“The central question of Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City has always seemed simple to me: Can a good person become victim to their own circumstances and still survive? It’s a question the album poses to the outside world, but it’s also a question that has echoed through generations, and not just in black communities: in all marginalized communities, but also in poor communities, in communities that have fallen victim to failures due to structural or governmental inequalities. The value of this kind of analysis is that to be confronted with this question, you must understand that no single thing stands on its own. At the core of the person who went to jail for the robbery is, perhaps, a need for survival. At the core of that need for a survival is, perhaps, a neglect that disallowed opportunities for survival through legal means...
Here is the first and only thing that has to be made clear: the Good Kid is good, despite the fact that he is not good enough. The Good Kid washes blood off his hands and holds his child while standing in the moonlight. The Good Kid sells what he must to feed an open and hungry mouth, but he buys his grandmother’s groceries. The Good Kid succumbs and survives in equal measure. One of the problems with the ways we chase binaries in our culture is that we demand a hero to be a hero and a villain to be a villain and nothing in between. The Good Kid is both hero and villain, sometimes within the same hour.”
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