ABSTRACT

In “From ‘Blackness’ to Afrofuture to ‘Impasse’: The Figura of the Jimi Hendrix/Richie Havens Identity Revolution as Faintly Evidenced by the Work of Kendrick Lamar and More than a Head Nod to Lupe Fiasco,” Jon Gill argues that many members of the academy in several disciplines, along with a significant portion of the nonacademic world, have found major significance in the work of West Coast stalwart/mainstay MC Kendrick Lamar. While agreeing that the aesthetic of Kendrick is indeed potent and transformative, he instead initiates an alternative reading of Lamar’s body of recorded music that may reveal Lamar’s methodology is not as groundbreaking as many scholars are wont to suggest. Gill pays homage to what he feels is the greatness of Lamar’s work to this point by instigating a contrast between To Pimp a Butterfly and Chicago exceptional lyricist Lupe Fiasco’s less publicized Tetsuo and Youth, released two months before. Gill proposes that Lupe in Tetsuo and Youth follows the more beneficial direction carved by rock/folk/blues icons Jimi Hendrix and Richie Havens in their reinvention of the possibilities of Afro-diasporic identity in the United States, ultimately distinguishing this from what Gill finds to be the reifying/maintenance of the oppressive category of ‘blackness’ reconstructed in To Pimp a Butterfly.