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In discussing Kendrick Lamar's 2012 major label debut album good kid, m.A.A.d. city, I
intend to highlight the strategy of misdirection at the album's heart. Lamar presents his major
label debut as contiguous with hip hop's longstanding interest in verisimilitude, autobiography,
and the urban real, thus priming his audience to receive the album as a realist narrative.
However, I contend that this project actually serves as an occasion to manipulate and probe the
limits realist technique, especially in relation to the problematics of black representation and the
autobiographical tradition of African-American literary history. Lamar invokes realist technique
only to problematize it. The album or "tape recorder", as it's referred to several times
lingers in a state of tension, a dialectic between the discourse of documentary realism which
always haunts the contours of African-American cultural production, and skepticism of mimesis.
This oscillation opens out onto broader questions, allowing us to interrogate certain
analyses of realist form and verisimilitude in relation to African-American cultural production. I
am concerned with a critical tradition, represented by scholars of the African diaspora like
Wahneema Lubiano and Paul Gilroy, that often denigrate realist technique as inimical to counterhegemonic discourse by virtue of its reliance on representational closure. I hope to apply
pressure to this tradition, to call attention to a particular strand of contemporary realist technique
that ironizes the pretension to represent black life.
Simultaneously, this strand complicates a tendency common to certain African diaspora
cultural theorists, one that situates capitalist consumption and anti-capitalist, anti-racist critical
discourse as irreconcilable opposites. For example, Paul Gilroy, a preeminent theorist of black
cultural production's critical capacity, claimed in his 2010 volume Darker Than Blue that
contemporary black popular music's obsession with conspicuous consumption is "antipolitical
and assertively immoral" (16). Popular music like good kid, m.A.A.d. city challenges Gilroy's

pessimism, forcing us to ask whether this model of black critical discourse must be adjusted for a
new historical moment, a moment when the sounds of African-American hip hop disseminate
across the globe as a commodity. By bringing theorists like Lauren Berlant and Jose Munoz into
conversation with Kendrick Lamar's album, I want to stake a claim for hip-hop's critical capacity.
Hip-hop's interest in conspicuous consumption insists that we recognize the commodity form's
potential as the locus of an affective realism that cannot be disentangled from Gilroy's postlapsarian world of consumption. Affect, then, plays a crucial role in unraveling how and why
contemporary hip hop not only finds its way back to aesthetic and economic forms that earlier
thinkers have disavowed, but also how we might arrive at a critically realist assessment of
contemporary racialized power through hip-hop's seemingly regressive obsession with
consumption.

good kid, m.A.A.d. city is a strange thing in the landscape of contemporary popular rap
music. A concept album, it tells the story of an adolescent Kendrick Lamar's ill-fated romance
with a local woman named Sherane. After meeting Sherane at a house party, Lamar takes his
mother's van and drives into a dangerous area of Compton to spend the night with his lover.
Upon arriving at Sherane's home, he is attacked by gang members; this ambush sets in motion a
revenge plot. The attack is also the pretense for a wide-ranging assessment of an urban
community that spans time and multiple versions of a character the audience is supposed to
accept as "Kendrick Lamar." Ranging in identity from an adolescent embroiled in his
community's vices to a young rapper on the cusp of superstardom and social insight, this
character plays the role of tour guide through early twenty first-century inner city Los Angeles.
Furthermore, due to the constraints of the commercial album form, Lamar eschews chronological
order and relies on a series of "found" sounds and imagestape recordings, phone messages

from Lamar's parents, conversations between Lamar and his friends, and photographsto draw
the album's songs into a plot. In other words, Lamar resorts to what, following Barthes, we might
call the narrative luxury of the reality effect. Counter-intuitively, these elements yield a highly
fragmented album constructed out of a multiplicity of voices and sounds, but which nevertheless
communicate a realist tale of ghetto adolescence. As Barthes argued, the descriptions and details
that constitute the "real" are "summatory and [do] not contain that trajectory of choices and
alternatives which gives narration the appearance of a huge traffic control center." Lamar takes
the narrative luxury of these summatory figures to its logical extreme, occluding his own
position within narrative's traffic control center, and even calling into question the possibility of
stable representation.
Lamar's overindulgence in the luxury of thick description disrupts the reality effect.
While Barthes posited that realism's sense of having-been-there rests on speech-acts that are
justified by the referent alone, Lamar has no interest in eliding the signified's absence. Rather,
that absence is brought into productive tension with the album's aspiration to verisimilitude. This
experience commences with a glance for Lamar's audience: picking up the album, before we hear
a sound, the audience is presented with a starkly intimate photo from Lamar's childhood. We see
a young Lamar sitting shirtless atop his uncle's lap, staring straight into the camera though the
eyes of every adult are censored. There is a certain tension between Lamar's fixed gaze and the
blacked out visages of his male relatives that haunts the entire album: Lamar exhorts us to enter
into a "real" world, all the while confronting us with that world's absence. So, while this
photograph trots out the familiar signs of what Nicole Fleetwood terms the "fetish of the real" in
relation to popular stereotypes about black lifefor example, a 40 ounce bottle of beer rests on
the table, and Lamar's uncle Tony embraces the boy, all the while flashing a conspicuous Crips

