Wesley’s Theory, For Free?
Opening the album is the introduction of a sample by Boris Gardiner “Every Nigger is a Star.”
Every nigger is a star, ay, every nigger is a star
Every nigger is a star, ay, every nigger is a star
Every nigger is a star, ay
Who will deny that you and I and every nigger is a star?
To jump straight into answering the question you may have asked yourself, Who is the Butterfly? or Who is Kendrick Lamar referring to? Well, the Butterfly is the Black American. The song progresses to the introduction to say,
When the four corners of this cocoon collide
You’ll slip through the cracks hopin’ that you’ll survive
Gather your wit, take a deep look inside
Are you really who they idolize?
What is the cocoon? For the Black American, it could indeed be their (neighbor)hood, their immediate environment that, for the caterpillar seeking to develop and spread its wings in the world, provides the first refuge or haven from the coldness of the world. But I venture to believe that the cocoon represents a bigger entity. “Four corners of this cocoon” resonates with 4 corners of the globe folding in on itself. So this idea, this metaphor of the cocoon is extended to encompass a greater power or force of influence than one’s own neighborhood, the world itself. Systemically, Lamar speaks to a bigger power, hard to overcome, and reverses the idea of a cocoon, which functions similar to a womb. It provides a safe environment abetting in the being’s evolution and gestation. But this idea of the cocoon being the world and collapsing on itself forcing you to hope “that you’ll survive” turns the idea of nurturing on its head. Instead, the cocoon, the refuge becomes a place of impending doom for the slow-moving caterpillar or butterfly. “Are you really who they idolize?” This line alludes to a thought that the adoration and praise Lamar is lauded with is based in a false reality. He’s questioning this admiration and wondering if it is genuine (love for himself and his Blackness) or fake and rooted in an adoration for the things his new life of fame and fortune has blessed him with. This is all before Kendrick actually starts rapping and unfolding this complex metaphor of his perspective he’s established.
When I get signed, homie, I’ma act a fool
Hit the dance floor, strobe lights in the room
Snatch your little secretary bitch for the homies
Blue-eyed devil with a fat-ass monkey
I’ma buy a brand new Caddy on fours
Trunk the hood up, two times, deuce-four
Platinum on everythin’, platinum on weddin’ ring
Married to the game and a bad bitch chose
When I get signed, homie, I’ma buy a strap
Straight from the CIA, set it on my lap
Take a few M-16s to the hood
Pass ’em all out on the block, what’s good?
I’ma put the Compton swap meet by the White House
Republican run up, get socked out
Hit the prez with a Cuban link on my neck
Uneducated, but I got a million-dollar check like that
It is in verse one, with a watchful eye, you can see the Butterfly clearly. Kendrick Lamar, as a fellow Butterfly, unfurls his “pimping” by not only the world but by the music industry as well, which both have a reputation within the black community for the commercialization and fetishization of Blackness purely for consumption’s sake. It’s clear now, I believe with this opening of the album, Lamar is still addressing every ear that hears his words, Black and an evolving caterpillar or not, it is a message of the exploitation of Blackness and the different forms that it manifests itself as in the world. Upon Lamar’s signing of his contract in exchange for an industry standard of an advance in the form of a large sum of money (that the artist will later have to recoup), he’s going to revel in carnal desires of the world and of the flesh, thereby abandoning any high morals and lofty goals for promises of material goods. Lamar, I believe posits himself as a representation of Black artists within the music industry, namely the genre of hip-hop. Parties that never end, sexual promiscuity with alluring women based on the fact he’s a celebrity, and new cars with all the bells and whistles that will surely depreciate in value almost immediately after securing it. The glamorization of material goods is only reified by your capitalist structure. We go to work, drone away years of our lives and work ourselves tirelessly for the promise of the great American Dream, things piled on top of more. The power of hip-hop/rap as an influence on the world and the community from which it derived is extremely powerful. We’ll later visit the power of sounds in a later post.
When I get signed, homie, I’ma buy a strap
Straight from the CIA, set it on my lap
Take a few M-16s to the hood
Pass ’em all out on the block, what’s good?
