“I got a bone to pick”

Abstract

Despite the profusion of rap analyses in the past decade or so, what is still missing is an explicit music-theoretical acknowledgement of the social message of the lyrics, of the essence of what most rap listeners immersed in the lyrics might glean from the music. This essay represents a call to engage rap music from an analytical standpoint that understands its inner workings from a music-theoretical perspective while also incorporating its social message into the analysis. This analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta,” from his landmark albumTo Pimp a Butterfly(2015), provides an illustrative case study. It first outlines an issue in the song’s formal structure, an ambivalence between a verse-chorus and a chorus-verse interpretation. It then contextualizes the song’s musical characteristics, including its flow, in terms of its West Coast influences, situates the song within the lyrical content of the album, and discusses in some detail Lamar’s use of “Signifyin(g),” an African American linguistic/literary practice. The essay concludes by considering the formal ambivalence and lyrical themes of “King Kunta,” along with Lamar’s position as a performer suspended between the rap game and American capitalism in light of DuBoisian “double consciousness” (1903). Incorporating rap’s social import into analyses not only bestows a social currency lacking in most other music theory scholarship, but more importantly it allows us to use music theory as a tool with which to understand current social issues.