Kendrick Lamar Taught Me Duality
Who the FUCK are you? Who the fuck are YOU? Who the fuck ARE you?
We want these answers. We want THE answer. For some reason, in a world that changes seasons, a world that goes through light and dark every single day — both literally and metaphorically — we want to give our identities a single definition.
As if we can’t hold multiple truths:
You can’t enjoy hip hop AND country.
You can’t be selfless AND selfish.
You can’t hustle AND relax.
You can’t be strong AND broken.
You can’t be resigned AND be hopeful.
You can’t. You can’t. You can’t.
I was like you — I knew who I was. Never mind the fact that I just couldn’t reconcile that story with reality.
Sinner AND saint.
Jekyll AND Hyde.
Lamb AND lion.
And then, I heard the song “DNA.”
I’m Kris Hampton, and this is how Kendrick Lamar Taught Me Duality.
I grew up a white kid — in a very poor, very white, very racist neighborhood — who loved hip hop.
I flaunted it. They hated it.
You couldn’t tell me that I wasn’t hip hop: I dressed like it. Talked like it. Lived it. Breathed it.
One night in 1991, after seeing the premiere of Boyz N The Hood, I was in my grandparents’ front yard with a few friends — black friends — when a black and white pulled up and asked us what we were doing out this late.
In less than two minutes, the white cops had all three of my friends — all of whom were from better families, better neighborhoods than I was — face down in the yard, yelling at them to keep their hands where they could see them. My very quiet and gentle grandfather, raised in a very backwoods, almost certainly very racist, Kentucky town in the 1940’s, burst out of the house, threw the cops off his property, and calmly went back inside.
Who the FUCK are you?
I don't contemplate, I meditate, then off your fucking head
This that put-the-kids-to-bed
This that I got, I got, I got, I got —
Realness, I just kill shit ’cause it's in my DNA
In “Go Set a Watchman”, a lost-to-time follow-up to the classic “To Kill A Mockingbird”, Harper Lee exposes Atticus Finch to have racist tendencies. White people who had long held him on a pedestal exploded. It was set in the 50’s. In the deep south. Of course he was conflicted. Of course he was flawed. Of course he was human. A walking, talking paradox.
Who the fuck are YOU?
I know murder, conviction
Burners, boosters, burglars, ballers, dead, redemption
Scholars, fathers dead with kids and
I wish I was fed forgiveness
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, soldier’s DNA. (I’m a soldier’s DNA.)
One government-funded building to house a population of people who all live under one identity:
Criminals. Felons.
It’s what I thought of myself. What I was told to think of myself.
But I met business owners. Fathers. Husbands. Hustlers. Athletes. Church-going, god-fearing people who were doing what they had to do to survive.
I learned to trust no one at first encounter, but to give them a chance to be more than my first impression. I learned to make judgements, but not pass judgements. I learned to lay back in the cut until I knew the reality of the situation. To observe.
Until it was time to speak up. Then just gimme the mic.
Who the fuck ARE you?
And I'm gon' shine like I’m supposed to, antisocial extrovert
And excellent mean the extra work
And absentness what the fuck you heard
And pessimists never struck my nerve
I’m an album person. I listen straight through. As far as I’m concerned, the invention of shuffle is a stain on humanity. I don’t skip songs. Particularly not on the first listen. Or the second. Or third. No — not ok.
The album had barely started. One song in. The Mike WiLL Made-It production was head-noddingly rhythmic, but menacing. Foreboding. It felt urgent. Like it demanded I give it 100% of my attention - forget the winding mountain road I was driving on.
Kendrick, like he does, had perfectly found the pocket, and was just… riding.
But then, chaos.
The beat disappears. It’s coming apart at the seams and we hear an ignorant and incendiary Fox News clip. As if he can’t believe the two distinctly different realities that the world sees, Kung Fu Kenny is repeating himself, stuttering, not able to get his thoughts out completely, while we hear pieces of the beat growing darker and reorganizing into something that seems to be battling against Kendrick himself, when he finally finds his voice and holds the trigger down for round after round of nonstop, blistering assault.
And it just keeps coming.
You can’t hide from it. My car speakers could barely handle it but I turned it up anyway. This should be played at full volume, preferably in a residential area.
Tell me somethin'
You mothafuckas can't tell me nothin'
And once you’ve resigned yourself to that idea that he might never stop, it’s over.
The silence jolted me.
I’m an album person. But I ran it back.
WHO the FUCK are YOU?
Thanks for listening to Hip Hop Taught Me Everything. This whole show - from imagery to writing to beats to the website to final mixes - is created by the two of us: Kris Hampton and Devin Dabney.
You can support the show by sharing it with all of your friends who love hip hop. Or podcasts. Even better, both.
We know that we aren’t the only ones out here who were raised by hip hop. If you’d like to tell us about a lesson you learned from your favorite song, to possibly be featured on a future episode, share it with us at My Story.