This, politically speaking, is a powerful statement. With it, Lamar aims to elucidate the listener to the fact that the government, during the 1970s and 80s sanctioned the CIA and FBI to distribute guns and drugs (crack cocaine) throughout the Black community, providing the ammunition and evidence needed to legitimize a “War on Drugs.” In plainer terms, he’s going straight to the source to get the assault rifles and disseminate them to his neighbors and friends. Kendrick also plays on a prevailing stereotype of African-Americans living in impoverished neighborhoods. That they’re full of guns and drugs. But he’s doing so in order to shift the focus to the source of the problem(s) within the community.
I’ma put the Compton swap meet by the White House
Republican run up, get socked out
Hit the prez with a Cuban link on my neck
Uneducated, but I got a million-dollar check like that
Serving as an allusion to the album cover, the reason the gavel-holding Republican got “socked out” (knocked out) when Lamar according to his desires, moved his neighborhood swap meet to the White House. (See RAP: Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly) Why would he want to do that? Maybe its to exchange a slice of life with outliers that have systemically had great influence over his own commmunity. He and his compatriots are going to meet the President with a neck full of gold, an unusual and very cavalier way to greet and meet the revered leader of our free world. Uneducated, thanks to the great school system provided by the nation, is a state that does not bother Kendrick Lamar to exist in. What’s the use for education when you have the freedom to buy what you want with a “million dollar check.” As a rhetor, Lamar’s lines are riddled with a strange satirical truth. He plays with these images in an attempt to overturn prevailing tropes of Black Americans, yet, in doing so he’s still telling the truth. It may not be all Black Americans, but the mentality is one of a good bit of the population.
The bridge reveals, quite possibly, the voice of White America, or America itself.
We should’ve never gave
We should’ve never gave niggas money
Go back home, money, go back home
We should’ve never gave
We should’ve never gave niggas money
Go back home, money, go back home
(Everybody get out)
At this moment, it does not seem likely that the rhetor is addressing anyone but African-Americans within the nation. Echoing a well known Garveyism of returning to millions of African-Americans from America back to Africa in an effort to “link up the fifty million Negroes in the United States of America, with the twenty million Negroes of the West Indies, the forty million Negroes of South and Central America, with the two hundred and eighty million Negroes of Africa, for the purpose of bettering our industrial, commercial, educational, social, and political conditions (Groff 176). This movement was the closest Black people may have ever come to being free from the systemic oppression of a blanched hegemony. This movement was what Marcus Garvey was a solution to The Negro Problem of the early nineteenth-century. If you don’t know what that problem, that can be remedied. The Negro Problem was millions of ebony veterans returning to a war-ravaged nation that just 50 years earlier was locked in a Civil War. After World War 1, many returned back to their homes to find that jobs and opportunities for upward economic mobility only to find racial tensions and a system that wanted to prevent Black bodies from contributing to the society in exchange for money. Yet, it (America) had no problem kidnapping and subjugating millions of human beings and subsequently erasing ties to their native identity and culture.This was the Negro Problem. The releasing of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, was widely credited with inspiring the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey’s speech was delivered less than two years after the Red Summer of 1919. Richard Wormser provides succinct accounts of the Red Summer and the inception of the KKK (See: Red Summer (1919) and The KKK). Hypocrisy lives, as the very beings that plucked Africans from their ancestral lands to come work and be enslaved, benevolently bestowing a wretched existence of suffering unto them, only to treat the same beings with contempt and disregard when we cannot continue to work for free and demand to be economically enfranchised.
Continuing to the second verse, Lamar expounds more on the materialistic mentality that has Black Americans, or artists in the music industry in a vice-grip-like clutch.
What you want? You a house or a car?
Forty acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar?
Anythin’, see, my name is Uncle Sam, I’m your dog
Motherfucker, you can live at the mall
The rampant consumerism, the spirit of capitalism is personified in this final verse as Lamar raps as if he’s Uncle Sam talking to himself. At this point, Kendrick could serve as a representation of Black America. So what is he trying to say? What is Uncle Sam, a personified spirit of America, who comes to us in the form of an elderly white man with his index finger extended to the view as if a selection of some sort is happening. 
