The Six Dreadful Words of Kendrick Lamar
or, lay me down to sleep and die and never dream again
Kendrick Lamar is, perhaps, the most acclaimed rap artist of this new century and maybe ever. He’s certainly the only one, thus far, to win a Pulitzer Prize. In fact, he very well might be the only Top 40 music artists to win such an award.
But let me take a moment here to write about one of his songs that just played in my presence because I have a surprising amount to say about it.
And I’ve done this a few times now where I take a close look at a single song. You can find some examples here:
How many Pulitzer winners get paid by Marvel?
Well, at least one.
Setting aside that this is a Disney song for a comicbook movie, I do think there are interesting elements here. As my good friend
put it:I think this song is good and bad at the same time. Like you can play it on New Year’s Eve or a stadium and it would do well, but it’s terrible for casual listening at home or in the car.
I didn’t ask him if I could quote him so he may have a more refined statement about this song if given the chance, but I stand by his off the cuff remarks on the song after I said what I said about it.
Because the song hooks. It’s catchy. It has a pulsing beat and Lamar has a very interesting voice. I mean his physical voice. There’s a strange texture to it that worms its way into your ear. But this song is, really, more of a showcase for Sza’s singing, which is airy and light, working as a contrast to the textured roughness of Lamar’s rapping.
But he only gives us one verse. I would love to know how much he was paid by Disney to drop this slop on the table, even if it’s a solid club beat. If this came out fifteen years ago, I would’ve been out there dancing, not knowing any of the words but not caring.
Anyway, I want to talk about exactly six words.
I hate people that feel entitled
When I heard this song for the first time years ago, that line stuck out to me. Caught in my ear like gravel grinding its way down the canal to deafen me for the rest of my days. And I wouldn’t mind, honest, if I never had to hear a line like that again.
Six words.
Hemingway famously wrote a stillbirth into MFA programs across the decades with six words and I feel the stillbirth happening every time I hear Lamar’s six words here. When it came on earlier today, unbidden, unlooked for, unrecalled, these same six words stabbed into me like that sliver in your sock that you don’t notice until you step down and it pierces the sole of your foot.
I feel hobbled by these six words.
Six words that I will never forget, that leave me cowering, trembling, sweating at 3am in terror for the unforgivable, unbelievable, unrecantable stupidity of these words.
I sit here panicking trying to figure out how much money was spent on this, how many people listened to this verse and signed off on it. How many people heard those six words in a literal song by a literal Pulitzer Prize winner and thought that those six words should stay. Or worse, how many knew the calamity happening here but, for fear of reprisal said nothing. They washed their hands of it or even told people they were proud of this song, even while they felt the stillbirth clawing its corpseridden way out of this horrible canal to splatter on dancefloors across the English speaking world.
I hate people that feel entitled
An abortion happened here and they didn’t even bother to clean it up or hide it behind a curtain. They let it out, told you they were proud, and made us all live in that moment together.
I hate people who feel entitled
Has there ever been a less lyrical or musical line in music history?
I mean, probably, but only because a lot of very bad music gets made every day. There’s a twelve year old recording their own music on their mom’s iPhone right now writing probably worse lines than that. But you’d be hardpressed to find them.
I hate people that feel entitled
This defies poetry or any sense of music. Its sonically horrendous. And even if we set the music aside, it’s the kind of banality that belongs nowhere in civilized society. For someone to say something so trite and stupid should cause them to feel the profundity of shame that Judas felt when he suicided atop his thirty pieces of silver.
If you heard someone say this within earshot you might laugh or weep for the brutal reminder of how far we have fallen.
We once wrote epics. Odysseus sailed the winedark seas and Prufrock grew old with the bottoms of his trousers rolled and yet we sit here and bob our heads to I hate people that feel entitled like that was ever something worth saying, worth hearing, worth setting to music and recording for posterity.
Existential dread sweeps over me and I pray for death at these six words. Better to be deaf, to be dead, than to live like this. To live in a world, in a society, in a culture that allows someone to hit record and say I hate people that feel entitled without immediately deleting it and telling that person to try again, to try anything else, to say even nothing at all instead.
I hate people that feel entitled
Every time I write that sentence I write it wrong the first time because of the that which should be a who and I hate that I even have to think about something so stupid but I’m awake here in a silent house by myself spiraling downward because of six words.
Six words.
This is the terror that keeps me up at night for it is the terror of the decline and fall, the collapse of civilization, the twilight of the gods we are, the return to Dust, to nothingness.
I could kill myself over these six words and maybe, someday, I will, and I’ll force you to etch it into my tombstone because the future deserves to know that we knew, really, we did, we fucking knew that this was the worst thing ever recorded and we let it happen anyway, let people like me suicide away in absolute chthonic fright over the death of humanity emblazoned by this stillbirthed line of not quite poetry.
But I do find it fitting that these six words belong to a Marvel movie since almost all Marvel movies now cost hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of human labor to make visual effects that are signed off by people wearing $20,000 suits and driving cars that cost more than my house while wearing watches that cost more than every car I’ve ever owned combined even though those effects look like absolute shit, like a digital abortion gone Cronenbergianly wrong.
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Alright I give up. I've been thinking about this all day, and while I can understand feeling an antipathy toward those six words, I can't quite get to a place where they inspire existential dread. What am I missing? I know you intentionally left the "why" out of this piece, but maybe a hint?
In all honesty, I can’t be angry at this song. I listened to the whole thing, and five minutes later, I could not remember a single note. In contrast, I re-read your Blink 182 review and listened to the song again, and the melody is still humming along in my head.