Images by Karim Davis

The sound of the blues is pre–Civil Rights. It’s oppression. In high school I had a friend who asked me why I played the blues, that black people don’t play blues. And for the most part, he was right. But I said, how can you abandon what we come from? All the stuff that you’re jamming to [now] came from this foundation. Jimmy Reed sang “Big Boss Man,” and, as a black man, he sang that because he couldn’t say it in the workplace. He sang that and had people dancing to it. If guys like that were ballsy enough to put that out, how can you deny it? That was the foundation to be able to say whatever the fuck you want.

— Gary Clarke Jr.

When the lights shut off
And it’s my turn to settle down
My main concern
Promise that you will sing about me
Promise that you will sing about me

— Kendrick Lamar
 

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IN A MOMENT I will tell you why Kendrick Lamar, a young rapper from Compton, deserves much of the acclaim, and, even more so, the analysis he has received, but first let us deal with the vanguard of black memoirists who came before him and in whose well-forged path he follows.

In the summer of 1945, Ralph Ellison wrote a review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Wright’s semiautobiographical novel about his tough boyhood in Mississippi. In Ellison’s piece he suggested that Black Boy is shaped more by the blues tradition born from the same hard countryside as Wright than it is by any literary genre or narrative model. Ellison would explain that, “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

Twenty years later — still long before he converted to Mormonism, or ran as a Republican candidate, or invented Christlam, his own religion with its branch of military forces called The Guardians of the Sperm — came Eldridge Cleaver’s first book, Soul on Ice. But first, Cleaver, on the lam from a shoot-out with the Oakland police, moved to Paris and became a fashion designer. He made pants with a codpiece, calling the cloth prosthesis that fell from their fly the “Cleaver Sleeve.” “Walking tall … walking proud … walking softly but carrying it big. You’ll be cock of the walk with the new collection from Eldridge de Paris,” he advertised.

Although it is difficult to understand Cleaver's intentions in designing the pants, it is easier to configure them into the strange blues that was Cleaver’s life. They were merely another leitmotif in his homophobic, sometimes rambling obsession with his own masculinity. Cleaver was a man full of the almost embarrassing desire to express all of the makings of himself despite the costs, open to al...