Kendrick Lamar’s Music Reflects The Trauma Of The Forced Relocation Of Black People

The acts of traveling and forced relocation have impacted the Black community from slavery to Compton, and Kendrick holds on to these themes in his music

“Barefoot babies with no cares

Teenage gun toters that don’t play fair, should I get out the car?

I don’t see Compton, I see something much worse

The land of the landmines, the hell that’s on earth”

Kendrick Lamar, Complexion (A Zulu Love)

Travel has been at the center of the African-American struggle with itself since African-Americans were invented. The African-American was literally born traveling — seeing American sunlight for the first time while stepping out of the hellish artificial womb constructed by people who only expected a third of its inhabitants to survive. As a people, we’re constantly relocated, forced to uproot families to find opportunity in America or avoid the end of a noose. And when we’re not physically moved, the city literally moves around us as districts are reformed to keep us out of schools or to prevent us from affecting an election. The Black family in America has never been allowed to grow roots because roots are stability and stability is too much of a threat to a system that has found little use for us since the end of slavery.

Travel as trauma is still with us. The idea of success and “leaving the hood” has often been conflated with the idea of “selling out.” The concept of mobility — upward or otherwise — has always brought unease. The basis of iconic shows like The Jeffersons and Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air center around the struggle to stay close to our roots while enjoying the fruits of our achievements.

And then there’s Compton — a city ravaged by travel. Believe it or not, Compton was a relatively safe neighborhood throughout the first half of the 20th century. Then the African-American middle class moved in…and the White people fled. Because White people can do that. The Shelley v. Kraemer Supreme Court decision of 1948 reinforced the 14th amendment and struck down housing discrimination based on race, allowing middle class African-Americans to move into Compton. Almost immediately, White neighbors put their For Sale signs in their front yards. Compton soon became segregated with White Flight crippling the city.

Sadly, when White Americans travel, they can take resources and opportunity with them. And that’s exactly what they did when they left Compton. White Flight — evasion from Black neighbors — decimated Compton. Resources left. Schools deteriorated and ultimately Compton became “the hood.” The erasure of the Black middle class and the neighborhoods they occupied led to the Compton we saw in Boyz n The Hood. A once-quaint suburbia became one of the landmarks for crime and violence in America.

This is the Compton we see in Kendrick Lamar’s music — a veritable wasteland of violence left behind when the White population took their resources and White America’s care and attention with them. Like the American slave, Compton (and its residents) became a victim of relocation.

The acts of traveling and forced relocation have impacted the Black community from slavery to Compton, and Kendrick holds on to these themes in his music. These themes of relocation’s impact play themselves out in the way Kendrick treats methods of travel in his music. He pours every lyrical sin and fault into the act of traveling — thus cars and hotel rooms are presented as versions of Hell that he can’t escape from.

In Good Kid, Maad City, the now-iconic van represents a metaphorical Sodom and Gomorrahs where he indulges in sin and transforms into an immoral, worst version of himself. In To Pimp a Butterfly, his car becomes a literal Hell; the one thing keeping him from coming in contact with God. And hotels, airplanes and the separation from “home” are all used to symbolize his distance from happiness and Heaven itself. Sin and turmoil are all represented in the vessels Kendrick uses to travel in his music, and this literary tapestry is woven throughout the stories he tells in his albums.

In GKMC, the van Kendrick Lamar and his friends rode in became one of the central characters in story of the rapper’s journey from one side of town to the other to see Sherane. On the surface, it would appear that it’s Kendrick’s friends who are the reason for the devilish turn he makes in the White Toyota (“We on the mission for bad bitches and trouble”).

In many ways, the van in ‘GKMC’ is a slave ship on wheels, as Kendrick uses imagery to connect the two.

However, the car is as much of a culprit of the immorality as the friends are. The air conditioner is broken, exacerbating Lamar’s hunger. The ventilation is such that even with the windows rolled down the car is a hot box for him to get high even though he’d chosen not to smoke…yet. The radio is blasting their gospel, Jeezy — perhaps a coy play on the muffled word of Jesus reaching their own hell of a car. Lamar is masterful at painting the picture of his car as a chaotic den of bad decisions — the haze is palpable and his lack of control is infecting. The refrain of Lamar saying that he’s usually not like this only highlights the fact there’s a negative influence at work.

In many ways, the van in GKMC is a slave ship on wheels, as Kendrick uses imagery to connect the two. The van is smoky, and he and his friends are “crammed” tightly in every seat. They’re hungry but only able to eat junk food. And the idea of time is fleeting, with the trip feeling like it lasted for eternity. When Kendrick and his buddies flee the home they burglarized, they take a rather straight path in one direction (a right, a left, a right and another left) that still somehow felt like a circular route to the MC (we was just circling life).

From “Peer Pressure” on through the rest of the album, we see the car as a character that invites images of sin and bad luck. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the climactic “Sing About Me/I’m Dying Of Thirst.” The song comes after an interlude in which Kendrick’s friend, Dave, gets killed when a bullet enters the van. The irony here is that the boys are firing out of their van and shot at before they can escape, dying before they can escape Hell.

The second verse of “Sing About Me” expands Lamar’s Tarantino-like world of self-references and multiple universes as it comes from the perspective of Keisha’s relative. Keisha is from Section.80’s story of a prostitute who was killed in the backseat of El Camino. “Keisha’s Song” culminates in the prostitute getting killed in the back of a car. Throughout the entire song, Keisha is victimized and treated as subhuman as she hops from car to car where men use her and discard her. The song begins with seven car horns honking (“The seven cars start honking, she start running like Flo-Jo”), mimicking the seven trumpets found in Revelations to signal the coming apocalypse.

