6 ms·

Damned with Praise: The Meaning of Kendrick Lamar

89 points by ElonsMosque 9y ago

btown 9y ago
Paywall can be bypassed by opening link in an incognito window, FYI.
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  I'd love it if this could be the default in browsers. I want to select individually which sites should be allowed to store any type of state.
  - unreal37 9y ago
    Firefox, Chrome et al exist to serve ads. That's where they get their funding. That's who pulls the strings. Turning off cookies would kill that model for revenue.
    - ihaveajob 9y ago
      You're spot on for Chrome, but I don't think you're familiar with Firefox and the Mozilla foundation.
    - Hupriene 9y ago
      Just to clarify and provide some supporting documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing Mozilla makes money by providing users to companies that make money from ads.
    - unreal37 9y ago
      Mozilla Foundation reports $500 million per year in revenue. From search engines, primarily Google. So, they're not turning on "private browsing" as the default.
  - nvr219 9y ago
    In Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/DtI419U.png https://i.imgur.com/DtI419U.png uncheck "Accept cookies from websites" and then individually set your allowed sites in "Exceptions"
    - brndnmtthws 9y ago
      Cool, nice to know about this. I'm still (slowly) switching from chrome back to Firefox.
- MaysonL 9y ago
  Or by setting Safari preferences to open economist.com pages in Reader mode. Preferences -> Websites -> Reader
perfmode 9y ago
the Jeff Dean of the rap game...
- arionhardison 9y ago
  I 100% agree, and he is needed more now than ever as rap/hip hop are becoming diluted by non AA cultures. I remember the first time I heard To Pimp A Butterfly. I instantly got the feeling that this was made for us (AA). I have not felt that way since the first time I listened to "Makaveli". If anyone reading is not familiar with some of K.'s earlier work you should go checkout Hol Up, ADHD and rigamortis.
  - team_america 9y ago
    >diluted by non AA cultures Your comment reminds me of a German leader who didn't like his race diluted. As a minority myself I always wonder what makes comments like this acceptable as long as it's not coming from whites.
  - lostgame 9y ago
    >> I remember the first time I heard To Pimp A Butterfly. I instantly got the feeling that this was made for us (AA). I think, more importantly, it was also made specifically for white folks who needed to hear the message. Sure, everyone I know in the AA community knows Kendrick...but they’re also already vehemently aware of the issues. I’m glad TPAB had the reach it did. Not only is it, message-wise, one of the most important pieces of media in the last 10 years at least, but from a compositional, production standpoint, it still has yet to be surpassed. Many will try. I’ll be shocked if any succeed for the next decade. What TPAB does, for white folk like me, who can’t directly relate to the message, is prove that we should be acknowledging these issues from the white community...as some of the most talented African-Americans in the world got together (Dr. See, Pharrel Williams, Flying Lotus, just to name a few?) to just project this hyper-clear message to everyone - the African-American community is intelligent, brilliant, socio-politically aware AF and are fully capable of putting forward a message in a far clearer way than I’ve seen most white folks do in the last decade. I mean, let’s face it. Can we name one album from all the top 40 white producers or musicians that has meant half as much in the last ten years? This is the most important message that TPAB brings. For all the damage hip hop did to the AA image in the early 00’s, it’s worst era by far, TPAB is undoing.
alexashka 9y ago
What are people getting out of this article? For me, it read like a typical album review that has no point besides getting clicks from people who mistakenly look for insight from entertainment.
- arionhardison 9y ago
  For me it provided insight on how white America views rap (specifically K.). As a long time fan of his I have always wondered of people outside of the AA community recognized his greatness or if it was generally accepted that Macklemore deserved to win that grammy.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    I liked the article, but I didn't see anything in the article that I would be willing to project on more than a tiny slice of white Anericans. Certainly no valid generalizations.
- snakeboy 9y ago
  Do you really think that there is no insight to be gleaned from art?
  - alexashka 9y ago
    I said from entertainment - and the answer is yes, almost none, most of the time. Every now and again, you get a movie like The Matrix, that's both entertaining and thought provoking. Those are entertainment unicorns, as evidenced by the sequels that had nothing thought provoking left, but were still somewhat entertaining. When it comes to art - if you knew how much shit art gets made and never sees the light of day, you could argue entertainment and art are both equally devoid of almost any value, including insight, to anyone.
- mlevental 9y ago
