10.30.2012

Bitch don't kill my Vibe

Kendrick Lamar is 25 years old...within his music there reasonates an acute awareness of someone much older and wise, but he is still a kid; Learning, discovering, recognizing, and relaying...life. That's the scary part. When genious keeps learning and creating (ie: Picasso or Tupac1); they open the possibilities to creating memorable art. It's exciting.

I started listening to hip hop around 1987, so I came right in when Westcoast gangsta rap was starting to take over the industry. I had an older cousin who lived in Indianapolis at the time. I was a sheltered kid from St. Louis, MO. My parents hardly ever let me go outside and roam the neighborhood alone. In the summer of '88 my mom sent me and my sister to stay with my aunt for a month and a half in Indiana...it was my first summer of freedom! Cousin Tony, 5 years my senior, took me to the basement and gave me a step by step education to rap music. I remember feeling the truth. Tony gave me two cassette tapes to take back to the Lou2...one was Eazy E's single "Boyz in the hood," and the other tape was NWA's "Straight outta Compton."

I listened to those tapes probably everyday for 6 or 7 months. Always with my cousin Donnell, upstairs at my grandmother's house3. NWA hooked me with cold beats, fresh lyrics about the streets and officials with power who abused that said power4. You could tell that these cats were speaking the real truth from their own point of view without fear of retaliation. Cousin Tony used to tell me "these niggas got heart!" It made me feel down to listen to them preach. Even at a young age I realized that the 2 "real" emcees of the group were Ice Cube and The DOC...the poets, the lyracists. All backed by "Beats by Dre5."

The Westcoast kept a hold of me all the way through my family's move to TX in 1992. By that time, I was a full-fledged hip-hop fan with allegiance to the Westside. In high school, I started listening to Tupac, Snoop, MC Eight, Dre, MC Ren...all the west coast G.O.D.S. They spoke to me...that's why when I first heard Kendrick Lamar's "Section 80" mixtape, it brought it all back to me. He isn't a gangsta rapper, but he is Westside. Compton, in fact. When I first heard him spit, he reminded me of Tupac Shakur and Eminem. The standout track to me was the J. Cole6 produced "HiiiPower." Lamar speaks of old and new on the track. Marcus Garvey to Malcom X and Martin Luther (who also appears on his new LP "good Kid, m.A.A.d city) to building new pyramids and writing our "own" hyroglyphics. In other words, he takes lessons from the past to build some new shit. I'm down with that. The kid is smart.

On the aforementioned GKMC, Lamar is all over the place with his stories from the streets in Compton. Stories about his life and the people he has come across in his 25 years of living there. His manic ADD flow is held together by an inherent genious of putting words together in a way that lets you know he had a clear plan from the start7. The deeply personal "Sherane aka Master Splinter's daughter" starts the CD off with a ghetto tale of unrequited lust. The end of that song trails off into a voice mail from his mother asking him to bring the family Van home 'cause she will be late to a meeting if he doesn't...his father then chimes in with a profanity-laced tirade telling Lamar to bring home the dominoes that he borrowed from his father. His father ends the rant with, "This mothafuckas gonna kill my vibe." Lamar lets us into his life, much like Eminem. He does it with an emotional tinge of self-reflection that puts you in a Pac state of mind. With all that said, all the comparisons to Pac, EM, and Jay not withstanding, I believe Lamar can be more like a young Nas. Crafting a bonafide hip hop classic (Illmatic); all the while staying true to the lyricism that makes hip hop art in the first damn place...gritty enough to reassure us that this is a real documentary of the streets.

So next time you see me riding down 75 nodding my head with my wayfares on, rest assure I'm bumping "Good Kid, m.A.A.d city8", and bitch please don't kill my vibe.

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1 Yes...I just compared Pablo Picasso to Tupac and Kendrick Lamar.
2 When he handed me the cassettes, he said, "If Aunt Walter Mae (my mother) finds these tapes, I'll whoop yo yella ass!"
3 Fuck the police!
4 Granny was hard of hearing, so she couldn't make out all the cuss words.
5 The real beats, not the headphones.
6 Another fantastic young hip hop artist.
7 He is similar in this way to Jay-Z.
8 Until the next classic hip hop album drops!


-tshurn