God is in the Redundancy: Lessons in Creative Intimacy From Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar has done far more than win a historic rap battle; he's given us a blueprint that we desperately need to build a new world.
Photo by Maja Smiejkowska/Shutterstock
“If you have discovered a truth, tell it first to a parrot! Every new truth needs an insistent repetition.” —Mehmet Murat Ildan
“Kendrick, STOP. He’s already dead!” —The Internet
A good lover, a good parent and a good serial killer all have something in common with a good artist: profound intimacy with the subject in front of them. For better or worse, that subject is molded from this profound intimacy, and forever altered due to the devotion of the one who holds them close. What I hadn’t quite put together until the week of Kendrick Lamar’s lyrical assault on Drake (with “euphoria,” “6:16 in LA,” “meet the grahams” and “Not Like Us”), is how so much of that devotion is actually born of repetition—even to the point of redundancy. As we continue to unpack and celebrate some of the greatest diss tracks of all time, we should also consider that Kendrick’s tower moment brings powerful weapons for us all to study, and add to our own creative arsenals.
When “euphoria” first dropped, I was in the middle of experiencing the most intense lesson about repetition I’ve ever had, besides potty training my children (the memories of which I have entirely blocked out, due to trauma). As a writer, pitching a TV show is an incredible win in and of itself, but as I rewrote my pitch for the seventh time, as I thought back on the three years the series spent at one network, as I remembered the original pitch, the first draft of the pilot, the second draft, the 12th draft, notes from the producers (not to be confused with the notes from the network), the thoughts from my agents, from friends, from the spirit of the author of the original novel I so boldly decided to adapt in 2020 when I thought I might die in a pandemic; as I tried to harness all that energy and get it across to one network after another, and another (because the original network passed on it during the writer’s strike, but that’s okay, because—Woohoo! I get to try and sell it again!), well… Repetition starts to sound like a dirty word.
So when I heard “euphoria,” my first thought (after I laughed myself to tears at “We don’t wanna hear you say nigga no mooooore”) was, ‘Haven’t we had enough repetition?’ Didn’t we (the culture) already do a version of this in 2018 when Virginia Thornton’s husband proved that Drake was a fraud? If the line, “You are hiding a child, let that boy come home” over “The Story of OJ” beat didn’t end Drake, why would “euphoria”? Of course, now we have the answer: Pusha T’s “The Story of Adidon” was diabolical, but it wasn’t enough. Just like Meek Mill’s revelations about Drake’s ghostwriters weren’t enough, anymore than the first three to 10 drafts of a pilot aren’t always enough to sell a show. Nowadays a good pilot, a lead actress attached, a visual deck and a director sitting in the room with you may not even be enough—but what it does give you is repetition many studios need to be properly aroused, a powerful creative idea presented in several different forms. It sounded and felt like overkill to me, or like asking way too much, until Kendrick Lamar spent a week in May redefining “overkill” for an entire generation.
A little passion isn’t enough anymore; mere dedication isn’t enough; a single headshot won’t do. K.Dot says we want our enemies walking around like Daft Punk and I agree, theoretically. (Let me state for the record that I do not personally believe in enemies; I subscribe to the Law of Universal Oneness, where Drake can’t exist without Kendrick Lamar, and they are not actually separate entities or enemies, anymore than any of us are truly separate from one another, but that’s a mystical deconstruction for another essay).
Kendrick the reaper—or the creative force moving through him, the great Duende Federico García Lorca wrote about (which might help us create some distance between the art and the artist, and our dangerous penchant for hero worship)—understood the assignment when he quickly followed up “euphoria” with “6:16 in LA.” Hell, even before that he understood, because “euphoria” itself is an ode to repetition. After similar points made by rappers like Future, Kanye, Rick Ross and Meg Thee Stallion, he found a dozen more ways to call Drake a phony, a habitual liar (from his fairytale stories, to his abs), a performer and an actor (literally producing other actors on Euphoria, the TV series the title points at); one whose falseness can even be felt in his pronunciation of “nigga.” The first diss is filled with so much else, but it’s the repetition, this insistence on not letting up, that primed us (sort of) for what came next.
And maybe we’d been primed for all this back in January. Many have blamed/thanked Katt Williams’s January interview on Club Shay Shay for planting some kind of energetic, cultural seed of unabashed and unapologetic truth for the year 2024. Like Kendrick Lamar’s disses, the beautiful lessons on craft have often been forgotten amongst the spectacle of Katt calling out his fellow comedians. When host Shannon Sharpe asked him how much repetition is required to master a joke, Katt compared telling that joke to sex with a woman: If it’s great material, you never master it. As in, a true artist can be on a never-ending journey of discovery with a single joke, or a single body of flesh. The artist should be as devoted as a lover (or parent, or serial killer), where intimacy with the subject has no true end.
When Kendrick dropped “6:16 in LA,” there was a collective agreement that he had done it. The beef was finished. Somewhere between “circadian rhythms” and “war-ready if the world is ready to see you bleed,” Drake had been psychologically and spiritually slaughtered. But the great duende had not completed its cycle. Like Kendrick said, it’s not enough to have killed; he is here to “pick the carcass apart.” The use of this very image points to the true definition of redundancy: “the inclusion of extra components which are not strictly necessary to functioning in case of failure in other components.” Shoring up his opponent’s death required a level of lyrical violence that even we—the so-called desensitized generation—felt was not strictly necessary.
This is the approach we should all aspire to (which we can now call “K Dottin,” per Uncle Snoop), where all angles of creative warfare are used, in case anyone dare suggest that one of them failed. Had Kendrick let up when many of us thought he should have—God, what a loss the culture would have suffered! Let this be a lesson to all creatives: The bar is now in the clouds; the bar is not “euphoria” or “6:16 in LA” but both, along with “meet the grahams” and “Not Like Us.” Your best efforts multiplied by four; your greatest truth parroted in different forms. The death of your enemy, his reputation and his camp is not enough. The entire bloodline must be addressed with a slow, repetitive knife—a lesson learned specifically from “meet the grahams,” the one track of the four that I cannot listen to on repeat because even I have my psychological limits, and the repetition of “You lied…” is a spell that threatens to haunt my dreams.