  yea man no insight to be found whatsoever in war and peace, Iliad, 2001 space Odyssey, the wall, waiting for Godot, Lolita, Carmen. if it's not obvious I'm being facetious: there's immense insight in "entertainment". good kid maad city, tpab and damn are masterworks of poetry/song. just because you don't understand them doesn't mean they're not valuable.
bardworx 9y ago
This was fascinating. When I was 15 I read Tupac's The Rose That Grew From Concrete, which helped me understand my neighborhood (I was the only white guy). Kendrick Lamar brought similar feelings in me. The toughest album to listen to is Section 80; It’s not polished but it’s powerful. To find focus in this comment, I suggest that we all look for ways to improve our own understanding and compassion. If you've “made it”, please consider doing something for others. Monetary help is great but if just 1 in 100 people donates their time it might render higher impact. Teach code in a local school, sort clothing in good will, work in your particular house of worship, or lend a hand in a soup kitchen. I apologize if I sound preachy, that is not my intent.
- olalonde 9y ago
  > Monetary help is great but if just 1 in 100 people donates their time it might render higher impact. I believe this was debunked numerous times.
  - aantix 9y ago
    Source?
    - olalonde 9y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism-where-charity-and-rationality-meet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism... http://www.charityscience.com/blog/why-donating-may-be-better-than-volunteering http://www.charityscience.com/blog/why-donating-may-be-bette...
      - bardworx 9y ago
        While these sources main point is to research where money goes and argues against quitting your job to donate time it does not infer, imply, or make a case, for or against, volunteering vs giving money. Yes, a donation is better then quitting your job to join the peace corps, if you are under qualified. [note: peace Corp does not take random folks. They look for specialized professionals. https://www.peacecorps.gov/volunteer/volunteer-openings/ https://www.peacecorps.gov/volunteer/volunteer-openings/] Please watch video I linked to above. Donations are great; So is volunteering a bit of your time in your community to educate, or at least incurage, folks to strive for betterment.
krrishd 9y ago
Super excited to see something hip-hop related at the top of HN, especially Kendrick. For anyone looking to understand why he's likely one of the best lyricists/storytellers of our time, here's some recommended songs from him: * Sing About Me, I'm Dying Of Thirst * Momma * Wesley's Theory I'd recommend checking out his projects as a whole (Section.80, Good Kid m.a.a.d City, To Pimp a Butterfly), but those songs distill a lot of what's best in him.
- ElonsMosque 9y ago
  Agreed, I would also add: Collect Calls The Art of Peer Pressure How Much Dollar Cost (Obamas fabourite song) Blacker The Berry FEAR
  - lostgame 9y ago
    Up voting for ‘How Much A Dollar Cost.’ What a fucking track.
  - krrishd 9y ago
    All good additions, totally agree. So much solid work to choose from.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gt_ 9y ago
  and sourcing it didn't require venturing beyond economist.com
- shams93 9y ago
  His choice of side musicians is amazing as well, he had Joe Limberg who has been mixing jazz trumpet and hip hop since 1992, lots of really incredible musicians get to work on his records and you can hear it in the end result. Maybe I'm slightly biased because I played with Joe in a couple jazz groups in the 90s but this music is so exciting because LA has this long history of jazz and Lamar ties together that legacy with the future forward vision of hip hop. He's not necessarily the greatest rapper ever some of his stuff is over produced and over exaggerated, nobody is perfect but the way he ties together the history with the future is exciting.
gxespino 9y ago
Always get confused with punctuation outside of quotation marks. Then I realized I was reading The Economist.
sysalphUS 9y ago
The article actually gets some of the finer points of the content in the album. To Pimp A Butterfly was really refreshing but DAMN hit me way harder. I must have spent about 3 or 4 days listening to it on repeat. It has a lot of really deep meaning, complete with some hard hitting contradictions, which the article mentions. It made me say “damn!” out loud several times.
lokut 9y ago
I don't understand what people are getting out of this review. It seems like a shallow interpretation of the album in the context of his previous work, and just settles to make insightful-sounding claims with weak evidence to support. Making assumptions about the artist's motivation for the album with respect to current social environment is not a useful review; speculations don't add to the discussion. And, superficial statements such as "[h]is hypocrisy is part-performance, part-confession," are failed attempts at enlightened commentary that only serve to provide pseudo-sustenance to a post lacking real critical value. It's hard to point out the unbalance of the themes in this album, while comparing it to themes proposed in To Pimp a Butterfly, and attempt to claim that the juxtaposition of emotions in DAMN is really just "a sense of emotion overpowering the artist." Am I the only one seeing this, or is this article in need of some deeper analysis?

