[This is part 2 of a longer series – previous track “Wesley’s Theory” – next track “King Kunta”]
“For Free?” is labelled as an “interlude,” and though it does have the feel of skit that goes between two more properly formed songs, what happens on this track is much more than a transition. Under cover of an argument between a nagging girlfriend and her frustrated boyfriend, “For Free?” previews one of the album’s central struggles – Kendrick’s battle with “Lucy”: the personification of the United States’ history, economic, social and racial status quo as a tempting woman, somehow also the devil – Lucifer.
The song opens with a dramatic, old-night-club-sounding saxophone riff, and a chorus opening the curtains with their voices. We then transition to a monologue by a nagging girlfriend voice [another way of reading this back-and-forth is as between a prostitute and her pimp – though since it’s music we don’t have to pick just one]:
“Fuck you motherfucker, you a hoe-ass N-word” starts it off, insulting Kendrick’s manhood, his blackness, his skills as a pimp, and it gets harsher from there. The girlfriend’s voice suggests she is cheating on him – “my other n-word is on, you off” and that the reason she’s doing this is that he doesn’t provide the material comfort she deserves – “you ain’t even buy me no outfit for the fourth.” Now it’s subtle at first, but “for the fourth” starts to open us to the truth of “her” identity (i.e., the Fourth of July, aka her birthday). She also demands that she needs “a baller-ass, boss-ass N-word,” which also echoes the tempter’s voice from “Wesley’s Theory” – “I can see the baller in you, I can see the dollar in you.”
This is the same girlfriend addressed in “Wesley’s Theory,” (“at first I did love you but now I just wanna fuck”) – note that she is demanding three things: (1) money to spend on a weave, (2) nonexclusive sexual services whenever she wants them, and also, that (3) Kendrick embody a certain character-type (“a baller-ass, boss-ass N-word”). She wants to steal Kendrick’s labor (2) and colonize his mind (3), and thereby access to capital and from there, luxury (1).
Now it’s significant to me that Kendrick uses the voice of a stereotypical black female girlfriend to speak all of this. This is another example of carnivalesque juxtaposition – Representing America as a stereotypically pushy and materialistic black woman draws us to reflect on the relationship between the “high” and the “low” in fascinating ways. This stereotype would seem to be anti-Black and anti-woman, just considered by itself, but as becomes gradually clear, what’s really up for criticism here is the power structure that has given rise to both this stereotype and Kendrick’s response to it. We have, then, a possibly realistic portrayal of a nagging girlfriend and her boyfriend standing up for himself, yes, but we also have, embedded within it, an analysis of the socially constructed nature of these identities themselves.
I have spent some time reflecting on whether/how misogyny is working on this track. It’s complicated. At first, the track seems just literally to be mocking black women, invoking the pernicious stereotype of a promiscuous “welfare queen” of conservative myth and legend. But I always remember a conversation I had with one of my students – a Black woman – about this song. I asked her if she thought this song was misogynistic. She said “I know Kendrick respects black women.” I asked her why she thought so given this song, and she said “it’s hard for me to say but I’m just sure.” Now I am not trying to hold her experience up as representative, someone speaking for all, and I do not want to deny that seemingly misogynistic imagery is definitely deployed here. But I also want to honor my student’s intuition. Later on after having that conversation, I read Imani Perry saying something similar in her book Prophets of the Hood – where she confesses to feeling defensive of the black men whose music she has enjoyed, in the face of such criticisms, wanting to shield them from the anti-black machinery that is ready to use the threat of “misogyny” to destroy their credibility – an analogy to the way constructed threats against White women have historically been used to provide justifications for lynching Black men. Perry argues that understanding hip-hop’s use of hyper-masculine and/or misogynistic tropes is not so means we must see that it has something to do with the relationship between gender and race. Anti-blackness “feminizes” Black people in the sense of de-privileging them, and that the performative embrace of anti-feminizing tools is better read as an act of anti-racism than one of anti-woman hatred, and that most hip-hop listeners realize this, on an intuitive level at least.
One more point on this question: I think it’s also fair to read the dialogue in this song as a critical depiction – not an endorsement – of the way capitalism and racism can work together to distort human relationships between Black men and Black women. The album has two notable female-male dialogues – the other is much later on. “Complexion” [track 12] falls after Kendrick has told us about some the greatest work he has been done to liberate himself, and provides a foil to the confrontation we find here. Here, there is hostility and manipulation – there there is mutual respect and love.
