ABSTRACT
Rob Peach’s ‘“Real Is Responsibility’: Revelations in White through the Filter of Black Realness on good kid, m.A.A.d city,” argues that Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city (2012) employs the trope of “realness” as an expression of black cultural criticism. As a ‘real-life’ documentarian deploying an autobiographical ethnography of Compton, California, Lamar negotiates the politics of black male identity and Dubosian double-consciousness (“my angry adolescence divided”) against the backdrop of postindustrial urban decay in the manner of what Michael Eric Dyson (1993) calls a “post-modern secular spirituality.” In so doing, Lamar engages in what Peach refers to as an autoethnographic mode of racial/ized self-reflexivity, or ‘realness,’ that finds its expression in a synesthetic LP/’short film.’ Writing from the standpoint of a white scholar of hip-hop and religion and a fan – a ‘KENdrid’ – of Kendrick, Peach poses questions producing an interpretive framework for unpacking and understanding better Lamar’s embodiment of ‘black meaning’ with GKMC in mind. Using autoethnography as method, Peach’s chapter attempts to answer these questions as a means by which to model and sharpen the white religion studies scholar’s engagement of and with the ‘black meaning’ of hip-hop.