89 points by ElonsMosque 9y ago

btown 9y ago

Paywall can be bypassed by opening link in an incognito window, FYI.

brndnmtthws 9y ago
I'd love it if this could be the default in browsers. I want to select individually which sites should be allowed to store any type of state.
- unreal37 9y ago
  Firefox, Chrome et al exist to serve ads. That's where they get their funding. That's who pulls the strings. Turning off cookies would kill that model for revenue.
  - ihaveajob 9y ago
    You're spot on for Chrome, but I don't think you're familiar with Firefox and the Mozilla foundation.
  - Hupriene 9y ago
    Just to clarify and provide some supporting documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing Mozilla makes money by providing users to companies that make money from ads.
  - unreal37 9y ago
    Mozilla Foundation reports $500 million per year in revenue. From search engines, primarily Google. So, they're not turning on "private browsing" as the default.
- nvr219 9y ago
  In Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/DtI419U.png https://i.imgur.com/DtI419U.png uncheck "Accept cookies from websites" and then individually set your allowed sites in "Exceptions"
  - brndnmtthws 9y ago
    Cool, nice to know about this. I'm still (slowly) switching from chrome back to Firefox.
MaysonL 9y ago
Or by setting Safari preferences to open economist.com pages in Reader mode. Preferences -> Websites -> Reader

perfmode 9y ago

the Jeff Dean of the rap game...

arionhardison 9y ago
I 100% agree, and he is needed more now than ever as rap/hip hop are becoming diluted by non AA cultures. I remember the first time I heard To Pimp A Butterfly. I instantly got the feeling that this was made for us (AA). I have not felt that way since the first time I listened to "Makaveli". If anyone reading is not familiar with some of K.'s earlier work you should go checkout Hol Up, ADHD and rigamortis.
- team_america 9y ago
  >diluted by non AA cultures Your comment reminds me of a German leader who didn't like his race diluted. As a minority myself I always wonder what makes comments like this acceptable as long as it's not coming from whites.
- lostgame 9y ago
  >> I remember the first time I heard To Pimp A Butterfly. I instantly got the feeling that this was made for us (AA). I think, more importantly, it was also made specifically for white folks who needed to hear the message. Sure, everyone I know in the AA community knows Kendrick...but they’re also already vehemently aware of the issues. I’m glad TPAB had the reach it did. Not only is it, message-wise, one of the most important pieces of media in the last 10 years at least, but from a compositional, production standpoint, it still has yet to be surpassed. Many will try. I’ll be shocked if any succeed for the next decade. What TPAB does, for white folk like me, who can’t directly relate to the message, is prove that we should be acknowledging these issues from the white community...as some of the most talented African-Americans in the world got together (Dr. See, Pharrel Williams, Flying Lotus, just to name a few?) to just project this hyper-clear message to everyone - the African-American community is intelligent, brilliant, socio-politically aware AF and are fully capable of putting forward a message in a far clearer way than I’ve seen most white folks do in the last decade. I mean, let’s face it. Can we name one album from all the top 40 white producers or musicians that has meant half as much in the last ten years? This is the most important message that TPAB brings. For all the damage hip hop did to the AA image in the early 00’s, it’s worst era by far, TPAB is undoing.

alexashka 9y ago

What are people getting out of this article? For me, it read like a typical album review that has no point besides getting clicks from people who mistakenly look for insight from entertainment.

arionhardison 9y ago
For me it provided insight on how white America views rap (specifically K.). As a long time fan of his I have always wondered of people outside of the AA community recognized his greatness or if it was generally accepted that Macklemore deserved to win that grammy.
- weberc2 9y ago
  I liked the article, but I didn't see anything in the article that I would be willing to project on more than a tiny slice of white Anericans. Certainly no valid generalizations.
snakeboy 9y ago
Do you really think that there is no insight to be gleaned from art?
- alexashka 9y ago
  I said from entertainment - and the answer is yes, almost none, most of the time. Every now and again, you get a movie like The Matrix, that's both entertaining and thought provoking. Those are entertainment unicorns, as evidenced by the sequels that had nothing thought provoking left, but were still somewhat entertaining. When it comes to art - if you knew how much shit art gets made and never sees the light of day, you could argue entertainment and art are both equally devoid of almost any value, including insight, to anyone.
mlevental 9y ago
yea man no insight to be found whatsoever in war and peace, Iliad, 2001 space Odyssey, the wall, waiting for Godot, Lolita, Carmen. if it's not obvious I'm being facetious: there's immense insight in "entertainment". good kid maad city, tpab and damn are masterworks of poetry/song. just because you don't understand them doesn't mean they're not valuable.

