ABSTRACT
Joseph Winters, in “Beyond Flight and Containment: Kendrick Lamar, Black Study, and an Ethics of the Wound,” contends To Pimp a Butterfly is Kendrick’s attempt to re-express depression in the form of black intimacy, a way of communicating with and experiencing the world through what Winters calls “cuts and wounds.” In an interview on the Breakfast Club, Charlamagne tha God expressed surprise at Kendrick’s confession that he experiences depression at a moment that, according to Charlamagne, should be experienced as achievement and triumph. While the hosts of the Breakfast Club assume that Lamar should be moving upward and forward, the recording artist attributes his depression to the gap between his newfound freedom and wealth and the conditions of ‘home,’ the forms of social death in Compton he refuses to disavow and extricate himself from. As exemplified in songs like “King Kunta,” a term that brings together sovereignty and slavery, Winters cautions that Lamar’s suggestion of his being at any kind of summit is also a kind of fall – an identification with black bodies in the afterlife of slavery and at the edges of human recognition. Lastly, drawing from Fred Moten’s elaborations on the relationship between blackness and tumultuous movement, Winters argues To Pimp a Butterfly cuts against the common sense of linear (racial) progress.
