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Kendrick Lamar releases new song ‘The Blacker the Berry’

By Ryan Lehrman

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Compton MC Kendrick Lamar drops a racially charged track that invokes the prejudice mounting from Ferguson, Staten Island and places across the map.

If Kendrick Lamar’s inspirational first single “i” was Martin Luther King Jr.-type ideology, “The Blacker the Berry” is Malcolm X.

The Compton MC unveiled the sharp-tongued track produced by Boi-1da that invokes the prejudice mounted from Ferguson, Staten Island and places across the map and whips it back in our faces. In what seems like an African-American anthem, he unleashes a diatribe against the white man whose evil has “vandalized” his culture.

It marks a fiery departure from “i” — which won two Grammys — off the upcoming good kid, m.A.A.d city followup, which many started to believe would be a breezy commercial album.

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K Dot kicks off the first rap verse with “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015.” He concedes he is full of contradictions that he’ll explain by the end of the cut.

Grisly-toned vocals rub against a boom bap beat, leading to a chorus that repeats: “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

The single’s accompanying photo shows the chest of an African-American woman breastfeeding two babies.

Wrestling with the issue of racism that has once again bubbled to the surface of our society, the reigning hip hop king unloads a verbal clip at a shadowy, hatred-heavy reality. It is a message that has parted the seas of time and is arguably no more relevant during the Civil Rights Movement than it is today.

“This plot is bigger than me/ It’s generational hatred/It’s genocism, it’s grimy little justification.”

For the majority of the track, he takes his anger out on a system that’s been stacked against him, yet toward the end he looks in the mirror.

“So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the streets, when gang banging make me kill a n**** blacker than me?”

Overall, “The Blacker the Berry” is a dark, heavy cut that shows the complexities and contradictions of prejudice, at once dismantling hatred as a one-way street and instead revealing it will take mutual responsibility to end it.

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