Hear Me Out: 'The Blacker the Berry'

Mid-February is a time of year with intimate musical associations: mellow jazz piano, sultry crooners, perhaps some romantic strings. It is only logical, then, that iconoclastic Kendrick Lamar chose February 9—the day after his two long-belated Grammy wins—to drop one of his darkest tracks to date. “The Blacker the Berry,” the second single off Lamar’s as-of-yet untitled third album, reverses the infectious optimism and self-love of “i” to deal with hatred within the black community in a way that is equal parts brutal and compelling.

Evidently, Lamar is conversant with Harlem Renaissance literature; the single borrows its title from Wallace Thurman’s novel “The Blacker the Berry,” one of the first to deal with the discrimination black people commit against one another. Lamar does not shy away from handling this complex issue but instead embraces it both lyrically and musically. His rapping is harsher than on any previous release; Boi-1da’s sparse production consists primarily of a similarly intense boom-bap beat that allows Lamar’s voice to dominate the track, as it deserves to. Cleverly, Lamar distorts his vocals lower to rap, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice / The blacker the berry, the bigger I shoot” in a dark inversion of the high-pitched voice he utilizes to represent his conscience on 2012’s “good kid, m.A.A.d. city.”

The remainder of the track is likewise lyrically unforgiving—though this certainly does not make “The Blacker the Berry” an easy song to listen to, it cements it as all the more essential. Lamar champions his blackness in the face of racism with lines like “I want you to recognize that I’m a proud monkey” and “I’m black as the heart of a fuckin’ Aryan.” Simultaneously, the song has a deeper undercurrent, hinted at when Lamar begins every verse with “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015.” As identified by author Michael Chabon in a surprising Genius comment, Lamar defers an explanation of this assertion until the track’s final lines, when he raps, “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street? / When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!” Difficult lines to hear, certainly, particularly concerning the tragedy of Martin’s death. In delaying this mention of violence within the black community until the end of the track, however, Lamar is successfully able to call attention to anti-black racism on a first listen and introduce a novel interpretation for subsequent listens.

“The Blacker the Berry,” then, is not only a well-composed track dealing with a significant societal ill—it is also uniquely intelligent. If this and “i” are an accurate representation of the album to come, Lamar’s third release may even surpass the considerable success of “good kid, m.A.A.d. city.”