Ideas in Antiquity Journal #13

November 12th, 2020

12:05 p.m.

For today’s class we were transported to the world of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.

The Group named their presentation To Pimp Antiquities and I loved the name change and reference to the class ❤

Just-Us, Tosin, Christian, Lettirose, and Rawlonda gave a great presentation that analyzed the leadership journey of Kendrick Lamar and the subliminal messages conveyed in the award winning album.

I am quite familiar with Kendrick Lamar and his work, but I have never had the opportunity to dive deeper into his work as literary pieces, let alone for their leadership messages.

According to the group members research, “Kendrick Lamar‘s third album To Pimp a Butterfly was released on March 15, 2015. Lamar uses traditional African American music such as jazz, funk, soul, spoken word, and avant-garde to accentuate his lyrical political commentary and personal themes. His ingenious word play with homonyms and alliterations create upbeat and catchy lyrics that still connect to his themes throughout the songs.”

I always found the album title interesting and enjoyed finding out that the original album title was “Tu Pimp A Caterpillar,” each words first letter spells Tupac, the late rapper. Tupac is a big inspiration in Lamar’s life and one of the reasons he started creating music.

I enjoyed the analysis on one of my favorite songs from the album, The Blacker the Berry, The group described the songs as,

“To talk about “the blacker the berry” you have to start with the song title itself. The saying “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice” is used to celebrate black skin and uses this analogy as a way to celebrate people of darker skin. The parallels can be made to Tupac’s “keep ya head up” who Kendrick previously almost abbreviated his album name to. In a way this makes Kendrick a mentee to the legacy and influence Tupac left in hip-hop. We see the influence that Tupac presented to Kendrick within the album and the struggle that Kendrick faces with being a celebrity just like Tupac. In the first verse of this song Kendrick talks about how he is a black man and how white people hate him for it. But Kendrick is proud to be an African and at one point refers to himself as “a proud monkey” seemingly reclaiming his blackness and the term for black people. He also gets into the fact that he is an African American but later retracts and says he is just African because he does not identify with white America. He ends this verse explaining how the black community was “sabotaged” and white people that controlled the government made profit from it while the community were made killers.”

I thought that this description of the song was informational and informaitve. It also showed me to look more into the meanings of the songs that I listen to. As someone who loves hidden messages this song is full of them. I enjoyed where the group brought up the last verse of the song where Kendrick realizes that the problems the black community faces are bigger than himself, he cannot fix them alone

Discussion Questions

• Kendrick purposefully chose “Institutionalized” as the titles of one of his tracks for its ambiguity. WHat is an institution in your life? One major institution in my life is that of motherhood. As a mother we juggle so many things and still have to take care of ourselves. I often find myself at odds with the traditional institution of motherhood.
• In the song “Blacker the Berry” Kendrick ecplains how he is a hypocrite because of his past. Have you ever been put in a situation where you had to admit hypocrisy? I have a few examples of where I have been put in a situation where I had to admit hypocrisy. During the presentation Isaiah said it best, “ Hypocrisy is growth (Or something like that).” I agree with what Isaiah said, there are millions of things I said I’d never do, that I now do everyday. When we admit to changing our opinions and views we are essentially growing up. Someone also mentioned that Hypocrisy might even be an institution in itself. Something thats taboo but really necessary.

The literary connections listed in the presentation between Killmonger from Black Panther and Kendrick Lamar was very interesting. I agree that “ They both hold up a mirror to society to show the world its flaws and imperfections.”

November 14th 2020

With my groups own final project coming up I was getting increasingly nervous. I’m not the best public speaker and I get nervous when the spotlight is on me (even if its a virtual spotlight). I have the pleasure of working with a group of young ladies who are also dedicated to getting the work done. Throughout my academic career I am usually the group member who picks up all of the pieces inconveniently last minute. I came to Howard hoping that I would have the opportunity to work with people who would be glad to pull their weight in a group assignment and I was right !

I was having a hard time making myself watch Hercules and thought it might be a good idea to see if my group wanted to have a facetime movie night so we could all watch it together.