Kendrick Lamar’s “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” spent a good six months spinning inside the CD player of my old school Toyota Corolla. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to learn of it myself: I first heard about it from the blogger Ta-Nehesi Coates who proclaimed it “not simply one of the best hip hop albums I’ve ever heard, but one of the most moving pieces of art I’ve seen/heard in a long, long, long time.” I quickly came to agree.
More than literary, “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” qualifies as deeply theological. At times, “Good Kid” even seems to sing a contemporary “Confessions.” Lamar differs from Augustine in many respects (Lamar offers no apology for torture, and he leaves much more room for sexual love.) But like Augustine, Lamar crafts a narrative of sin, grace, friendship, and conversion in a particular time and place. Lamar’s “The Art of Peer Pressure” works like Augustine’s incident of the stolen pears, for example.
In some ways, I think Lamar even surpasses Augustine: in addition to confessing his own sins, Lamar also offers a structural critique. All throughout, Lamar confesses his sins–for example, in “Swimming Pools,” he explores the perils, pleasures, and pathos of the human appetite for alcohol. In another track, he laments, “I am a sinner who’s probably going to sin again; Lord forgive me, Lord forgive me.” While confessing his personal sins, Lamar demonstrates that, for young black girls and boys, adolescent folly is no child’s play. When they make mistakes, they are much more likely to get not slapped on the wrist but killed or sent to prison.
Sometimes, as depicted in his video for the love song “Poetic Justice,” they are cut down for no reason at all.
But he cares about more than just the sins of individuals. Young black boys and girls living in impoverished places also often pay for the sins of an entire society with their lives: in the haunting title track, “MAAD City,” Lamar calls himself “Kendrick Lamar aka Compton’s human sacrifice.” Lamenting the toll that structural sin takes on a teenaged boy, he raps, “I live inside the belly of the rough; Compton, USA made me an angel on angel dust.” In so doing, Lamar serves as not the exception to the tradition of rap but its heir.
Baptismal imagery and allusions permeate the album. He seems to celebrate baptism while also questioning it. Lamar’s story of sin and grace reaches its apex in the masterful two part-track entitled, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying Of Thirst.” There’s nothing I need to say for these songs: they speak for themselves.
Despite the theological depth of Lamar’s album, mainstream music fans do not perceive it as theological. But this is not because Lamar makes music instead of sermons. Nor can it be simply because he makes rap music. The U.S. American music-listening population has had a much less difficult time recognizing the white rapper Macklemore as a theologian of sorts. To them, Macklemore’s music seems self-evidently theological. Some even call Macklemore “prophetic” and laud him for doing something you don’t ordinarily see done in hip hop. But Lamar’s album contains much more theological depth than Macklemore’s, yet we think only Macklemore is preaching. Why?
If you doubt it, give Lamar’s album a listen. I would love to know what you think.
WIT 
Thanks Katie,
For one, Lamar’s is theological in a much more entangled, messy way, and takes longer to work out—but what the patient listener finds is much richer for all that. Macklemore’s music is theological in the moralistic, narcissistically confessional way—it’s all on the surface ready to be read.
But beyond that, lots of people have noticed that Macklemore’s popularity is way, way, out of proportion with the little credibility that he has established for himself as a rapper. At some level, he may even recognize this disproportionality himself (depending on how cynically one reads his text-to-Instagram shenanigans last night). But surely one of the reasons that Macklemore is so popular is that his preachiness is not only tolerated but lauded as a kind of truth-telling (while, in most genres, being so overtly preachy just comes off as annoying). Through the lens of whiteness he looks like someone accepted as an “insider” saying what “needs to be said” within the stereotypically black world of hip-hop. Macklemore appears as a kind of missionary of (white) liberal sensibility, bringing the truth to those who need it. Amaryah’s post from a while back did a great job of calling out the supersessionistic anti-blackness of the popularity that Macklemore has enjoyed, and I don’t think I’m really adding anything here to what she wrote. But that’s where I would start in articulating the racial dynamics at play in the recognition of Macklemore as “theological” and the misrecognition of Kendrick as just another rapper from Compton.
excellently stated. and yes, that is my sense of things as well. especially the part about macklemore seeming like “an ‘insider’ saying ‘what needs to be said.'” and the messiness. yes. love this, thank you.
Thanks for this Katie , I had the exact same thoughts , when Lamar’s album dropped.
Thanks for this Katie! I had the same thoughts when Lamar’s album dropped.
Have you heard his first album ‘Section.80’? That is a fantastic album , and on the song ‘Kush and Corinthians’ he deals with it directly.
No I sadly have not! Very excited to go check that out right now. Thanks for the recommendation…
I can tell you why Macklemore gets praised and Lamar does not, the same reason why Eminem is the best selling rapper of all time and given critical acclaim – while the inventors of rap are looked down upon as thugs. Macklemore claims rap as his own, and claims to share in the oppression that most rappers have actually lived the oppression he claims as his. While he lived in a comfortable suburban Seattle home with his parents, Lamar was dodging bullets. The packaging is nicer with Macklemore, the substance isn’t bad, but Lamar is a better rapper and his art is more…authentic.
OK. I gotta ask. What qualifies Lamar and Mackelmore as Theologians?