Photo appears as a courtesy of https://comicvine.gamespot.com/uncle-sam/4005-9624/
I know your kind (That’s why I’m kind)
Don’t have receipts (Oh, man, that’s fine)
Pay me later, wear those gators
Cliché, then say, “Fuck your haters”
I can see the borrow in you, I can see the dollar in you
Little white lies, but it’s no white-collar in you
But it’s whatever though because I’m still followin’ you
Because you make me live forever, baby
Count it all together, baby
Then hit the register and make me feel better, baby
Good Uncle Sam knows what we crave. The desire to acquire more things drives our motives. Moreover, socio-economically, the Black population is not known for being monetarily wealthy. So, in turn, the heavy reliance on credit, “uneducated”, and the desire for material trifles creates a cocktail for poverty. Uncle Sam (America) is able to see the “borrow” and “the dollar” in our “kind” with “no white-collar” in us. Woah, I know. What this means is that the Black body is chattel dollars to be farmed. The Black body is meant to lean on borrowing, never entrepreneurship. The Black body exists outside of the realm of the white-collar society (the word itself denotes a class that exists outside of the manual labor class). The clutch of consumerism is the sustenance that feeds the economic subjugation of a people, of a nation; it feeds Uncle Sam and what he represents. At this point, its not just the Black community involved in Sam’s immortality. We are all guilty. I believe this plays to the spirit of unity that ultimately binds us all, the 99%, and the best part is that it does not discriminate skin tones. Everyone is susceptible to being possessed by an endless pursuing of material commodities.
Your horoscope is a gemini, two sides
So you better cop everything two times
Two coupes, two chains, two C-notes
Too much ain’t enough, both we know
Christmas, tell ’em what’s on your wish list
Get it all, you deserve it, Kendrick
Lamar’s astrological sign is that of the Gemini, which demarcated from the other signs uniquely by its duality. This idea of duality is interesting, which brings to mind W.E.B. duBois’ discourse on the double consciousness that is unique to the Negro’s experience in America. There’s a binary created when our (the Black) identity is hyphenated. African-American, never just American. Whether its to celebrate what makes people unique or not, it creates a sense of Otherness. Black bodies cannot simply exist in this space as Americans. No. There had to be a sub-category to define a group of people who were through and through, American. The prefix sub- suggests a binary of lesser/greater, superior/inferior, etc.. So Kendrick Lamar, who serves many roles within his personal community and to the community at large. There are many binaries that exist within Lamar’s life, form the outside looking in, such as making music for the artistry/money, caterpillar/butterfly, African/American, etc.. Uncle Sam’s baiting of Lamar to indulge in his success isa trap that will only lead him to feed the white business(men) that own the martial commodities that he will buy. Now he commands Lamar to “hit the register” and make him “feel better” because they both know that “too much ain’t enough”. Uncle Sam is a spirit Kendrick has been raised around that he cannot seem to part with, even in his many accolades the call of consumerism still haunts him to buy more things.
And when you hit the White House, do you
But remember, you ain’t pass economics in school
And everything you buy, taxes will deny
I’ll Wesley Snipe your ass before thirty-five
Tax man comin’, tax man comin’ (4x)
As a final reminder for when Kendrick moves the “Compton swap meet to the White House” that he is in fact, uneducated on the workings of the nation economically. Essentially Uncle Sam is telling Kendrick that he has no real understanding of the money he is accumulating. Earlier we saw Kendrick (rapping as himself) bragging about making it to the White House, being uneducated yet having amassed a large sum of money. Finally, we see Uncle Sam telling Kendrick that he is not an exception to being caught up in scandal. Many Black artists and actors have fell victim to tax evasion, Wesley Snipes and Lauryn Hill to name a couple, because they were “uneducated.” The song trails off with a reminder that the tax-man is coming (for him).
Works Cited
BOIS, W. E. B. DU. “Strivings of the Negro People.” Atlantic, 2012 Civil War Special, pp. 138-141. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.gsu.edu/login?] url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=lfh&AN=112479456&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Groff, Bethany. “Marcus Garvey on “Back to Africa.” [“Defining Documents: The 1920s”]. Defining Documents: The 1920S, 7/1/2014, pp. 175-178. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.gsu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=khh&AN=120893908&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Video appears courtesy of YouTube.
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