Bob Dylan, ‘The Blacker the Berry,’ and the Poetry of Kendrick Lamar

The Swedish Academy caused a stir in the literary world when they awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. The decision to bestow one of the highest honors in literature on an artist known mainly as a singer sparked numerous think pieces on its validity. I admit I was also a skeptic. Giving the prize to Dylan felt like depriving a ‘real’ writer, i.e. someone who wrote words which were printed on sheets of paper, of the award. As a sixteen year old who wanted to be a part of that category, I imagined I was outraged on behalf of Murakami and DeLillo. 

The next year, Columbia University made a similarly historic decision in awarding the Pulitzer Prize for Music to Kendrick Lamar, making him the first rapper to win an award only given to classical and jazz musicians in the past. This decision was less controversial, probably because no one can argue that Lamar’s work doesn’t really ‘fit’ the award category. 

On further (and post-adolescent) reflection, the similarities between song lyrics and poems are obvious. Written down, the lyrics to most songs look like poems, albeit with some stylized features like choruses and bridges. Thinking of song lyrics as poetry requires little creative reasoning; establishing rap as poetry meets more societal resistance. Rap has long been dismissed by conservatives, often on Fox News, for its vulgar, misogynistic, violent and materialistic lyrics. This perception of rap as frivolous at best and despicable at worst obscures the artistry of its serious practitioners.

Though I doubted Bob Dylan’s lyrics should count as poetry in 2016, I now see Kendrick Lamar songs as poems. Lamar’s lyrics fly past in his fervent delivery, the lines thrumming with energy. Reading and re-reading the words, however, reveals meanings that multiply and refract, as with poetry. In his seminal essay ‘Strivings of the Negro People,’ W. E. B. Dubois wrote, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Lamar’s ‘The Blacker the Berry,’ from his third studio album To Pimp a Butterfly, portrays the struggle to escape this double-consciousness, for a Black man to see himself clearly without the lens of white society. 

In the first two stanzas of the song, Lamar addresses the assumptions and antagonism of white society. “You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture,” he raps. The word ‘terminate’ highlights the contrast between the clinical white society, inventor of the atom bomb, which wants to suppress the beautiful, living tradition of Black art and culture. The line “came from the bottom of mankind” alludes to racist European thinking which posited that Africans were at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, so different from white Christians as to be a different species of human beings. Such racial theories were popular in the nineteenth century and used to justify slavery. The chorus succeeds this stanza, with Jamaican artist Assassin asserting, “Remember this, every race start from the block.” This rejoinder, appearing after the line about mankind, mirrors the historical progression of scientists learning that all races originated in Africa, where humans first evolved. 

While Lamar positions himself in opposition to white society in the song’s first two stanzas, the third stanza attempts to break out of the bind of double-consciousness. We see the shift in perspective in the line “Excuse my French but fuck you, no, fuck y’all.” The line begins with a polite white society phrase before an invective. Lamar switches from the white standard ‘fuck you’ to the more Black colloquial ‘fuck y’all.’ Reams of history, politics and linguists live in this apparent correction. The English spoken by Black people was disparaged for years as ‘wrong’ compared to Standard English. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) was only recently recognized as a language that contains the culture and thought of a people.  

Every verse opens with the refrain, “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015 / Once I finish this, witnesses will convey just what I mean.” The second line invites us to revisit Lamar’s lyrics once we finish the song. In the song’s closing couplet, Lamar reveals that he has partaken in violence against a man darker-skinned than himself—“So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang banging make me kill a n**** blacker than me?” As fellow Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon notes in the Genius annotation for these lines, this searing self-indictment reshapes ‘you’ to mean both white society and the Black community. In the first two stanzas, ‘you’ clearly refers to white America. In the third stanza, however, the lines could address both white society and the Black community. The admonishment “Thinkin’ maliciously, he get a chain then you gone bleed him” could refer equally to white resentment at Black financial success, and jealousy within the Black community.    

The chorus “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice / the blacker the berry, the bigger I shoot” is a cynical subversion of the affirmative slogan from Wallace Thurman’s novel of the same name. While the first line of the couplet affirmed the beauty of dark-skin Black people in Thurman’s use, Lamar’s addendum shows that dark-skin Black people are more likely to suffer violence at the hands of white institutions like police and the criminal justice system but also within the Black community itself. Lamar’s use of ‘I’ in “the bigger I shoot” turns the blame onto himself, a shrouded disclosure which the last line makes clear. 

Lamar’s admission casts the entire song in new light. In the first stanza he raps, “You sabotage my community, makin’ a killin,’” indicting white America for profiting off the exploitation of Black people through systems like prison labour, where Black people are incarcerated at rates far higher than any other group. The ending of the second stanza mirrors the first with the line “How can I tell you I’m makin’ a killin’?” Lamar is now the one prospering. The parallel with the previous line, the uncertainty introduced by the question mark, and Lamar’s confession suggest his discomfort with his own success, which may have come at some unnamed cost to the Black community. 

Creating categories necessitates exclusion. Until recently, AAVE was not considered a ‘proper’ language, and songwriters were not poets. Rappers, to some, don’t even count as musicians. The Swedish Academy rendered some of these exclusions obsolete with the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Even more than Bob Dylan, Kendrick Lamar has convinced me of the poetry of song lyrics. After delving into the lyrics of the rapper Pharrell calls “this era’s Bob Dylan,” I wouldn’t be surprised if Lamar is one day a contender for literature’s most prestigious prize himself. 

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