bardworx 9y ago

This was fascinating. When I was 15 I read Tupac's The Rose That Grew From Concrete, which helped me understand my neighborhood (I was the only white guy). Kendrick Lamar brought similar feelings in me. The toughest album to listen to is Section 80; It’s not polished but it’s powerful. To find focus in this comment, I suggest that we all look for ways to improve our own understanding and compassion. If you've “made it”, please consider doing something for others. Monetary help is great but if just 1 in 100 people donates their time it might render higher impact. Teach code in a local school, sort clothing in good will, work in your particular house of worship, or lend a hand in a soup kitchen. I apologize if I sound preachy, that is not my intent.

olalonde 9y ago
> Monetary help is great but if just 1 in 100 people donates their time it might render higher impact. I believe this was debunked numerous times.
- aantix 9y ago
  Source?
  - olalonde 9y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism-where-charity-and-rationality-meet.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/upshot/effective-altruism... http://www.charityscience.com/blog/why-donating-may-be-better-than-volunteering http://www.charityscience.com/blog/why-donating-may-be-bette...
    - bardworx 9y ago
      While these sources main point is to research where money goes and argues against quitting your job to donate time it does not infer, imply, or make a case, for or against, volunteering vs giving money. Yes, a donation is better then quitting your job to join the peace corps, if you are under qualified. [note: peace Corp does not take random folks. They look for specialized professionals. https://www.peacecorps.gov/volunteer/volunteer-openings/ https://www.peacecorps.gov/volunteer/volunteer-openings/] Please watch video I linked to above. Donations are great; So is volunteering a bit of your time in your community to educate, or at least incurage, folks to strive for betterment.

krrishd 9y ago

Super excited to see something hip-hop related at the top of HN, especially Kendrick. For anyone looking to understand why he's likely one of the best lyricists/storytellers of our time, here's some recommended songs from him: * Sing About Me, I'm Dying Of Thirst * Momma * Wesley's Theory I'd recommend checking out his projects as a whole (Section.80, Good Kid m.a.a.d City, To Pimp a Butterfly), but those songs distill a lot of what's best in him.

ElonsMosque 9y ago
Agreed, I would also add: Collect Calls The Art of Peer Pressure How Much Dollar Cost (Obamas fabourite song) Blacker The Berry FEAR
- lostgame 9y ago
  Up voting for ‘How Much A Dollar Cost.’ What a fucking track.
- krrishd 9y ago
  All good additions, totally agree. So much solid work to choose from.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gt_ 9y ago
and sourcing it didn't require venturing beyond economist.com
shams93 9y ago
His choice of side musicians is amazing as well, he had Joe Limberg who has been mixing jazz trumpet and hip hop since 1992, lots of really incredible musicians get to work on his records and you can hear it in the end result. Maybe I'm slightly biased because I played with Joe in a couple jazz groups in the 90s but this music is so exciting because LA has this long history of jazz and Lamar ties together that legacy with the future forward vision of hip hop. He's not necessarily the greatest rapper ever some of his stuff is over produced and over exaggerated, nobody is perfect but the way he ties together the history with the future is exciting.

gxespino 9y ago

Always get confused with punctuation outside of quotation marks. Then I realized I was reading The Economist.

sysalphUS 9y ago

The article actually gets some of the finer points of the content in the album. To Pimp A Butterfly was really refreshing but DAMN hit me way harder. I must have spent about 3 or 4 days listening to it on repeat. It has a lot of really deep meaning, complete with some hard hitting contradictions, which the article mentions. It made me say “damn!” out loud several times.

lokut 9y ago

I don't understand what people are getting out of this review. It seems like a shallow interpretation of the album in the context of his previous work, and just settles to make insightful-sounding claims with weak evidence to support. Making assumptions about the artist's motivation for the album with respect to current social environment is not a useful review; speculations don't add to the discussion. And, superficial statements such as "[h]is hypocrisy is part-performance, part-confession," are failed attempts at enlightened commentary that only serve to provide pseudo-sustenance to a post lacking real critical value. It's hard to point out the unbalance of the themes in this album, while comparing it to themes proposed in To Pimp a Butterfly, and attempt to claim that the juxtaposition of emotions in DAMN is really just "a sense of emotion overpowering the artist." Am I the only one seeing this, or is this article in need of some deeper analysis?