Kendrick Lamar’s Camp Eye for the ‘Other’
Kendrick Lamar is an award winning African-American rapper and songwriter, who distinguishes himself from his peers by transforming his raw life experiences into pieces of art. His music videos for Alright and ELEMENT. convey the patterns of Afro-surrealism, transformation of trauma and Black perservance. Coined by Amiri Baraka, Afro-surrealism is the “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one ... the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life” (p.p. 164-165). It is how Black creatives present the larger-than-life experience of racism in a way that is shocking and doesn’t seem real. This concept, integrally shared by the two videos, will be discussed in the context of the ideas of Stuart Hall and Susan Sontag.
In chapter 4 of Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices, Hall discusses “regime[s] of representation,” which are the “visual effects through which ‘difference’ is represented at any one historical moment” (p. 232). This refers to how the public views a certain group of people at a certain point in time and has a tendency to categorize those not in the dominant group as the ‘other’. He jointly introduces “intertextuality,” which is the sum of “meanings” from “various texts” “where one image... has its meaning altered by being read in the context of other images” (p. 232). This is, images’ meanings come from how we compare them to other images we understand. The regime of representation concerning power dynamics between Black and White people is encapsulated by the shot in Alright in which Lamar and his friends are seen rapping and listening to loud rap music in a car and drinking—a stereotypical depiction of Black men—only for the viewer to see that this car is being carried on the shoulders of four White police officers, as people would carry a coffin. Intertextuality explains how one might interpret this visual as representing the unfortunate fate and ‘othering’ of a lot of Black men at the mercy of White policemen despite being harmless. Because of the prevalence of stories depicting male Black death, the viewer feels unsettled by this scene. Alternatively, intertextuality is used in ELEMENT. when Lamar raps “bunch of criminals” (2017) and a group of young white men are shown behind bars. Given that Black people are overrepresented in prisons, there is a misguided regime of representation of them as criminals or the ‘other’ that is being challenged here. Afro-surrealism plays a role in both moments Lamar creates through the shock value and stereotype reversal in Alright and ELEMENT. respectively. In doing this, Lamar powerfully evokes how easily Black men are categorized and stereotyped.
In Notes on Camp, Sontag states that “camp” has “artifice as an ideal, theatricality” (p. 11). That means that something camp is immensely exaggerated for effect. While Black trauma is real and not “camp” in itself, Lamar’s depiction of it is. Alright features Lamar literally ascending to the height of a traffic light, only to be shot down by a white cop with a finger gun (2015). A metaphor for how the progress of Black people has been stunted by the intervention of White people at various points in history, this exhibits the most extreme of this power dynamic. The camp theatricality of this scene relates back to Afro-surrealism, which, like camp, utilizes exaggeration to make a point—which for Lamar is the immense privilege White people have even over Black people who reach a high class status. In ELEMENT., this camp effect is achieved by the use of slow motion. Every shot is dramatized by this, ensuring that the viewer takes in every millisecond of Lamar’s depiction of the complexity of the Black experience. In both videos, the scenes are meant to illustrate the truth of being Black in the U.S.; using more dramatic, campy elements cements the mistreatment of Black people by those with more power in nonsensicality.
Another element of camp that can be applied to the videos is that it “dethrones the serious” (Sontag, p. 10). This means it brings a satirical aspect to lived experiences. In Alright, this is expressed through Lamar falling to his death after being shot and then coming back to life to smile (2015). Lamar’s smile is the antithesis of what one would attribute to an incident of police brutality and is intended to illustrate the strength of Black people in the face of the burden of systemic racism. In a similar way, ELEMENT. features shots of people being punched in slow motion or a man falling off of a building in slow motion as Lamar sings “make it look sexy” (2017). This illustrates the juxtaposition between the reality of the circumstances Black people living in systemically poverty-stricken neighborhoods versus the need to play into respectability (appealing to the White dominant group as non-threatening). The beauty of these shots intentionally conflicts with what is being shown, detracting from the seriousness of the scenes depicted here. Again, this is another example of Afro-surrealism, as it is so easy to write these scenes off as just that: moments that are imaging and aesthetically pleasing. In actuality, they represent the violence embedded in some Black communities as a result of systemic discrimination. While it may, to someone outside of the Black experience, seem counterintuitive to represent this in an unserious and campy way, Lamar chooses to do so to illustrate the defense mechanism many Black people use to be able to live with the insurmountable, unmoving burden of racism.
Overall, in the music videos Alright and ELEMENT. Lamar incorporates elements of the regimes of representation (Hall, p. 232) surrounding race in the U.S. and the intertextuality (Hall, p. 232)we use to unpack those through the employment of shocking imagery and antithetic portrayals of racial groups. Simultaneously, Lamar utilizes the dramatizations and displacement of seriousness that are characteristic of “camp” (Sontag, 1964) to capture the incomprehensibility of racism and how Black people may cope with it through transforming their experiences into something more desirable or “sexy” (Lamar, 2017). Lamar’s music videos encompass Afro-surrealism as a formidable tool for Black creatives to translate their lived experiences into striking, thought- provoking art.
References
Baraka, A. (1988). Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist. Black American Literature Forum, 22(2), 164–166. https://doi.org/10.2307/2904491
Biography. (2018, January 29). Kendrick Lamar. Biography; Biography. https://www.biography.com/musician/kendrick-lamar
Hall, S. (1997). “Spectacle of the ‘Other.’” in Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. SAGE.
KendrickLamarVEVO. (2015). Kendrick Lamar - Alright (Official Music Video) [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-48u_uWMHY
KendrickLamarVEVO. (2017). Kendrick Lamar - ELEMENT. [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glaG64Ao7sM
Sontag, S. (2018). Notes on Camp. Penguin Classics.
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