gang signit also denies the level of familiarity necessary to posit this scene as a referent of
reality. Lamar's decision to censor his relatives' eyes is a negative move, a subtraction from or
cut in the visual field that unravels the reality effect.1 These cuts thus reveal an epistemological
gap in which Lamar and his audience must linger, a gap in which the work's claim to realism is
simultaneously sustained and called into question. This realism acknowledges its own limitation,
and refuses the comforts of representational closure. Lamar intimates through this altered image
that, despite his lyrical dexterity and narrative talents, something eludes his representation of life
in Compton; there is always an excess, a residue that escapes depiction. That is all to say that
Lamar's photo is a signifier which ejects us from the real before we can find out feet in it.
But what is at stake in the initial appeal to realism, in this aborted attempt to satiate a
global audience's demands for ghetto authenticity? Taking a cue from Saidiya Hartman's work
with the literature of sentimental antislavery, we might say that within the specific context of
black cultural production, mimesis is entwined with the subjection of the black body. In the sense
that they both strive to represent the reality of black life, realism and sentimental antislavery are
bound up with a brutalized black body that is physically, psychically, and spiritually transparent,
providing a portal into the vicarious experience of black life.2 That is, the black body's status as
the ultimate referent of authenticitythe kind of status which Lamar initially embodies through
his nakedness on the album coveris dependent on that body's perpetual availability to its
audience.
In employing the cut, revealing moments of discontinuity between the signifier and the
signified, or between representation and reality, Lamar unmasks and disrupts the black body's
1 See James Snead, "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture," p. 67; and, more
recently, Kobena Mercer, "Romare Bearden, 1964: Collage as Kunstwollen," p. 142.
2 Ibid., p. 21-22.

fraught relationship to mimesis. He stages this disruption through a series of tensions between
excess and erasure. His claim to verisimilitude is called into question by a sonic disaggregation
of black subjects, a refusal to fully manifest black bodies and voices for the audience's
enjoyment. Just as Lamar censors his relatives' bodies on the album cover so as to trouble the
reality effect, black voices become unavailable to our ears through the album's formal
commitment to a radical sonic and subjective heterogeneity.
I want to substantiate this claim by close reading the song that closes the album's
narrative loop, titled "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst." The track begins by feigning a
commitment to realist lyric testimony. Rapping in the personae of friends who listened to his
previous mixtapes, Lamar seemingly attests to his own power as a storyteller to encapsulate an
entire community's pain. The song begins uncertainly, with an unattributed voice pronouncing
the chorus: "When the lights shut off/And it's my turn to settle down/My main concern/Promise
that you will sing about me/Promise that you will sing about me."3 This floating voice arrives as
a generalized desire for representation attached to Lamar's crime-stricken community, deprived
of a narrative in popular and socio-political cultures that regularly elide its suffering. Lamar
materializes shortly after the chorus, satisfying this disembodied call for representation as he raps
in character as a deceased friend's surviving brother. This is a nationalistic vision of the black
artist, one capable of constructing an ethnic community in which subjectivities merge and
difference recedes.
The verse deflates at its end, though, culminating in a series of gunshots that jerk rapper
out of his persona. We might read this as being another example of urban tragedy, a sonic
addition meant to illicit an emotional response from the listener via a black body's mortification.

