Kendrick Lamar, Danny O'Keefe, and What It Means to Like a Piece of Music

I was talking with a musician friend of mine over the holidays and she reminded me that Kendrick Lamar's won the Pulitzer Prize in music a couple years ago for his album To Pimp a Butterfly. That's quite a seal of approval for a guy like me who likes art music and difficult music, the kind of thing that such awards usually go to. As an avid reader of the music press, I've known that Lamar is considered, along with Kanye West perhaps, the greatest rap artist and popular musician of the last ten years. If you go to AllMusic you will find a five star review as well as a unanimous five star rating by thousands of listeners. So between the Pulitzer and that, I thought I should give Lamar another try. I have checked out his work in the past and was left cold.

So off to Apple Music I went. I pulled Pimp up and hit play. After a few songs I quit listening, confirming that when it comes down to it, I just don't like his music, which is not to say his music is bad. I understand the artistic achievement. The record is a stupendous display of musical collage and dexterous rapping. Awarding it a Pulitzer is no kind of travesty. But it just don't move me. Even though the musicians on the record include some of today's best young jazz musicians, all of whom I like on their own, I'm indifferent to their work here. And I find his rapping style to be unengaging, at least compared to the rappers of the early-90s, Tribe Called Quest era, who had a groove-based flow. I don't hear any groove in Lamar. Then there are the words. Cold again. I even pulled up the lyrics to see if I was missing something. Well, I was missing something -- like everything. Reading the words I realized that the verbiage and socio-cultural-emotional concerns of a young man from Compton make about as much sense to me as do the verbiage and socio-cultural-emotional concerns of a young person from Albania. Lamar is communicating quite successfully with a huge portion of our population: they feel his music in their hearts, in their heads, and in their bones. Just not communicating with me.

So, what do I like if not that? Well, I like songs. I like when words and melody are in perfect communion. And the song I'm listening to several times a day right now that does that for me is Danny O'Keefe's "Just Jones," from his 1977 album, American Roulette. This is in fact one of the best songs I've ever heard, which makes it odd that, as far as I can tell, it's never been covered. A songwriter has to be happy when they write a song that begins and ends like this:

The voice is a marvelous instrument
And so is the heart and the brain
And so's the fire and so's the wind
And especially the rain
Especially the rain