Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther Album Is Rich With Meaning You Can Only Appreciate After the Movie

 At first it seemed like director Ryan Coogler was simply listening to cultural kismet when he tapped Kendrick Lamar to put together the companion album to Black Panther. Casting the decade’s reigning monarch (butterfly) of complex blackness in popular music logically followed from assembling a royal procession of black actors (among whom even Angela Bassett can sashay in as the Wakandan queen mother and barely steal focus) and a palatial retinue of behind-the-camera black excellence to mount a redefinition of the decade’s reining genre of popcorn entertainment, the superhero movie.

From Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City onward, Lamar’s always represented his own trinity of black superhero, supervillain, and mortal in one person, exiled in a world not of his making. Who else, then, but King Kendrick or, as he’s more Afrocentrically dubbed himself, King Kunta, for this epic of imagined African kingship transcending an American cartoon mythos? Who else but Kung Fu Kenny for this action film meant to dropkick historical trauma with a kinetic pivot to utopian possibility?

As many critics have noted, this partnership that stretches from the 1970s blaxploitation era on forward: the hit record tie-in. (Indeed, the soundtrack is currently headed for No. 1 on the album charts.) Lamar does for Black Panther what Isaac Hayes did for Shaft, what Curtis Mayfield did for Superfly, what Public Enemy did for Do the Right Thing (at one point in Panther we see a P.E. poster hung prominently on an apartment wall), and what Ice Cube and others did for Boyz in the Hood.

Lamar has showed up to this cultural event the way he takes the stage at award shows, with adrenaline that rearranges the scenery and a passion to discover within the prearranged spectacle a counternarrative that he can inhabit and magnify. Black Panther and Kendrick Lamar’s music are both inheritors of long lines of race-conscious creativity and symbolism that still feel sprung full-grown from the right-now—and even five years ago it would have been hard to picture either of them summiting the box office and the pop charts.

Source :- slate