3 Lamar, "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst," good kid, m.A.A.d. city.

In this reading, the gunshots are just another entry in a narrative of ghetto realism, another echo
of abject black life finding an expectant audience's ear. It might be more productive, however, to
read it in terms of the aforementioned cut. This is a moment where the real as that which remains
unsymbolized disrupts the truth-effect of Lamar's narrative representation: the gunshots confirm
that there are realities which cannot be assimilated into his representation, distances which
cannot be traversed, differences that cannot be elided. Thus, we are never given full access to the
brother's subjectivity. The song's second verse demonstrates the explosion of the unsymbolized
into the album even more dramatically. As Lamar performs in the voice of a woman offended by
his decision to tell her prostituted sister's story on a previous album, the persona wrenches out of
Lamar's control, critiquing his project as self appointed street bard: "You wrote a song about my
sister on your tape recorder called 'Section.80'/The message resembled 'Brenda's Got a
Baby'/What's crazy was, I was hearing about it/But doubted your ignorance, how could you ever
just put her on blast and shit/Judging her past and shit .../You lying to these motherfuckers,
talking about you can help them/With my story ..." Lamar's persona turns on him in accusatory
fashion, slipping from his grasp, doubting his ability to tell not only her story, but any story other
than his own. The accusation that he is lyingessentially spinning ghetto fictions that resemble
previous rap hits such as Tupac Shakur's classic song "Brenda's Got a Baby" in order to appease
an expectant audiencestrikes at the heart of mimesis. This is a questioning of Lamar's veracity,
a moment where his entire project threatens to collapse under the weight of its own ambitions; in
attempting to assume the voiceindeed, the bodyof a black woman driven to prostitution,
Lamar inadvertently reveals realism's tenuous relationship to reality. The pretension to mimesis
is revealed as a somewhat sinister fiction. It's implied that mimesis exists at the expense of the
voices Lamar would represent: by the end of the aforementioned verse, the woman's voice fades

away into the track's background as she vents her fury at Lamar's presumptions of authority. The
album's narrative closure necessitates the elision of excessive voices: it obscures their
contributions when possible, and excises them when they refuse to conform.
Lamar, though, makes no effort to hide the seams that mark his project as artificial. He
allows his audience to hear the points of rupture at which his skills fail to capture a larger social
reality, to hear the audible cuts in his musical text, the moments when an excess of voices
threatens to unravel the entire project.
To close my comments, I want to point out one trajectory of this descriptive excess and
luxury, this realism that collapses under the weight of its signifiers. In his audible anxiety over
mimesis and the autonomy of the elements that compose black authenticity's reality effect,
Lamar forces his listeners to consider global capital's relationship to contemporary hip hop. That
is, contemporary hip hop's status as a global commodity weighs on the entire album as a
symptom of that which demands verisimilitude, creates and marginalizes black subjects as
surplus populations, and might facilitate a critique of those same processes of marginalization. In
this sense, the album helps me think through hip hop's counter-productive obsession with
consumption as central not only to hip hop, but to the social life that the genre partially reflects.
A song like "Money Trees", for example, addresses the cognitive dissonance that arises when
dreams of opulence crash headlong into the material experience of marginalization, and the
possibility that nascent forms of critique might emerge from such dissonance.
I don't have the time to treat this song with the attention it deserves, but I want to call
attention to how Lamar's relationship to the commodity form manifests primarily as a fantasy of
escape, a desire for luxury goods ultimately as farfetched as the idea of a money tree. This
fantasy life is met at every turn, however by the realities of violence and deprivation endemic to

inner city communities. Commodities might present an occasion for aspirational desire in this
song, but they are also pegged to the material particularities of black life. The song insists on this
juxtaposition of consumption-based fantasy and detailed accounting of deprivation's tolls. After
reminiscing on how the Bay Area rapper E-40 filled his youthful head with dreams of grandeur,
Lamar is brought down to earth by the sudden death of his uncle Tonythe same uncle seen
holding Lamar on the album's cover. Lamar raps: "Dreams of living life like rappers do/Bump
that new E-40 after school/You know, big balling with my homies/Earl Stevens had us thinking
rational/Back to reality we poor, you bitch/Another casualty at war ... /Two bullets in my uncle
Tony head/He said one day I'd be on tour .../That Louis Burger [will] never be the same/A Louis
belt will never ease that pain/But I'mma purchase when that day is jerking/Pull off at Church's
with Pirelli's skirting." This verse tells something of the complex interplay between the fetish
character of hip hop among impoverished black communities, the realities of poverty that
contradict yet sustain that fetish, and the violence that policies and reinforces the boundaries of
black thought in relation to global capital. These three nodes are held together by affect, by the
particular ways that black subjects move through and make sense of a historical present
characterized more by the incoherent shock of loss than cogent political narratives. Take Lamar's
wordplay, for example, which confuses abject poverty with ecstatic black sociality, gang
warfare's stark imagery with music industry glamour, and luxurious consumer goods with
repurposed ghetto squalor, until the dichotomy between consumerist fantasy and abject reality
seems finally unproductive.
Here, the commodity fetish doesn't obscure the reality of capitalist social relations, but is
repurposed to help point towards both the structures that underpin those social relations and their
alternatives. If, as Lauren Berlant theorizes, the cruel optimism of attachment to unreliable forms

