Good kid, m.A.A.d city: Kendrick Lamar's Autoethnographic Method

Abstract

In characterizing his second studio album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, as a “short film” Kendrick Lamar offers something of a public declaration: We, the listening audience, are not hearing another hip-hop album, just another “autobiography” or slice of one person's life, but, rather, something else; we are hearing a mixture of social, cultural, and personal narrative truth in what will be termed “autoethnography.” In doing so, Lamar offers us a new way of thinking about hip-hop as a whole, not simply as a capitalistic enterprise or as a “black news” channel but as a distinct method for collecting data and understanding the experiences and existence of black people. While autoethnography is not a new method for research, it has been underutilized in philosophy as an approach to reading “texts” of all sorts, in particular Africana texts. This article analyzes Kendrick Lamar's second album to demonstrate why autoethnography is important as both a way of understanding reality and an expression of reality and also why it is centrally important for “doing” Africana philosophy.

Attuning toIn‐the‐Red Frequencieswith/in Readers Workshop

“…In other words, hip‐hop artists ‘keep it real’ by both privileging and undermining reality, i.e., narrating about the conditions of living as a Black person within an anti‐black world, even when that narration may be untruthful (Mubirumusoke, 2016). For example, when a rapper tells their ‘truth,’ it may involve a blurring of perspectives that ‘speaks to larger social, cultural, and historical realities shared within the ‘black’ diaspora’ (Haile, 2018, p. 491) … a truth that has the capacity to affectively ‘resonate … [to] challenge the will to truth of white supremacy in [an] anti‐black world’ (Mubirumusoke, 2016, p. 176). No longer seen as a container of the truth controlled by the autonomous rational subject, the body here becomes a force‐relation that moves/vibrates in ways that put pressure on educators to not only acknowledge anti‐blackness (e.g., the policing of silence in Readers Workshop, cf.…”

Theorizing Literacies as Affective Flows: Attuning to the Otherwise Possibilities of Hip-Hop's “In-the-Red Frequencies”

“…Originating in the United States in the 1970s on the heels of the Black soul movement and contextualized by the 1960s fight for civil rights, hip-hop stood as a musical articulation that enabled Black and Brown voices to resonate within a disregarded urban landscape designed for their demise (Haile, 2018). Historically, hip-hop music and culture was “sonically, vocally, and visually birthed from a polycultural mix of influences” (Poulson-Bryant, 2013, p. 214) connected to forms of Black resistance that utilized musical, oral, visual, and dance forms as alternative spaces to practice freedom—for example, African griots and drums, improvisations, quilting, plantation chants (call and response), negro spirituals, blues, jazz, and R & B/soul (Asante, 1991; Poulson-Bryant, 2013; Rose, 1994).…”

“…When rappers such as Nas tell their truth, it may not simply be their own truth but a blurring of perspectives that “speaks to larger social, cultural, and historical realities shared within the ‘black’ diaspora” (Haile, 2018, p. 491)—a truth that has the capacity to affectively “resonate in different register[s]…[so as to] challenge the will to truth of White supremacy in an anti-black world” (Mubirumusoke, 2016, p. 176). The production of subjectivity, then, involves an encounter with affect; the powerful intensity of this encounter marks the hip-hop artist's/subject's capacity to act.…”

“…Nas may describe himself as a “gangsta” here, but he also refers to himself as a philosopher, a subject position previously made unavailable to him as a Black man in a white supremacist, racist world (Mubirumusoke, 2016). Additionally, by telling untruths here, he blends his voice with the voices of other marginalized subjects in a way that helps their stories resonate “without subsuming their voice[s]” or speaking for them (Haile, 2018, p. 491).…”