Kendrick Lamar takes visuals seriously. The immersive and staggering experience of To Pimp a Butterfly is rejuvenated through the release of each musical accompaniment, which brings us into that album’s dizzying experimentalism. The Colin Tilley directed Alright was the album's most impressive until recently. The now-released God is Gangsta (especially its first half) is not far off. It attests once again to Kendrick's combined openness, vulnerability, and artistic ambition through his explorations of alcohol abuse (a thematic topic of his), escapism, and depression. Kendrick feels the weight of his world in his work and his work’s success-to-date. This emotional heaviness, expressed through Kendrick’s opening screams, is reminiscent of Kanye West’s shrieks on I Am a God, shrieks which proclaimed Kanye’s failure to live up to his proclamations of divinity. Kendrick doesn’t claim divinity for himself. Instead, Kendrick brings God to earthly levels (God is Gangsta) rather than raising himself to divine heights. Indeed, he pushes himself further and further down in his depressive and suicidal depths. Kendrick cannot, in his music, avoid the heaviness of life:
I fuckin tell you, you fuckin failure /
You ain't no leader /
I never liked you, forever despise you /
I don’t need you /
The world don’t need you /
Don’t let them deceive you
[…]
I fuckin hate you, hope you embrace it
Watch Kendrick’s new short film, God is Gangsta below. It was directed by the little homies (Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free), Jack Begert, and PANAMÆRA.