of sociality and normativity allows a community to turn its "treasured attachments into safetydeposit objects that make it possible to bear sovereignty through its distribution, the energy of
feeling relational, general, reciprocal, and accumulative," only to reveal this dynamic's proximity
to a dulled "coasting sentience" once the full weight of sovereignty returns to the subject, Lamar
cuts the latter movement short, disrupts the passivity that Berlant assumes lies at the end of such
circulation.4 In rapping that uncle Tony's death snaps him back to reality, the reality of "we poor",
Lamar nests the power of sociality within abjection, positing that the social rituals of community
which arise from poverty can counteract the most stultifying aspects of disposable
marginalization. Poor is, after all, a homophone for "pour", which refers to a common inner city
ritual of commemoration whereby individuals gather to pour out alcoholic drinks onto the
ground in memory of deceased friends and family. "We poor" is therefore not just a statement of
fact, but a defiant assertion of black agency against the listener's expectations of ghetto tragedy,
an assertion of the excluded reality of a sociality that exists in spite of, but also because of,
abjectness. Black sociality, the distribution of individual existence throughout a community so as
to avoid Berlant's "psychotic loneliness" of sovereignty, isn't meant to elide the burden that
Berlant thinks it does. It is intimately entwined with the experience of that burden, with the
crushing impact of a relative's death or the daily indignities of poverty. The same goes for uncle
Tony's predictions of Kendrick's future stardom: yes, the young rapper might one day be on tour
as an entertainer, but that tour will always be inseparable from the metaphorical tour of war
which many black Americans are subject to in inner city communities. The material success of
the rap star's cross-country tour opens up onto the persistent violence that stalks much of inner

4 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 43.

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city America, so that the two are continuous in Lamar's psychic life. Material success, in other
words, will always refer to its occluded opposite, material deprivation.
Affect, then, might provide us with a framework that loosens the commodity from global
capital's tendency to "stage-manage" difference, as the recently departed Stuart Hall put it.
"Money Trees" gives us a potential model for how commodities become invested with a certain
affect that marks them as cognitive and affective markers. Lamar's name checking of luxury
goods - the Louis Vuitton belt and high-end Pirelli racing tires - charges them with an affective
resonance. We might say that his interest in the commodity here constitutes a kind of griefstricken strategy of citation by which the subject orients himself in the present. For example,
Lamar's mention on the Louis Vuitton belt echoes the Louis Burger in Compton, chaining the
luxury item to the location where uncle Tony was shot to death. The belt thus represents a
process of affective haunting which the commodity doesn't erase, but highlights.
Taking a cue from Jose Munoz, we can even understand this affective investment in
global capital's local manifestations as a strategy to dislodge the commodity form from capital's
inscrutable and affectively "impoverished" edifice.5 Commodities become inappropriate,
excessive, gaudy, "ghetto" when attached to the black body or put to use in a creolized inner city
context. But for an artist like Lamar, that newfound ghetto quality would be exactly the point: in
deploying luxury, racing-quality Pirelli tires in the parking lot of a Church's Chicken restaurant,
where the tires were never meant to appear (certainly not in proximity to the emotional
resonance of an uncle gunned down in gang violence), he reprograms the commodity, wedges it
into a new affective reality that will not be relegated to the margins or obscured beneath a
neutered and commercialized ghetto realism. It is precisely in insisting upon the affective

5 Munoz, "Feeling Brown," p. 69-70.

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continuity between marginalized black experience, the commodity, and a hip hop music that
embraces the fantasy of spectacular consumerism that a nascent from of critique takes shape, one
which locates its power in a collective experience circulating along with global capital.