Art and Poetry: Kendrick Lamar's "The Heart Part Four"

Kendrick Lamar’s way with words has made him one of the most popular rappers of the 21st century.  Beyond his popularity, however, he’s a bona fide artist.  If Kanye West and 2Pac were the teachers, Kendrick is the preacher, using his podium as the spokesman for the reignited Civil Rights movement to build himself up (like any charismatic leader) and to deliver his call to consciousness and revolution to his musical constituents.  Though this message reaches the mainstream, it’s carefully and artfully crafted enough to draw the countercultures in, too.  Kendrick’s aim with this is to bring together different factions of the masses to reach a common goal through music, which he does on his latest track “The Heart Part 4.”

The fourth segment of a continuing musical saga (where each chapter is a long-versed stream-of-consciousness meditation representing the physical and mental space the artist inhabits at the time of the recording, not unlike a winding Samuel Beckett story), this edition of “The Heart” is classic Kendrick, with seamless shifts between samples and tempos.  The tune starts out with a deep electric organ and bass riff, before switching into a breezy yet eerie guitar track before darkening into a minimalistic double-time, bottom-heavy reverb that stays out of the way of Kendrick’s lyrics.  On the track we hear Kendrick embrace Kanye-like braggadocio (with declarations like “One, two, three, four, five/I am the greatest rapper alive!”) and the willingness to throw out disses here and there.  This is something he first exhibited on “King Kunta,” though it’s amplified and exaggerated on “The Heart.”  Considering Kendrick’s traditional métier is social consciousness, the fact that he rips his contemporaries numerous fat ones - like “Ho, Jay-Z Hall of Fame, sit yo’ punk-ass down!” which is actually an insult directed toward Drake, who has declared himself the new Jay-Z on several occasions and who Kendrick has taken upon himself to keep in check - and wages a verbal war with a president who is mentally unstable and prone to verbal and written tirades himself (“Donald Trump is a chump”) may seem strange, but it’s not.  Kendrick understands we live in a time of extremes, and he’s shown himself willing to push his poetry in that direction.

In terms of poetry, Kendrick’s socially-conscious attitude overshadows his liberal throwing of shade.  Like many Americans and world citizens, Kendrick is angry.  He’s angry at the institutions keeping Black people - and other minorities - down, angry at disingenuous people who keep up appearances that are fake (both in the entertainment industry and on social media) and - above all - angry at a president whose victory he perceives as illegitimate.  Lamar’s no conspiracy theorist, but he knows bullshit when he sees it and recognizes when people in power try to pull the shade over their constituents’ eyes.  This is why the verse, “And Russia needs a replay button, y’all up to somethin’/Electoral votes look like memorial votes/But America’s truth ain’t ignorin’ the votes,” is the most resonant fragment of “The Heart,” for it comes from “The Heart,” the gut.  Granted, there’s no lack of logic behind Kendrick’s assertion, but his argument that the Russians helped Trump steal the election is one that begins with emotion. Lamar’s observation here is that many Americans feel wronged and suspicious in the election’s aftermath, and sometimes when there’s a feeling, there are truths to back it up.

Critical theorist Theodor Adorno argued, “A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.”  By Adorno’s logic, Lamar’s music is a successful work of art, perhaps not high art - since he’s willing to take shots and swipes here and there - but in this day and age, the distinction between what’s high art and low art, what’s art and not art, is in constant flux.  The modern shapelessness of art allows for an expanded definition of the word which encompasses the musical poetry of rappers and songwriters.  Because Lamar can at once self-promote while delivering a message that is larger than himself and his ego, he is an artist.  Because he plays with rhyme and time and makes observations on the sublime, Kendrick is a poet.  Poetry in the 21st century is no longer a literary medium, but an oral medium read (for rap albums are “chapbooks” on tape for the socially conscious set) by autodidacts who hung out on the streets, with one foot in popular culture and the other in an intellectual headspace.  There is no money in putting poetry on the page, but there’s money and a platform to speak on when poetry is recorded and set against a pulsating, catchy beat.  Poetry in its traditional sense abstracts a concrete event, theme or idea.  Poetry in its newest sense does the opposite; it distills and explicates complex cultural themes in a manner that the average person can understand.  Thanks to Lamar and his contemporaries, poetry is no longer esoteric, but egalitarian; no longer literature, but art, straight from the heart.