[This is part 4 of a longer series – previous track “King Kunta”– next track “These Walls”]
I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence
A technical term to describe what happens over tracks 4-10 is a “cumulative tale,” like the nursery rhymes “this is the house that Jack built” or “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly…” Kendrick adds a line or two each time, eventually retelling (almost) the whole story before the beginning of “Hood Politics.” We get a crucial coda at the very end of the album, on the spliced interview with Tupac. Each addition reflects upon the song it introduces.
If tracks 1-3 were in medias res, in some ways, track 4, “Institutionalized,” goes back to the beginning. Sort of. Kendrick tells us a story of a friend of his, but also tells us a story about an earlier version of himself. In sketching his friend and himself, he shows us some of the earliest roots of the racist narrative forced upon him as child, a sort grooming that does advance-work for “the temptations of Lucy” – the temptations of capitalism.
“Institutionalized” starts by stepping down the energy. The slower tempo is matched by a lower-key voice intoning
What money got to do with it
When I don’t know the full definition of a rap image?
I’m trapped inside the ghetto and I ain’t proud to admit it
Institutionalized, I keep runnin’ back for a visit, hol’ up
“What money got to do with it” consolidates what’s been established so far – that financial success has not resolved an underlying tension that Kendrick feels about his situation, and “When I don’t know the full definition of a rap image” suggests to me he’s exploring the full ramifications of the construction of his identity and knows he hasn’t worked it all out yet – like he’s speaking to himself here. “Me, scholarship? No, streets put me through colleges” picks up the idea again of miseducation. Here I hear him saying that what he learned street-wise was more important that what those scholarships might have given him.
The next line “I’m trapped inside the ghetto and I ain’t proud to admit it” anticipates what Snoop contributes to the outro – “you can take the boy out the hood but you can’t take the hood out the homie.” Here, it’s both that Kendrick “trapped inside the ghetto” figuratively – he’s moved beyond being physically restricted there, but still mentally so. He could also have said the ghetto was trapped inside him – or he raises the idea of “the ghetto” to something beyond a physical space, but a sense of self this song explores.
“I keep runnin’ back for a visit” is a line a lot my students have resonated with. Many of them find themselves in a relatively unfamiliar suburban landscape, and end up travelling between that world and the world their friends and family live in, somewhere else in the city (or even just back home within the town my school is in).
That’s all followed by another connection to the overall political and historical message of the album, before plunging to another dense exploration of so many themes:
As this interlude starts, the shifted tone implies a shift in narrative perspective: this is no longer the successful Kendrick reflecting on his new position, but more the old Kendrick, expounding the dreams he had before he got signed, etc. “If I was the president I’d pay my mama’s rent” rhymes a juxtaposition between the extreme power of the commander-in-chief and the extreme powerlessness and vulnerability and love, wanting to provide basic needs for his mother. “Free my homies and them” names the desire to end both mass incarceration and ghettoization; “Bulletproof my Chevy doors” names the danger Kendrick feels both now (and would as president). “Lay in the White House and get high, Lord” sounds to me like a deep felt desire to be able to relax at least once in his life.
And then the new cadence of “master, take the chains off me!” shifts gears again. This direct invocation of slavery and chains continues to cast a metaphorical shadow over the album: everything takes place in the context of living out of the history of Kendrick’s ancestors having been literally enslaved, and the metaphorical analogies to it that persist in his present-day reality. Slavery comes up on almost every song of this album. This particular one, speaking directly to a “master,” especially right after a cluster of lines about internalized racism, leads to the idea that he’s pleading with a “master” that is to some extent inside his own mind, the part of the oppressor that has grown up inside him (one half of DuBois’s double-consciousness).
