To Pimp a Butterfly #5: These Walls

[This is part 5 of a longer series – previous track “Institutionalized”– next track “u” coming soon]

I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence
Sometimes, I did the same

As Kendrick Lamar adds lines to his poem through the course of To Pimp a Butterfly, he explores different aspects of his journey away from the kind of insecure material success with which he begins the album. He’s “conflicted” in a lot of ways – the one I’m focusing on his the conflict between the feeling of his material success and his identity as a Black man in a racist society. This is an instance of a broader conflict, between the material impacts of capitalism and the psychological impact of racism, and my argument is that this album shows us that that even if capitalism is a root cause, even the root cause of racism, deconstructing the former will require a simultaneous attack against the latter.

The portion of the poem before “These Walls” adds the line “sometimes I did the same,” which is confusing because it suggests there are two personalities here. My reaction is to see this as the older, more conscious Kendrick speaking to a younger version of himself, which means “sometimes I did the same” becomes a way of saying, “I remember when I was like that”; maybe the splitting it into personalities emphasizes the distance he now feels. But he also effectively speaks to other people identify with the earlier version of himself, allowing a listener to become “you” and also feeling some of where “I” is coming from.

The “misuse” of influence this track talks about is taking advantage of his position as a “famous rapper” to sleep with the girlfriend of someone who’s been imprisoned. The title of the song – “These Walls” becomes a metaphor for that woman’s body, but also builds on “Institutionalized”‘s “trapped inside the ghetto I ain’t proud to admit it.” Representing those institutional constraints as feminized feels also like it connects with Imani Perry’s notion that racism renders Black people – especially black men – as feminine, in the binary sense of being cast as weaker and lacking in privilege.

The song announces the allegory in the initial fade in, through a woman’s moaning that matches a piano sound and also echoes the saxophone riffs from earlier – “if these walls could talk” repeats, then we get the simple word “Sex.” Now every lyric here can be read as an exploration of sex, personifying and speaking from the perspective of the feeling of the “dick” that Kendrick rapped about on “For Free?” and the “life ain’t nothin’ but a fat vagina” he mentioned on “King Kunta.” And there is an overall vibe that effectively creates an intimacy here in two people in an act of infidelity, Kendrick taunting the partner of the woman he’s with while he’s doing it. Since he has already told us he knows he’s “misusing his influence,” though, we hear the whole thing through a more melancholy, regretful lens. Like, this is fun but also something that he knows, while he’s doing it, is not only wrong but also destructive to all three people involved. The song’s mellowness conveys a lot of ambivalence – especially the Prince-sounding chorus.

Exploring the other aspect of “these walls,” where they become the physical and institutional boundaries of the world he inhabits, there are a lot of ways the double entendre works the other way around from how double entendre usually works. The sexual aspect is the first meaning, the critical theory becomes the second. This is also something we already saw from the opening moments of the album – “at first I did love you, but now I just wanna fuck” forcing the audience to find the economic, political and racial dimension of something that is presented initially as erotic.

Your defense mechanism is my decision
Knock these walls down, that’s my religion

This couplet feels like a place the sexual image is transcended- “knock these walls down, that’s my religion” speaking to Kendrick changing his material conditions.

Walls feeling like they ready to close in
I suffocate, then catch my second wind
I resonate in these walls
I don’t know how long I can wait in these walls
I’ve been on the streets too long
Looking at you from the outside in
They sing the same old song
About how they walls always the cleanest

Continues the sense of being trapped, “institutionalized,” and the doubling of perspective adds to the complexity of this – “looking at you from the outside in” can mean a lot of different things – one is that as a famous rapper, he now sees problems with the people he’s walking among – “they sing the same old song, about how they walls always the cleanest” for me ties in with something Frederick Douglass says in a passage when he is describing remembering his former fellow slaves singing songs:

Few privileges were esteemed higher, by the slaves of the out-farms, than that of being selected to do errands at the Great House Farm. It was associated in their minds with greatness. A representative could not be prouder of his election to a seat in the American Congress, than a slave on one of the out-farms would be of his election to do errands at the Great House Farm. They regarded it as evidence of great confidence reposed in them by their overseers; and it was on this account, as well as a constant desire to be out of the field from under the driver’s lash, that they esteemed it a high privilege, one worth careful living for…

While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm.

Douglass sees the slaves’ competition for the overseers’ affections as somehow a trap, their desires to go to the Great House Farm ultimately reaffirming the conditions of their servitude by building a sense of privilege within different levels of it. Kendrick’s hearing them sing the “same old song,” about “how they walls always the cleanest,” and in that I hear a resigned sadness about the fact that residents of the neighborhood are comparing their relative holdings, and not uniting to “knock these walls down.” Who cares if they’re clean, so long as they’re ultimately blocking freedom? And similarly to Kendrick, Douglass is bouncing back and forth between two perspectives – he’s remembering his old self, standing in the fields hearing the singing, and his new self, who’s moved to Massachusetts and is writing his narrative.

Even when he comes to making from of the incarcerated man, he’s critiquing mass incarceration at the same time:

You pray for appeals hoping the warden would afford them
That sentence so important

The way the song zooms out for a second to focus on the words “that sentence so important” brings me as I listen to reflect on the multiple meanings of “sentence.” One is making fun of the criminal for “turning snitch” – Kendrick telling us to listen to “that sentence” (the one he just spoke) again, emphasizing the criminal’s subservience to the warden. But also – “that sentence so important” speaks to the political impact of “sentencing,” i.e., mass incarceration and all the ways that, as Michelle Alexander has documented in The New Jim Crow, the idea of being a “felon” can do all the work that, in the Jim Crow days, the N-word could do to enforce segregation. It heaps political disenfranchisement, economic dis-empowerment, psychological and social scorn on those who receive its label. “That sentence so important.” So Kendrick is exploring the ways the prison system encourage snitching, and thereby foments the divisions within the people who are both inside and outside of its walls. Kind of like how Douglass sees the privilege of the “Great House Farm” working in his context.

Kendrick continually weaves the duality of his perspective into this song. Towards the end when he says

So when you play this song, rewind the first verse
About me abusing my power so you can hurt

It’s like a message to himself – and the use of the phrase “abusing my power” make an explicit connection to the framing poem, the part that is about to be added before the next song. While he is doing this he feels the problem with it. “Abusing” is not a morally neutral word. That he understands what he is doing, while he doing it, as “abuse” is really deep – it feels like something he would have been more intuitively aware of, not verbally, but in performing this song, he brings that to consciousness.

[This is part 5 of a longer series – previous track “Institutionalized”– next track “u” coming soon]