Music lineage in Kendrick Lamar’s 'reincarnated'
Sampling, Signifying, and West Coast Hip-Hop.
Following Kendrick Lamar dominating the hip-hop wins at the 28th Annual Grammy Awards, I have revisited his sixth studio album GNX. At the time of release, I felt the record was slightly spotty in quality. However, I have come back again and again since for it to grow on me more each time.
Released in the aftermath of his universally agreed defeat of Drake in the greatest rap beef since Biggie Smalls versus Tupac Shakur, this surprise drop paid homage to a definitively West Coast sound. It simultaneously looks back to the glossy G-funk instrumentals of the 1990s and 2000s (although framing them within a more modern, sparse sonic aesthetic) and also consolidates and promotes the future of the West Coast scene with features from Lefty Gunplay, AzChike, and HittaJ3.
This idea of lineage and genealogy; the highlighting of the past and present of the continuum, is not just inherent in the sonics of the beats, nor the hometowns of the guest artists. A track that forefronts this thematic thread is ‘reincarnated’, where he discusses the psychological fallout from past-life regression therapy he underwent. The themes and compositional concepts here echo the theoretical writings of Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Signifyin(g). Gates Jr. argues that African American cultural artefacts and practices can be understood as takes on, and deliberate references to, what has come before whilst building on them to evolve artistically and culturally. Kendrick brings into focus this idea of lineage as he raps from the perspective of varying Black musical icons.
The first artist he refers to is Tupac Shakur. Kendrick has never obscured his appreciation for the West Coast’s poster boy, exploring Tupac’s ideas on Black masculinity and the struggles of being an African American icon in ‘Mortal Man’ from To Pimp A Butterfly. But instead of a post-humous stitching together of audio interviews in the former, here he samples the drums, arpeggiated guitar and meandering piano melody of Tupac’s ‘Made Niggaz’.
This sample sticks out amongst the other instrumental timbres on GNX, particularly because of the piano’s plasticity. Contemporary VST is now much more developed than the production apparatus of the 1990s. This is evident here as the sample sounds decidedly synthetic against some of the other instrumentals. Now, it isn’t hard to download a fairly realistic sounding piano plugin, have it play a MIDI line clicked into the piano roll, and, especially when buried in the mix amongst other instrumental lines, happily deceive listeners as to its non-acoustic reality.
The undercurrent of artifice attests to the sample’s function as referential rather than aesthetic. Kendrick spits his first bars with a sixteenth note flow that resembles the rhythmic fashion of Tupac’s opening bars on ‘Made Niggaz’. As we continue looking at the first verse, it becomes quickly apparent that he is not rapping strictly from his own perspective as he “take[s] it back to Michigan in 1947”. Although he does not make it explicit who he is referring to, it is highly likely he is rapping as blues guitarist John Lee Hooker. Hooker ran away from his parents in Mississippi as a young teen, before settling in Detroit where his recording career eventually took off whilst he was working on a factory line. Kendrick (or John) ends the verse with “died with money, gluttony was too attractive, reincarnated”.
Every time Kendrick yells “reincarnated” he then proceeds to embody another musical figure. He starts the second verse with “another life had placed me as a Black woman in the Chitlin’ circuit”. This woman is probably Billie Holiday. He then discusses Holiday’s struggles with substance addiction, ending the verse with “I died with syringes pinched in me, reincarnated.” This is the last time we here the “reincarnated” motif; the third verse is ended with an exclamation of “’carnated!”. Kendrick initiates the final stanza with “My present life is Kendrick Lamar”, implying we have made our way through the past-life genealogy to his current embodiment.
Interestingly, the ‘Made Niggaz’ piano sample drops out here and is replaced by a bright, beautifully arpeggiated guitar alongside some fluid, embellished piano lines, that are decidedly organic; it sounds like a performer actually played these parts as opposed to them being inputted as MIDI. The basic harmonic content prior to the entrance of these two lines had been repeating throughout; the bass implies an Am7 chord for two bars, followed by a Gsus2 chord for the same duration, which then resolves back to the Am7 and repeats. However, at the point Kendrick declares he is rapping as himself, we get a development of the harmonic content and an omission of the Tupac sample. Am7 plays again, but instead of leading to the Gsus2, we get a borrowed chord of Bmin7 that takes us out of the A minor key previously created through the cyclicality between Am7 and Gsus2. As the B minor takes us to another harmonic realm, we enter the Kendrick’s current carnation as himself.
The piano sample then re-enters as he begins a conversation with someone he calls “father”. The themes of lineage here suggest the father figure could be Kendrick’s biological father, but it can also be read as being God, or maybe some sort of unifying amalgam of the lineage he underscores. However, the biblical references that proceed this infer he is talking to his creator as the “father” says:
“I sent you down to earth ‘cause you were broken,
Rehabilitation, not psychosis
But now we here now
Centuries you manipulated man with music
Embodied you as superstars to see how you moving”
The shifting points from which Kendrick outlooks lyrically now here become clearer. Kendrick is imagining the possibility of him being, in essence, the same soul as Holiday, Tupac and Hooker, chosen by God, and reincarnated in a new body each time the dangers of fame compromise one of their earthly bodies. This genealogy of past-lives points at a dark consequence of stardom; the pull of destructive temptations is as strong as the joy you provide to your audience. Whether this be substance abuse, greed, or the attacking of your peers, Kendrick infers this special soul was chosen by God as a messianic but prodigal figure.
What is most masterful here, is Kendrick’s use of the Tupac sample. Although it, admittedly is not played throughout the whole song, the moments where it enters or is removed are of most profundity. The sample is playing when he is lyrically exemplifying Holiday, Hooker, and briefly Tupac at the start. Yet, when he announces his current manifestation as Kendrick Lamar, the sample is removed, and we enter new harmonic territory, granting this sonic sense of forward motion. The sample does re-enter in the third verse, but only when he is having the conversation with his “father”. We can understand the sampling of Tupac as sonically marking this idea of lineage, and this is a powerful tool to do so.
On sampling, Joe Schloss writes “it allows producers to use other people’s music to convey their own compositional ideas”. Sampling is basically a compositional way of overtly underscoring the idea of musical heredity; a song is made and exists within itself, then someone samples it and it becomes, whilst still embodying its origin, something new. This sonic ‘reincarnation’ is the same thing Kendrick explores lyrically. Sampling is a musical manifestation of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s literary theory of Signifyin[g]. Other examples include the constant re-arrangement of the jazz standard, or the collage work of Jean-Michel Basquiat: the taking of a source material, and repurposing of it into something new. This creates an overt lineage of art, in the same way Kendrick constructs the lineage of African-American excellence and places himself as the most recent expression of it.
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