Til Death Do Us Part: Kendrick Lamar, “The Heart Part 5,” and Black Male Vulnerability

Abstract

Hip-Hop continues to be one of the most influential music genres in the modern era. Such impact necessitates scholars to engage in Hip-Hop discourses to comprehend its power in shaping and understanding various individuals’ experiences, attitudes, values, and beliefs. To that end, this essay explores the rhetoric of Black male vulnerability as it is expressed in Hip-Hop by Black male artists. We contend that studying the rhetoric of Black male vulnerability articulated by Hip-Hop artists assists in better understanding the realities and sensibilities of Black men and boys, one of the most vulnerable populations. To accomplish this task, we analyze Kendrick Lamar’s “the Heart Part 5” to explore how he constructs a rhetorical definition of Black male vulnerability. Our analysis asserts that Lamar recognizes the vulnerabilities of Black males through lyrically conveying their relationship to emotional suffering and death, oxymoronic peer networks, and illuminating Black males’ varied reactions to trauma. We conclude that attending to the vulnerabilities of Black males as articulated in Hip-Hop propels scholars to move beyond understanding Black males as deviant, toxic, and the racialized counterparts of white males. Such a nuanced understanding of Black male culture may improve their life chances in a white supremacist society.

KEYTERMS:

• Black male studies
• Black male vulnerability
• Hip-Hop rhetoric
• Kendrick Lamar

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)

Notes

1 In postcolonial and anti-racist engagement, this study uses a lowercase “w” when referring to white individuals and capitalizes Black when referring to Black individuals to combat historical writing conventions that perpetuate white supremacy (see Bauder, 2020; Lanham & Liu, 2019).