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Kendrick Lamar performs like someone parceling out a secret. On the 2015 single “King Kunta,” he stage-whispers, “I swore I wouldn’t tell,” and then proceeds to flaunt industry gossip without naming names. Though the Grammy-hoarding, Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper has mastered literary opacity in his music — he’s a generous user of perspective shifts and allusion — in videos and in live performances, Lamar’s expressive stagings strike like visual poetry.
Lamar has scaled up those performances, becoming more elaborate as his platforms have grown in the 14 years since his recording debut. Dave Free, his primary creative partner and a collaborator on his visual presentations, has in the past attributed the rapper’s mutability to what he called the roller coaster effect: “You give people some type of variation, they can’t get used to you. They can’t put their finger on you. The more you keep people on their toes, the more interested they stay in you, for a longer period of time.”
The first single from Lamar’s major-label debut, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” (2012), is his most straightforward exploration of a visual lament. “I know you had to die in a pitiful vain, tell me a watch and a chain / Is way more believable, give me a feasible gain,” he chants in one verse. The song’s video, directed by Lamar and Free, is set at a funeral, with the rapper joining a procession of mourners wearing white in a hike up a picturesque hill. Their destination? A party with a preacher played by the comic Mike Epps.
One of Lamar’s most prominent motifs is his own haunting, his being spooked by loss and reminded of his own mortality. Elegies are featured throughout his discography. Lamar embodies a shooting victim in the video for “Poetic Justice.”
Performing “i,” the self-affirming lead single from his third album, is a key example. It’s a tactic called the Big Steppers, and it’s an evasive maneuver to delay the inevitable confrontation. it’s not only about avoiding vulnerability but also about flaunting one’s openness, even in the face of great turmoil.
The concert is no longer available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
In the video for “Squabble Up,” a single from his new album “GNX,” released last November, Lamar is at his most cryptic. Directed by Calmatic, the film director from South Central L.A., a world of action is contained in a single frame: a brightly-lit unfurnished room reminiscent of the one featured in The Roots’s “The Next Movement” (1999).
This continues for several more paragraphs, exploring various themes and music videos of Kendrick Lamar, including his use of visual poetry, influence of LA culture, and cryptic messages.
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