ABSTRACT
On the immortal cipher constructed on “Mortal Man” from Kendrick Lamar’s third studio album To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), Lamar forges an otherworldly cipher with the late Tupac Shakur on the nineteenth anniversary of his death. Others, such as the ghosts of Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela appear on the technologically probing sample. In “Can Dead Homies Speak?,” Miller considers the role of time, space, and ontology in the work of Lamar, asking, “What does it mean to let dead homies tell stories for us?” And, “How might, or ought, scholars go about analyzing the technological alchemy in constructing the ‘spirits’ of these dead homies (methodologically) brought back to life through the contingencies of a sample marked by times past, while made current through sonic cipher-like assignation?” In so doing, Miller considers dueling subject positions of spirits and bodies, contested visions and versions of blackness, the empty and full void of black space, and the nonlinearity of Lamar’s play with time. With great ingenuity and alchemical posterity, Lamar enables multiple modes and registers of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen.’ Through a ‘thin’ ethnographic approach relying on Lamar’s craft and interviews, Miller examines the aporetic flows and lines of flight running throughout Lamar’s penchant for digital immortality and mortally minded constructions of black meaning. From the “Spirit of Black Meaning” to the “Flesh of Black Time,” Miller’s chapter takes the reader on a black time travel on a variety of topics throughout Lamar’s work, most especially “Mortal Man” – from ghosts, to Africa, black history, mental health, pimping, celebrity status, and black memory, Miller relies on Lamar to look past the flesh of black death to dialogue about the current state of black life.
