Approaching any great music from the academic perspective does give you a greater understanding, but sometimes it also kills your original personal and subjective connection - which, I'd argue, is just as important. There is no doubt that though my confused mother may have been better informed afterwards, her daily singing and post-divorce connection with Lou Reed’s “I’m Waiting For My Man” was definitely hurt when I took it upon myself to tell her it was about him meeting up with a smack dealer as opposed to a singletons anthem.
Advertisement
When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?
Hypocrite!Read Chabon’s take below:"In this final couplet, Kendrick Lamar employs a rhetorical move akin to—and in its way even more devastating than—Common’s move in the last line of “I Used to Love H.E.R.”: snapping an entire lyric into place with a surprise revelation of something hitherto left unspoken. In “H.E.R.”, Common reveals the identity of the song’s “her”—hip hop itself—forcing the listener to re-evaluate the entire meaning and intent of the song. Here, Kendrick Lamar reveals the nature of the enigmatic hypocrisy that the speaker has previously confessed to three times in the song without elaborating: that he grieved over the murder of Trayvon Martin when he himself has been responsible for the death of a young black man. Common’s “her” is not a woman but hip hop itself; Lamar’s “I” is not (or not only) Kendrick Lamar but his community as a whole. This revelation forces the listener to a deeper and broader understanding of the song’s “you”, and to consider the possibility that “hypocrisy” is, in certain situations, a much more complicated moral position than is generally allowed, and perhaps an inevitable one."You can follow Joe on Twitter.