Things then take another step to an even slower vibe, with a descending mellow-synthesized keyboard, and a story begins. Kendrick draws himself back again into the successful present with “I can just alleviate the rap industry politics,” expressing a desire to cut through all this choreographed competition and exploitation . He then also returns to the swagger of “King Kunta”:
Be all you can be, true, but the problem is
Dream only a dream if work don’t follow it
Remind me of the homies that used to know me, now follow this
He’s critiquing the generalization he hears from the strivers that surround him, judging them for not putting in the work he has learned to. “Be all you can be” also invokes the 80’s Army recruitment commercials (the arm is also alluded to in last line of the song – “Fuck you, good night, thank you much for your service”). Both of these do two things at once: indict the people Kendrick sees around him in the ‘hood who are less successful than he, but also indict the game they’re trying to play, and encourage us to explore the myths of meritocracy or the idea that being a “good citizen” by joining the army, you could overcome your position.
This song is stuck between “hating the player” and “hating the game.” Which is one of the “conflicts” that the first bit of the poem mentions – “I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence.” The rest of the song focuses more on one of Kendrick’s friends that he brought as a guest to an awards show:
But somethin’ came over you once I took you to them fuckin’ BET Awards
You lookin’ at artistses like they’re harvestses
So many Rollies around you and you want all of them
Somebody told me you thinkin’ ’bout snatchin’ jewelry
The friend wants to steal the expensive jewelry the other guests wear, and Kendrick feels uncomfortable and distant from this friend, but also somehow very close to him. We also see, in his reckoning of that man’s perspective, an embedded criticism of the music industry and its connection to the history of exploitation of Black labor with “you lookin’ at artistses like they’re harvestses.” Music becomes a cash crop, like the “celery” and “yams” that have already come up earlier. That this line can both liter4ally describe Kendrick’s friend’s attitude at the BET Awards and more metphorically capture a problem with music industry as a whole is another example of Kendrick’s success with carnivalesque inversion.
Kendrick reflects on where his friend has gone wrong – and where, on his current view of himself, he has gone right. He prides himself on following his grandmother’s advice: “Shit don’t change until you get up and wash yo’ ass, n-word.” There’s an ambivalance, though, about whether Kendrick has made it because of all the hard work he’s done, or for some other reason. Here, he seems pretty clear that he did right, though later, he’ll give a more extended look at “survivor’s guilt” and how that figures in.
The mysterious combination of autobiography and distancing here comes through with the Snoop Dogg interlude. Somehow Snoop’s voice captures the fantastical nature of Kendrick’s connection to his friend:
Again. he’s describing both of them at once. There follows a complicated monologue, where the friend describes his own mentality and defends his actions and desires, in a way that unfolds an overall criticism of the structures they’re both inhabiting. The friend, considering his more thorough marginalization, can articulate back to Kendrick what Kendrick himself may have started to forget.
Now Kendrick, know they’re your co-workers
But it’s gon’ take a lot ‘fore this pistol go cold turkey
Shows his friend reckoning with the value of his friendship as set aside the chance to be wealthy. This is a tension we have already seen Kendrick himself experience – “bridges burned, all across the board, but what for?” – and here, Kendrick’s friend’s self-awareness represents something. His friend is skeptical about these assembled stars in their finery, and it’s a skepticism that Kendrick himself seems to empathize with. He doesn’t just dismiss his friend or his attitude. He hears him out.
When Snoop again interjects, we get:
He was five foot something, dazed and confused
Talented but still under the neighborhood ruse
You can take your boy out the hood
But you can’t take the hood out the homie
“Talented but still under the neighborhood ruse” shows a respect for his friend, and also shows us how Kendrick felt about himself earlier – it seems like the same idea, at its core, that is expressed on his earlier album title, “Good Kid M.A.A.D city.” For me, it’s a very moving show of vulnerability for him to put himself out there like that, and through telling a story about his friend, we can come to see what Kendrick is telling us about himself.
Hollywood’s nervous
Fuck you, goodnight, thank you much for your service
Is an enigmatic way to end the song, but one big idea I hear is that the entire stardom-system rests on a scheme of race and class hierarchy that Kendrick’s friend, being both poor and Black, can disrupt.
[This is part 4 of a longer series – previous track “King Kunta”– next track “These Walls”]
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