Shaun Scott is one of the smartest and most eloquent people I know. I’m lucky that he even talks to me! And recently I watched Kendrick Lamar’s video for “Alright” and it blew my mind. Shaun is The Monarch’s leading Kendrick scholar so I thought it only appropriate to ask him his thoughts about the creative triumph of “Alright.”

Jake Uitti: The video for Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” is packed with imagery – from police shooting black men, to those same black men enjoying themselves in a car (which later turns out to be a fake car held up by stagehands), to a man falling from a streetlight. The video is like a short film more than any music video I’ve seen in a long time. How do these images resonate with you? Because for me, they made Kendrick’s music, which I find at times to be dense and hard to enter, more clear.

Shaun Scott: A key to Kendrick’s music is that he refuses to decouple it from the community, which breathed life into him as an artist. What I think makes his music inaccessible is the fact that we aren’t used to seeing certain voices represented or aestheticized: the black grannies, “welfare queens,” alcoholics, chickenheads, and prostitutes Kendrick depicts and speaks in the voice of that exist at the bottom of the American social structure. When they aren’t invisible to the broader society, they appear only as racist caricatures on which entire political platforms are built. This is why the Fox News response to Kendrick performing this song at the BET Awards was so perfect; it perfectly illustrated the contradiction between a musician who gives a community a voice and a news station that lives in fear of what that voice has to say.

Balancing a political agenda with aesthetic values is a difficult project, and Kendrick doesn’t always succeed. But I read the “Alright” video as a redemption narrative where Blacks trapped in claustrophobic cities allow themselves to imagine what it would be like to finally feel at home in them. Because it’s the reversal of a violent reality that they’ve been handed, this fantasy expresses itself as revenge: note how prominent inverted hierarchy is in the film – the acts of standing and sitting and rapping and pissing from the top of things that you’re used to looking up at (street lights, skyscrapers, police authority, etc). It’s the visual equivalent of what the song illustrates sonically – namely, a “rising above” inherited circumstance, a sense of floating grace needed to survive an environment that assaults your self esteem at every turn.

Exactly 100 years ago, the film Birth of a Nation was a watershed because it showed how powerful the new medium of cinema could be as a tool that allowed us to imagine something different than what we experienced. That film was a racist cautionary tale about what would happen if disenfranchised people ever found a political voice, if they were given the vote, if they no longer had to live in fear of the expectations of White viewership. In a strange way, I see Kendrick as doing the same thing in the “Alright” video. But for D.W. Griffith, equality was a nightmare; Kendrick puts it in the form of a daydream.

JU: I find his lyrics at times very spare – there is so much unsaid between them and since I don’t have a lot of experience living the way he lives I have a hard time making the necessary connections. But his video took my hand and pulled me through scenes that must seem everyday for Kendrick. But, and this is his twist, he did it with a sense of realistic triumph. This isn’t Nelly’s “Country Grammar,” which seemed celebratory but somehow totally impossible, for example. Kendrick both offers the realism and the blueprint to feeling confident in a way that’s somehow sustainable. I think that points to your idea of community, a rising tide raises all boats mentality. But this time the rising tide, for Kendrick, is intellect and not 40s, cars and thongs.

SS: What you say about Kendrick actually kind of reminds me of The Jazz Messenger’s mission in the 1950s: at a time when Art Blakey and Horace Silver thought the music was becoming academized and detached, they decided to play a brand of jazz that was so steeped in (their imagining of) the Black Experience that, as far as they knew, it absolutely couldn’t be appropriated. They came out with tunes that emphasized black vernacular (with titles like “Moanin'” and “Back At the Chicken Shack”), and made the music’s connection to the blues as explicit as possible. The approach resulted in records that were tremendously listenable and fun, but also politicized in a way that made it difficult to cover and comprehend.

JU: Kendrick seems to have taken it a step further, knowing that the social climate is in such a state that he doesn’t have to pander to people like me to sell records. There are enough folks of color – and folks who’ve felt subjection and class discrimination – who understand his message immediately that have access to the internet and iTunes to make him a millionaire while at the same time he doesn’t have to get white dudes like me to be stumping for him. The rest of the world is already on his side, as well as the right side of history, that I’ll have to come over and join. It’s brilliant and also a function of the shifting American culture. In this way he’s leading the march.

But back to his video, specifically. What do you think that final smirk is all about?

SS: In a matter of speaking, I think it shows he’s aware of the audience; aware of his celebrity; aware of his cultural impact; aware that he’s at the height of his game as a rapper; and he wants us to know that, no matter how heavy the music or the message may get, it’s important to have a good time as well. What’s your take?

JU: I think that’s right – the word height is right on. There’s also a lot of imagery of him not touching the ground – images of him upside down amongst a crowd, images of him seemingly riding an invisible bicycle above the street, not to mention his penultimate image of the streetlight. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of the idea of this great rapper being ‘grounded’. I can’t help but wonder, what’s next – with the exception of maybe Jay-Z we haven’t seen a rapper sustain greatness: Lil Wayne went nuts after going to jail, Pac died, Biggie died, the heads from the 80s were trampled from oncoming corporate rap, Kanye is one big porn lyricist of no textual consequence… what’s going to happen to Kendrick?

SS: Oh I think it was corporate from pretty close to the beginning: we wouldn’t know of any of those legends from the 80s if it weren’t for the fact that they signed (usually exploitative) contracts with major record companies. And let’s not forget LL Cool J representing Kangol and Kool G Rap’s DJ going out of his name to call himself Polo. There’s no golden, platonic-era to return to, and nor should there be. And as it turns out, Kendrick isn’t exactly free from the pitfalls of commercialism, either, as evidenced by his recent collaboration with Reebok, who I didn’t realize made shoes anymore. I’m not sure where his career is headed, but I hope his impact becomes even more explicitly political, and that he’s able to make a ton of money and broaden his platform while he does it. He’s the right guy to root for.