In 2015, Kendrick Lamar was criticised for making what many interpreted as out-of-touch comments in the wake of the Ferguson riots: “What happened to [Michael Brown] should’ve never happened. Never. But when we don’t have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us?” Arguably even more provocative was his climactic line in 2015’s The Blacker the Berry, crying “hypocrite!” at those who lamented the killing of Trayvon Martin but who were also involved in gang violence. Yet by rapping in the first person, Lamar blamed himself as much as anyone, and the track’s even fiercer invective was aimed at an apocalyptically racist US: “Your plan is to terminate my culture.” This is a key part of Lamar’s overall musical project: a sustained, fraught, fallible and passionate inquiry into the forces that tear down and build up Black America.
Now, in The Heart Part 5 – the fifth track in his “Heart” series that began in 2010, and an expected inclusion on his new album Mr Morale & the Big Steppers, released this Friday – Lamar continues to consider these hard questions, but always couched in that wider context: America as a place where generations of racism, first federally mandated then institutionalised, have come to bear on his community.
