Modern rap music suffers from a poor reputation with the news media. CNN and Fox News tend to portray rap in a negative way and associate it with violence - specifically gun violence- sexism, and gang culture. Some rap is like the media tends to portray it, but even this rap has a purpose, to depict the violence, drugs, and gang culture that plagues the artists’ communities. Hip hop has a subgenre of sorts called “conscious hip hop.” Rappers like Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Lupe Fiasco, and Mick Jenkins advocate for social and political change through their music. Rap contains more intellectual value than much media portrays; it teaches the listener about things in society, as well as connects on an emotional level and shows the true conditions of people who live in poverty.

This year has been a great year for rap. Rap’s “king” Kendrick Lamar released a project named To Pimp a Butterfly, which has been heralded by critics as one of the greatest rap albums ever. With its unique jazz production and intelligent lyrics, it has become a point of comparison for any hip hop album released since. This year, a high school English class in Alaska used the album as a teaching tool. The use of To Pimp a Butterfly as a topic of study resulted in Kendrick Lamar personally visiting the high school to aid the students in their study of the album.
One of the songs on To Pimp a Butterfly is particularly important to me. This song is called u. The hook of the song is “Loving you is complicated.”  Kendrick raps from the perspective of his mind about the person he has become. Throughout the song, he shows listeners that at one point he hated himself for the person he had become due to fame. He feels that he has let his family down because his sister got pregnant as a teenager, while he was off on tour “preaching in front of 100,000.”  Toward the end of the song the different voice Kendrick is using starts cracking, while the noises of clanking bottles and gulping are heard. The song ends with Kendrick’s “devil on his shoulder” telling him “if I told your secrets/ the world’ll know money can’t stop suicidal weakness.” 

u is a song that has helped me in many ways. It shows that even the most powerful people in the world feel as depressed as I do at times. There was a point in my life where u was almost like me expressing my emotions in song form. I listened to the song daily while in a state of profound sadness. The beauty of this song is that it allows the listener to connect their own experiences and feelings with Kendrick’s words, and then the next song, “Alright”, breaks the listeners out of the depression with inspiration. This song helped me realize that everyone goes through moments of depression and sadness, but after a while everything will be fine, even the events that seem too negative to be viewed as a learning experience.

The album title comes from a poem Kendrick Lamar wrote before the release of the album. He reads the poem at the end of a 12 minute song called “Mortal Man”. Essentially, the album’s title is a metaphor for how a child growing up in a harsh place like Compton, California is surrounded by corrupting ideas and activities. The butterfly represents what the caterpillar could become if it can survive without getting involved in gangs, drugs, or violence.
While listening to the profound thoughts in To Pimp a Butterfly, you may feel like the driver of car with a dead battery and a working alternator. You are exasperated by the car’s refusal to start while the headlights illuminate your path. In order for the car to start, it needs to be put into neutral and pushed. Once the alternator can supply enough power to the dead battery, by using the kinetic energy from the movement in the wheels, you can turn the ignition and hear the engine bellow into life. Once your car is functioning, you thank the person who pushed it. You just thanked genius.com.

This “person” genius.com is a site that compiles text and allows users to annotate anything from the Constitution to rap lyrics. Before the car was pushed “conscious,” rap didn’t make too much sense to much of its audience. Listeners didn’t understand some of the metaphors, double or even triple entendres, or obscure themes of various songs. My use of genius.com along with listening to rap allowed me to learn facts that have been useful at school and have helped me in life. With an album as intellectual as To Pimp a Butterfly, this site provided me with background information as well as user and artist annotation of the meaning of lyrics. It also helped me understand some of the slang used in songs that describe the gang problem in both California and Chicago. My understanding of the music I love has grown exponentially since I discovered this website in 2013.

Many people view “gangsta rap” as promoting violence, drugs, and misogyny, but I believe that those views come from a lack of understanding. I’ll admit I was shocked at first when I heard a song about killing others.  The rappers who commonly reference acts of violence in their lyrics are for the most part are either using it figuratively or using it to portray the problems in their communities. Some rappers like Chicago’s Lil Herb have extremely violent lyrics that are used to convince the audience from a critical perspective that the problems plaguing the housing projects in major cities are causing good kids to give in to the gang lifestyle to survive.

Metaphors and similes in rap separate “conscious rap” from “gangsta rap”. One metaphor that has taught me something came in the Vic Mensa’s song Codeine Crazy (Icarus Story). This song uses the hook from rapper Future’s song Codeine Crazy and applies it as an extended metaphor for how “high” Vic Mensa is getting in terms of popularity. He examines the risks and rewards of popularity by using a metaphor about the risks and rewards of drinking lean (cough syrup containing codeine mixed with a soda, usually Sprite). This metaphor evolves into Vic comparing his rise to fame to the Greek myth of Icarus, a boy who built wings made of wood, feathers, and wax then flew too close to the sun, which resulted in his wings melting and his descent to his death at sea.

This knowledge doesn’t seem to be particularly useful, but to the contrary when my professor asked the class, “Who was the boy that flew too close to the sun?” I replied, “Icarus.” When she asked me how I knew the name of the boy and I explained that I knew it because of a rap song, she shook her head slightly, letting out a chuckle. This wasn’t the first or second time this has happened. Rap teaching me new ideas and terms is a common occurrence.

“Does anyone know what the term stigmata means?” my high school English teacher questioned.
“It means marks or sores on one’s body which resemble Jesus’s scars,” I replied.
“How did you know that?”
“There was a song named “Stigmata” by Ab-Soul.”

In addition to containing intellectual value, rap quickly responds to social issues. Late last year Mick Jenkins, a Chicago rapper who got his start during a rap contest in college, created a song titled 11. This song was a serious political statement about the death of Eric Garner. The verses were introspective takes on what it meant to be black in America. The outro was Eric Garner’s last words “I can’t breathe” repeated 11 times to depict that police brutality to African Americans is so harsh that a black man selling untaxed cigarettes can be killed by the police without even being indicted.

Understanding the bleak outlook for children born in the projects of Chicago and Los Angeles has prevented me from making racist assumptions that some media sources use to explain why the violence is so out of control in places like “Chiraq”, a popular nickname for Chicago. Artists like Kanye West use facts to expose the dangers of growing up in Chicago. In the song Murder to Excellence by Kanye West and Jay-Z, Kanye raps, “I feel the pain in my city wherever I go/ 314 soldiers died in Iraq, 509 died in Chicago.”

Rap as an artform is very personal. It connects with the listener on many levels emotionally. Political statements in rap aren’t new, they date back to the days of Public Enemy and N.W.A in the 1980s. Rap has shown the ways of life in the “hood” from a conscious point of view since Nas released the album Illmatic in 1994. Rap contains just as much or more intellectual value than many other art forms, yet the media portrays it as a public nuisance.  Rap can be used as a social activator to expose the truths in society. People who form opinions about rap from news shows should seek other sources of information before agreeing with the news media’s judgments of rap.  The song “Perception” by Mick Jenkins offers a humbling statement on what happens when people rely on one source of information, admonishing the world of the consequences of ignorance. “Wolves in disguise, how you supposed to see ‘em with the wool in your eyes, sheep to the radio we fooled and surprised

Works Cited
(Lamar, Kendrick Duckworth. U. Kendrick Lamar. Top Dawg Entertainment, 2015. MP3).
Carter, Sean, and Kanye West. Murder to Excellence. Jay-Z and Kanye West. Roc-a-Fella, 2011. MP3.
Jenkins, Jayson. Perception. Mick Jenkins(feat. TheMind). Cinematic Music Group, 2015. MP3