A single black hand rises from a sheet of steel-blue water. Fire enshrouds a house as women and men look on in amazement, or perhaps fear, and a voice tracks the haunting spectacle: “I’m willin’ to die for this shit / I done cried for this shit, might take a life for this shit.” A hazel-skinned boy rests on his back in a green knot of flora as a june bug, tied to a string, trudges across his forehead. All throughout, women and men, boys and girls gasp for life in pained and euphoric breaths. These stunning scenes thread together “ELEMENT.,” the latest video treatise from Kendrick Lamar—and further cement the fact that the Compton-born artist has, in the past half-decade, quietly become as gifted a visual storyteller as he is a rapper.
Since 2012, Lamar has unleashed a sprawling visual cacophony, a tapestry of videos as rich and paradoxical as black life itself. It is brilliant, complex work, a bundle of viscerally potent images that do not seek apology or approval. These are portraits of black existence viewed from the inside, a way of being that sits at the nexus of reality, fantasy, and abstraction—which is to say, true to life, if sometimes unnervingly so.
Nowhere is that negotiation more pronounced as in the video for 2015’s “Alright.” In one clip, a wily, grinning Lamar hangs upside down, an outworn but no less eloquent metaphor for black death, and recites the song’s chorus, equal parts affirmation and call to arms: “We gon’ be alright / Do ya hear me, do ya feel me, we gon’ be alright.” Below him, a sea of people rise and fall in unison. The black-and-white image would be terrifying if it weren’t somehow suffused with jubilation, every bit of triumph and grit and hope. Little wonder, then, that the song quickly became an anthem at several anti–police brutality protests from Oakland to Baltimore, soundtracking much of the state-endorsed bloodshed that defined a portion of the Obama years.
What is less well known about Lamar’s visual output is his meticulous involvement in each project. Since his very first videos in 2009, the rapper has collaborated with Dave Free—the president of Top Dawg Entertainment, the label he calls home—as The Little Homies, a creative partnership that has stealthily patched together some of the most evocative narrative filmwork in hip hop. Teaming with a credited director (in the case of “ELEMENT.,” Jonas Lindstroem), the duo conjures a wide range of iconography: the cinematic Compton noir of “Backseat Freestyle”; the jazz psychedelia of “For Free?”; the unfading image of a cornrowed, stone-faced Lamar posturing as a whipping red flame encircles his head in “HUMBLE.” In the past five years, the duo has come to represent a needed, if not surprising, vanguard in black short-form filmmaking.
“It’s not just the concept of videos,” Free told MTV News in 2015. “It’s about visually how you should come out to the world, how you present yourself.” This creative approach has come to represent not just Lamar’s and Free’s self-image but their worldview as well; Lamar admitted as much in a recent radio interview. You see it in the darkly comic, house-party-inspired “These Walls,” in which a late-night tryst takes a series of Chester Himes-ian twists; it permeates Lamar’s 2016 Grammy performance of “The Blacker the Berry,” in which he marched onstage as part of a chain gang as his band played behind him in makeshift jail cells. The terror of America is still with us, Lamar was saying.
Many of the visuals that flicker throughout the videos developed by Lamar and Free reside in an unending tension—the duty of the black artist to himself versus the purpose of the black artist to his community. That becomes even more tangled when you consider the deliberate social fracturing out of which black art so often arises: housing inequality and denied access to wealth, a deliberate plot to incarcerate black men, depleted mental health resources, skewed educational opportunities. Recently, the artist and educator Elise Peterson posed similar questions in regard to her work, sourced from her video collages, which confront themes of loss, struggle, faith, and community. (Disclosure: Peterson is a friend.) “Does the Black artist have any responsibility to express optimism?” she asked on her Instagram Story. “Is carrying the weight of Black America a choice or an existence?” What is the black artist’s responsibility against these forces? To chronicle the pain? To offer hope? To simply present more questions?
With calculation and cool, Lamar’s work puts a prism to the black interior, diffracting a glimmer of light into the shadows of America—in “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” and “King Kunta,” what was thought ugly is made beautiful; what has been despised is now exalted. Men and women dance and crip-walk across pavement in front of project buildings because it is sacred, a ritual of belonging and togetherness. It is the same known humanity that Deana Lawson documented in her photo series at the Whitney Bienneal in New York City this year. What viewers see in each video is just as powerful as what we’ve heard time and again in Lamar’s dense, novelistic wordplay across his four albums, each one more staggering than the last. Thirty years ago, filmmakers like John Singleton and Spike Lee chose not to answer questions but to complicate them; now Lamar is doing the same, to bracing effect. By framing his videos deep within a complex network of blackness—a blackness he has lived and fought for and loved hard his whole life—a truer portrait emerges.
“The power of this picture is in the loveliness of its dark areas,” author Teju Cole wrote in 2015, describing the work of legendary photographer Roy DeCarava. “His work was, in fact, an exploration of just how much could be seen in the shadowed parts of a photograph, or how much could be imagined into those shadows.” What Lamar and Free imagine into the shadows is just as revelatory: illustrations so vast and elaborate they elude singular categorization. “ELEMENT.,” perhaps the most striking of Lamar’s recent trio of videos from his poetically stringent and critically adored album DAMN., borrows classic imagery from the work of Gordon Parks, another Harlem lensman who, like DeCarava, was known for capturing the elegance of day-to-day black life. Lush, tender images populate the screen with bleeding vulnerability: A hooded man floats underwater, arms stretched wide like Christ nailed to the cross; a young black boy softly and hopefully stares through cracked glass, not yet marred by the twilight of day. At the video’s halfway point, Kendrick Lamar stands alone, a cavernous blue sky his only backdrop. He is cloaked in the shadow of night, ready to tell you more about how his people have ached and ached, and how they will, like all nights before this one, survive the sunrise.