Christians. We think of prophets only existing before Jesus's day, and that Jesus abolished the need for prophets at all. I too am hesitant to say outright that Tupac Shakur or Kendrick Lamar are at the same level as Amos and Micah. But, both men have messages that resonated and still resonate with their audiences. Both have used their status as rappers to talk explicitly about God and the relationship between God and God's people. It's an interesting idea to toy with, that Kendrick is a prophet with a dire warning to give us. I don't think I subscribe to it. But, the phenomenon of hip-hop prophets, like Tupac and Kendrick, is a fascinating one. One that says a lot about the power of popular music and its champions to speak to their listeners.
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AuthorSam Coker Archives
April 2018
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