Kendrick Lamar is known around the world as one of the best hip-hop artists out today. His searing, culturally relevant lyrics and carefully crafted production have pushed hip-hop as a genre to new heights. His talent and creativity have been recognized across the board, even by critics and institutions that have often dismissed the value of rap and other African-American art forms.
One can get a good feel for how much depth an artist has by looking at the kinds of discussions that listeners have surrounding their work. If you look up Kendrick’s lyrics on Genius, a lyric aggregate website that allows users to annotate lyrics, it is not uncommon to find songs where every single line is annotated and where most of them look more like essays than annotations. Not many artists deliver verses with that much content consistently enough to warrant that kind of discussion.
As the fantastic Youtuber Nerdwriter points out, one thing that makes Kendrick’s music so creative and work so well in a genre with so many different producers and people needed to make the product is because he is a master collaborator. He knows how to take people’s diverse talents and use them in the right way to better the project. One way he does this well is with music videos.
In all honesty music videos can be pretty crappy most of the time. They usually are promotional money-grabs involving a sickening number of jump-cuts showing the band playing in a warehouse or a beach or what have you. But Kendrick Lamar approaches music videos as more of a visual component created specifically to complement each song. In this way, each video sort of takes a new life of its own. Instead of just merely going along with the song, each video augments the material in a new way that provides a different experience than what you would get on the album. Often, Kendrick’s videos are longer than the actual tracks and might contain different beginnings, endings, and transitions.
The music video I wanted to look at in particular is the video for the song ELEMENT. of his 2017 album DAMN. This video, directed by Kendrick Lamar in collaboration with Jonas Lindstroem, is a breath of fresh air from most music videos: The shots are long, most are even in slow motion. Each image is very well composed and the style conveys a sense of close, yet detached observation. Lindstroem began his career as a fashion photographer in Berlin so it makes sense that he composes these shots to be more like images that breath, each one drawing the viewer in closer to the stories contained in each. Most of Lindstroem’s other film work uses the medium in this way, almost as a means of portraiture and I think that Kendrick and his team were very purposeful in choosing him to bring that style to this project.
The song ELEMENT. is a very personal one. It revolves around Kendrick’s struggles as a Compton native suddenly living in the spotlight and how he still retains his roots despite how different his life is now. The songs lyrics are a sort of aggressive assertion of Kendrick’s identity amidst an industry with a lot of “whack artists” as he mentions in the third verse. In the video, a lot of this lyrical reflection is manifested through the treatment of violence. Violence is a very prevalent theme in the images of the video and its a part of life in places like Compton where Kendrick grew up. Essentially its a part of his element. In the video these images are strung together in a way that obscures any direct narrative between them. Instead each individual cell acts as a threshold into a story that we are not given the context of, just a single moment. This gives violence a sense of ubiquity and emphasizes the cyclical nature of it in communities like the one Kendrick grew up in. One of the most striking shots to me is the one of the father trying to teach his son how to fight. That is something that my dad has never had to do with me but had I grown up somewhere else, its a big possibility that that would be a part of my life, an aspect I would have to address and be ready for.
One hugely important aspect to this video is the many references it contains to the work of photographer Gordon Parks. Parks was a humanitarian who worked as a photographer primarily documenting urban and African-American life from the 1940’s up until his death in 2006. His work exposed truths about the everyday lives and struggles of impoverished communities to audiences in America that had never been exposed to them before. There are several images from the music video that are direct references to photographs taken by Parks. The provocative opening shot of the video is a hand rising out of the water which is the same subject as an untitled photograph Parks took. Another striking example is a recreation of a photograph by Parks called Boy with June Bug.
Its fitting that Kendrick would choose Parks’ work to pair with his music because both are essentially doing the same thing with different mediums. These references are littered throughout the video which adds a unique dimension of depth and experience that one would not have been able to have from the song alone. Kendrick Lamar has already taken over the rap world with his music alone, but its really cool to see an artist that can navigate other mediums so deftly and still manage to pack a lot of meaning into something as trivial and media-driven as a music video.
