Michael Chabon Deciphers Kendrick Lamar's "The Blacker The Berry"

After winning Best Rap Song and Performance for his single “i,” Kendrick Lamar takes a notable dark and impassioned turn in his recently released track “The Blacker The Berry.” Drawing on comparisons from Wallace Thurman’s book of the same name, “The Blacker the Berry” is a dense, emotional depiction of race and identity. So dense, in fact, that Pulitzer-winning author Michael Chabon has deciphered a portion of the song’s lyrics for the annotation site Genius. In his analysis, Chabon breaks down the different uses of identity and who is meant to represented by certain umbrella terms. Check an excerpt below and the full annotation here.

In this final couplet, Kendrick Lamar employs a rhetorical move akin to—and in its way even more devastating than—Common’s move in the last line of “I Used to Love H.E.R.”: snapping an entire lyric into place with a surprise revelation of something hitherto left unspoken. In “H.E.R.”, Common reveals the identity of the song’s “her”—hip hop itself—forcing the listener to re-evaluate the entire meaning and intent of the song. Here, 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. Common’s “her” is not a woman but hip hop itself; Lamar’s “I” is not (or not only) Kendrick Lamar but his community as a whole. This revelation forces the listener to a deeper and broader understanding of the song’s “you”, and to consider the possibility that “hypocrisy” is, in certain situations, a much more complicated moral position than is generally allowed, and perhaps an inevitable one.