The bulk of this song consists in Kendrick’s reply to the girlfriend’s monologue, a spoken-word explosion of defiance through which he establishes a breathtaking kind of self-confidence – yes, against this girlfriend, but on the deeper level, against the social structure Kendrick finds himself trapped within. His reply begins, more or less, with a thesis statement, spoken slowly enough for you to hear it, and repeated several times throughout:
This dick ain’t free
I experience an initial wave of awkwardness at the bluntness of the sexuality of the image, but as the track goes along, some very powerful reactions happen. This is one point in the album that students listening often respond very directly, verbally, and exuberantly. I can remember one student getting up out of his seat and exclaiming a deeply felt “damn!” that made a ton of sense to me. The gradual crescendo of the accelerating reply to the girlfriend’s demands is so densely packed that when I listen to it, I feel a kind of overwhelming of history, emotion and a respect for the cleverness unfurled in those lyrics that opens up a vision of self-respect in the face of oppression that inspires awe.
“This dick ain’t free” – as Cole Cushna points out, has at least two meanings – “ain’t free” can mean – “you’re going to need to pay me for it,” but “ain’t free” can also mean, “I am not free to live my life the way I want to,” or both. And here again we see the tension between economic self-sufficiency – those payments might make Kendrick rich – and liberation from racism – he still will be a Black man in America. He’s also noting the oppression implied by and required for the maintenance of capitalist structures by finding them both in the simple phrase “ain’t free.”
This dick ain’t free
You lookin’ at me like it ain’t a receipt
Like I never made ends meet
Eating your leftovers and raw meat
“You lookin’ at me like it ain’t a receipt” suggests he’s being looked at like someone who has himself stolen something, whereas what’s really going on is that he’s been stolen from – his body and the bodies of his ancestors have generated unknowable wealth for which they have not been compensated, and then a more direct reference to life under slavery – “eating your leftovers and raw meat” invokes the reality of meals in slave cabins.
Livin’ in captivity raised my cap salary
Celery, tellin’ me green is all I need
Explores the idea that slavery and its latter-day analogues have “raised my cap salary,” meaning they perhaps have given him some skills others would not have, especially regarding “celery” (which to me contains echoes of Booker T Washington’s idea that the formerly enslaved have unique agricultural skills they can use to develop their own wealth, especially since “celery” is obviously also a metaphor for money). “Tellin’ me green is all I need” harkens back to the idea on “Wesley’s Theory” that not only has Kendrick acquired these skills, but also the ideological construction of his desires, such that he has been made to think that all he needs is to grow wealthy. There is a line of criticism of Washington, that he was naive about the relationship between racial hierarchy and capitalism, and I think you can hear Kendrick hinting at that here.
Later on we get
I need forty acres and a mule
Not a forty ounce and a pit bull
deftly rhyming the “forty acres and a mule” failed promises of Reconstruction idea, and thereby juxtaposing that historical promise with what Kendrick sees as a cliched ghetto reality being foisted on him – “a forty ounce and a pit bull.”
Further,
Kept me up watchin’ pornos in poverty; apology? No
Watch you politic with people less fortunate, like myself
Puts together stereotypes of black hyper-sexuality and indigence (“watchin’ pornos in poverty”) and refusing to make just recompense or even acknowledgement (“Apology? no”). And again, “Watch you politic with people less fortunate, like myself” further develops the vision of just who “you” is – a political and economic structure.
The rest of the verse continues to develop the connection between sexual and economic control in clusters of ways simultaneously. I’ll just let them speak for themselves:
Matter of fact, it need interest
Matter of fact, it’s nine inches
Matter of fact, see our friendship based on business
Pension, more pension, you’re pinchin’ my percents
It’s been relentless, fuck forgiveness, fuck your feelings
Fuck your sources, all distortion, if you fuck it’s more abortion
More divorce courts and portion
My check with less endorsement left me dormant
Dusted, doomed, disgusted, forced with
Fuck you think is in more shit?
Porcelain pipes pressure, bust ’em twice
Choice is devastated, decapitated the horseman
… all running at such a pace that if I were not reading it, I just would not catch it (but when I read it, I also don’t, because that slows it down and misses so much of the power of the flow of the delivery)… all of this ends in a final couplet, one every bit as effective as any you will find in any Shakespearean soliloquy or monologue, followed by a deft repetition of the thesis that intuitively advances the lines of analysis I’ve only begun to unravel. As Kendrick delivers the final punch, he slows the tempo just enough to create the kind of bold cadence only a couplet can generate:
The apostrophe – “Oh America” – finally confirms that Kendrick’s not just as lashing out at an unfaithful girlfriend or pimp’s charge, but at “America,” full-stop.
In “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” (1844) Thoreau similarly indicts Massachusetts:
A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut,
To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt
A “slut” because it takes it benefits economically from the southern slave labor it officially condemns – and so here Kendrick points the finger at the life of the country as a whole, condemning it as “bad bitch.” “I picked cotton that made you rich” so efficiently summarizing 400 years of economic history that there can be no reply. So what does “she” do? She threaten nationalistic violence:
Which also makes a transition to track three – “King Kunta.” More on that tomorrow.
[This is part 2 of a longer series – click here for the whole series – or go to the next track “King Kunta”]
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