The music video for Kendrick Lamar’s “squabble up” pays homage to “The Next Movement” video by The Roots. They are placed in the same setting—an enclosed room with green walls where you never see anyone enter or leave, but the occupants are constantly shifting—and both videos start the same way, with a few seconds of silence before the first musical notes hit.
In 1999, The Roots were both pushing back on the shiny suit/hyper-commercial era of hip-hop and also announcing the arrival of something new: the thrilling Soulquarian era of black music that they were generating in the Electric Lady Studios in New York with D’angelo, Common, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, and others. There were more commercial artists of the era, but none influenced the culture more than the merger of hip hop and soul and the rise of Dilla Time, as Dan Charnas puts it in his book of the same name, that Questlove and his co-conspirators delivered to us.
I’m unsure if K. Dot began this year intending to shift the culture. The operating plan seems to have grown organically as his thesis solidified throughout the beef with Drake. “I’m what the culture feeling” led to him wanting to be explicit about which culture he meant. The impact of “Not Like Us” on Los Angeles and its ability to generate mass appeal for a very South LA, very California sound seemed to spark a more extensive idea about what he wanted to do with his label and his work.
“The Pop Out: Ken and Friends” further confirmed this was magic in a bottle. Since it happened, I have thought a lot about Kendrick’s performance during that show. He flubbed the lyrics in both “euphoria” and “Not Like Us” and could never get “The Colonizer” section of that song correct once. Making quotable, punchline-dense hits is light work for him. He made those songs to win a rap battle, but they aren’t meaningful, incredibly thoughtful pieces.
They won’t win him any literary awards.
They did wake people up, though.
Music audiences didn’t know they were hungry for authenticity, cultural specificity, or even a return of the boom bap in rap, but we were. I was. In the aftermath, I have locked in with bombastic, honest, and enthusiastically unique albums. Tyler, the Creator, Glorilla, and Doechii put out whole bodies of work that felt free from chasing trends and were precisely the music they wanted to be making.
And now we have gnx and Kendrick’s “The Next Movement” moment. Lamar is ready to expand beyond his solo introspective work and utilize this next phase of his career as an artist and tastemaker to put the West Coast on, unite disparate communities, and uplift people. As Spence Kornhaber put it, it’s populism with a point. Thirty-plus years after Dr. Dre’s The Chronic brought about the rise of the g-funk era and LA laying claim as the center of the hip-hop universe, Kendrick Lamar seems to be generating that same gravitational force.
Get on board, get left behind, or be prepared to squabble up.
Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash
