Kendrick Lamar has two reasons to rejoice as he has gotten himself two Grammy awards for his hit track, "i," on Feb. 8. However, he celebrated his win in an unconventional way, dropping a politically motivated single, called "The Blacker the Berry," says The Guardian.
"You hate my people," he says in the song's first verse. "Your plan is to terminate my culture." "The Blacker the Berry" is in stark contrast to a relatively upbeat "i" as the track solely focused on racism. He even directly referenced Trayvon Martin.
"So, why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang-banging make kill a n**** blacker than me / Hypocrite," the track says. His new single appears to target some of today's biggest community-related issues in the United States, namely, gang-related gun crime, police violence, and racial profiling.
Just last month, Lamar was blasted by some social media users for his comments on Billboard regarding the case in Ferguson. "What happened to Michael Brown should've never have happened," he said. "But, when we don't have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us?" His comments were criticized as "respectability politics," says MTV. However, "The Blacker the Berry" has placed his recent comments in a better light.
Lamar's latest single is produced by Boi-1da and Terrace Martin, according to Rolling Stone, and also features Assassin who made a memorable appearance in the chorus of Kanye West's "I'm in It." All together, they take aim at hypocrisy, institutional violence and, what Lamar refers to as, the termination of his culture.
"I'm the biggest hypocrite of 2015 / Once I finish this, witnesses will convey just what I mean / The plot is bigger than me / It's generational hatred / It's genocism / It's grimy, little justification / I'm African-American / I'm African / Black as the heart of a f****in' Aryan / I'm black as the name Tyrone and Darius," Lamar raps.
Even Michael Chabon, a Pulitzer-winning author for "Wonder Boys" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," praised his work and used a portion of his bars in an annotation posted on the website, Genius, according to Complex.
"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," Chabon wrote, according to Pitchfork.
Chabon even stated that Lamar's "i" single was actually not about the rapper but about the community as a whole. "This revelation forces the listener to a deeper and broader understanding of the song," he wrote. "Hypocrisy is, in certain situations, a much more complicated moral position than is generally allowed, and, perhaps, an inevitable one."