Each verse of “Keisha’s Song” ends with a refrain of seeing a car parked and “In her heart, she hate it there but in her mind she made it where/ Nothing really matters,” the loss of morals found in the car so similar to Kendrick’s own fall from grace once he goes into the van in GKMC.

GKMC is all about death and how it follows the characters especially once they start traveling. Kendrick Lamar’s sophomore masterpiece, To Pimp A Butterfly, by contrast, is about surviving the travel and how it changes and destroys the survivor’s soul. Kendrick struggles throughout the album to maintain his sanity and desire to be successful despite the fact people back home are dying and suffering. K. Dot’s entire meltdown centers around his guilt for leaving the hood — an essential and classic side effect of the stress of relocation in the Black community.

The first sign of travel’s impact on Kendrick’s psyche comes in “Institutionalized,” as he takes his friends with him to the BET Awards and notices who they’ve changed into once they’ve left the hood: “Somebody told me you thinkin’ ‘bout snatchin’ jewelry/I should’ve listened when my grandmama said to me…” His friends only see the “harvests” of chains they can steal and take back home. They’re no longer his friends when they leave the hood — they’re predators, subhuman animals transformed when they left their familiar surroundings. It’s at this point that Kendrick realizes he has to leave certain things behind in his journeys, but the toll of doing that damn near breaks him apart.

TPAB has a distinctive dichotomy between being home and being away where home is the place he wants to and should be, especially in songs like “These Walls” and “Momma.” “These Walls” speaks to the comfort of intercourse, relating it to a cozy home he never wants to leave. Here, the “walls” in question place Kendrick literally inside of a woman’s vagina, reforming it into the perfect home for him to stay forever.

The song opens with bars about traversing bodies of water, conjuring images of the Middle Passage: “If these walls could talk they’d tell me to swim good/ No boat, I float better than he would/ No life jacket, I’m not the God of Nazareth.” However, Kendrick is freed from a boat in “these walls,” thus making him God-like; a carryover of the narrative that the freedom from the confines of the ship and traveling mechanism gives him a connection to God and a higher power. He carries the metaphor into the second verse with “Knock these walls down, that’s my religion.”

Later in the album, “Momma” has a refrain of going back home and how that moment of returning brings clarity and inner peace. An older Kendrick returns home on the other side a career-spanning journey to guide a younger version of himself who thinks he knows everything because he hasn’t been broken down by leaving home. The song culminates in the kid actually relaying to Kendrick the trauma of his travel and the centuries-long game he’s playing:

But never mind you’re here right now don’t you mistake it

It’s just a new trip, take a glimpse at your family’s ancestor

Make a new list, of everything you thought was progress

And that was bullshit, I mean your life is full of turmoil

Spoiled by fantasies of who you are, I feel bad for you

I can attempt to enlighten you without frightenin’ you

If you resist, I’ll back off quick, go catch a flight or two

But if you pick destiny over rest in peace then be an advocate

Tell your homies especially to come back home

That passage packs hundreds of years of traumatic travel in just half a verse. “It’s just a new trip, take a glimpse at your family’s ancestor” shows a precise knowledge that these travels have been going on for centuries and that those travels may seem like moving forward. However they bring about grief and realization that the New World will only bring more pain. The verse ends, though, with hope that the pain of the travel is necessary to bring his “homies” to a proverbial home — that home being anywhere between freedom and heaven. Home maintains its place as the ultimate goal at the end of his journeys, whether that be returning home or paving a way for a permanent home for him and his community.

On the other hand, TPAB is full of pitfalls and tragedies associated with travel. “u” finds Kendrick in a hotel room — obviously a place that’s as uncomfortably unlike home as possible and a sign of how much traveling Kendrick has been doing — hating himself and contemplating suicide because his success has taken him away from home. His friends are dying. His family is growing old. People are depending on him and he’s not helping because he’s gone. This is an essential conflict in the Black American and it’s destroying Kendrick. Of course, “u” ends with the MC passed out on the floor, drunk and lost.

Nowhere, though, does the heaven/hell dynamic associated with travel become more clear than President Obama’s favorite song: “How Much A Dollar Cost.” The song finds Kendrick at a gas station (another symbol of travel) confronted by a homeless man who wants a single dollar. Kendrick is dismissive, refusing to grant the request. Eventually, we find out that the man is God, testing the rapper to see if he deserved a place in heaven. Kendrick meets the homeless man while walking to the car and as he gets closer to leaving, he gets further away from his salvation. It’s not until Kendrick is actually in his car that he wants to commit violent acts against his would-be savior: “Cause now I’m starin’ back at him, feelin’ some type of disrespect/ If I could throw a bat at him, it’d be aimin’ at his neck.”

When it’s revealed that the panhandler was in fact God, Kendrick is in his car. In Hell because he chose to leave over staying and finding salvation. Literally the thing that kept Kendrick from heaven was being in his car. It’s almost as if God himself shunned him and left him in his hell on four wheels.

Kendrick Lamar never seems to resolve his issues with travel — neither has the Black community. We still grapple every day with what it means to grow and leave our homes and our responsibilities to the ones left behind. Kendrick feels the same guilt we feel every time we can’t fly back home to a funeral because we can’t afford to buy those damn airline tickets or the times we couldn’t send our siblings $50 to pay the water bill because our student loan money hadn’t come in.

We know the feeling of shame when we can’t give back to the “hood” like we always wanted. It’s just part of our journey to and through American history. Traveling — leaving home if only for a short period of time — is taxing on the Black psyche and it has been since we were forced to leave our homes hundreds of years ago. Kendrick Lamar feels this shame, guilt and embarrassment that generations of displacement and removal have burdened all of us with.

These feelings of despair have permeated Kendrick’s music and will continue to do so as he struggles with his newfound fame and the fact he’ll probably find himself screaming in hotel rooms as long as his career takes him to new places.