God is in the Redundancy: Lessons in Creative Intimacy From Kendrick Lamar

“If you have discovered a truth, tell it first to a parrot! Every new truth needs an insistent repetition.” —Mehmet Murat Ildan

“Kendrick, STOP. He’s already dead!” —The Internet

A good lover, a good parent and a good serial killer all have something in common with a good artist: profound intimacy with the subject in front of them. For better or worse, that subject is molded from this profound intimacy, and forever altered due to the devotion of the one who holds them close. What I hadn’t quite put together until the week of Kendrick Lamar’s lyrical assault on Drake (with “euphoria,” “6:16 in LA,” “meet the grahams” and “Not Like Us”), is how so much of that devotion is actually born of repetition—even to the point of redundancy. As we continue to unpack and celebrate some of the greatest diss tracks of all time, we should also consider that Kendrick’s tower moment brings powerful weapons for us all to study, and add to our own creative arsenals.

When “euphoria” first dropped, I was in the middle of experiencing the most intense lesson about repetition I’ve ever had, besides potty training my children (the memories of which I have entirely blocked out, due to trauma). As a writer, pitching a TV show is an incredible win in and of itself, but as I rewrote my pitch for the seventh time, as I thought back on the three years the series spent at one network, as I remembered the original pitch, the first draft of the pilot, the second draft, the 12th draft, notes from the producers (not to be confused with the notes from the network), the thoughts from my agents, from friends, from the spirit of the author of the original novel I so boldly decided to adapt in 2020 when I thought I might die in a pandemic; as I tried to harness all that energy and get it across to one network after another, and another (because the original network passed on it during the writer’s strike, but that’s okay, because—Woohoo! I get to try and sell it again!), well… Repetition starts to sound like a dirty word.

So when I heard “euphoria,” my first thought (after I laughed myself to tears at “We don’t wanna hear you say nigga no mooooore”) was, ‘Haven’t we had enough repetition?’ Didn’t we (the culture) already do a version of this in 2018 when Virginia Thornton’s husband proved that Drake was a fraud? If the line, “You are hiding a child, let that boy come home” over “The Story of OJ” beat didn’t end Drake, why would “euphoria”? Of course, now we have the answer: Pusha T’s “The Story of Adidon” was diabolical, but it wasn’t enough. Just like Meek Mill’s revelations about Drake’s ghostwriters weren’t enough, anymore than the first three to 10 drafts of a pilot aren’t always enough to sell a show. Nowadays a good pilot, a lead actress attached, a visual deck and a director sitting in the room with you may not even be enough—but what it does give you is repetition many studios need to be properly aroused, a powerful creative idea presented in several different forms. It sounded and felt like overkill to me, or like asking way too much, until Kendrick Lamar spent a week in May redefining “overkill” for an entire generation.

A little passion isn’t enough anymore; mere dedication isn’t enough; a single headshot won’t do. K.Dot says we want our enemies walking around like Daft Punk and I agree, theoretically. (Let me state for the record that I do not personally believe in enemies; I subscribe to the Law of Universal Oneness, where Drake can’t exist without Kendrick Lamar, and they are not actually separate entities or enemies, anymore than any of us are truly separate from one another, but that’s a mystical deconstruction for another essay).

Kendrick the reaper—or the creative force moving through him, the great Duende Federico García Lorca wrote about (which might help us create some distance between the art and the artist, and our dangerous penchant for hero worship)—understood the assignment when he quickly followed up “euphoria” with “6:16 in LA.” Hell, even before that he understood, because “euphoria” itself is an ode to repetition. After similar points made by rappers like Future, Kanye, Rick Ross and Meg Thee Stallion, he found a dozen more ways to call Drake a phony, a habitual liar (from his fairytale stories, to his abs), a performer and an actor (literally producing other actors on Euphoria, the TV series the title points at); one whose falseness can even be felt in his pronunciation of “nigga.” The first diss is filled with so much else, but it’s the repetition, this insistence on not letting up, that primed us (sort of) for what came next.

And maybe we’d been primed for all this back in January. Many have blamed/thanked Katt Williams’s January interview on Club Shay Shay for planting some kind of energetic, cultural seed of unabashed and unapologetic truth for the year 2024. Like Kendrick Lamar’s disses, the beautiful lessons on craft have often been forgotten amongst the spectacle of Katt calling out his fellow comedians. When host Shannon Sharpe asked him how much repetition is required to master a joke, Katt compared telling that joke to sex with a woman: If it’s great material, you never master it. As in, a true artist can be on a never-ending journey of discovery with a single joke, or a single body of flesh. The artist should be as devoted as a lover (or parent, or serial killer), where intimacy with the subject has no true end.

When Kendrick dropped “6:16 in LA,” there was a collective agreement that he had done it. The beef was finished. Somewhere between “circadian rhythms” and “war-ready if the world is ready to see you bleed,” Drake had been psychologically and spiritually slaughtered. But the great duende had not completed its cycle. Like Kendrick said, it’s not enough to have killed; he is here to “pick the carcass apart.” The use of this very image points to the true definition of redundancy: “the inclusion of extra components which are not strictly necessary to functioning in case of failure in other components.” Shoring up his opponent’s death required a level of lyrical violence that even we—the so-called desensitized generation—felt was not strictly necessary.

This is the approach we should all aspire to (which we can now call “K Dottin,” per Uncle Snoop), where all angles of creative warfare are used, in case anyone dare suggest that one of them failed. Had Kendrick let up when many of us thought he should have—God, what a loss the culture would have suffered! Let this be a lesson to all creatives: The bar is now in the clouds; the bar is not “euphoria” or “6:16 in LA” but both, along with “meet the grahams” and “Not Like Us.” Your best efforts multiplied by four; your greatest truth parroted in different forms. The death of your enemy, his reputation and his camp is not enough. The entire bloodline must be addressed with a slow, repetitive knife—a lesson learned specifically from “meet the grahams,” the one track of the four that I cannot listen to on repeat because even I have my psychological limits, and the repetition of “You lied…” is a spell that threatens to haunt my dreams.

Before these lessons in creative intimacy, I was actually keeping track of how many times I’d rewritten my pilot. I’d fret over how many times I’d reworked a certain character’s introductory scene. Today I play “meet the grahams,” and I know all of that is utterly irrelevant. “Repetition” is still a dirty word, but now it’s the dirty kind that I like. It’s a promise of deeper intimacy and deeper connection; something to whisper to myself as I fall asleep to the soft sounds of Drake’s body being dragged across the internet; Kendrick’s back-to-back attacks as gratuitous and redundant as Achilles dragging Hector’s corpse from a chariot for 12 days around the city of Troy—because, sometimes, it really is that serious (I don’t think the divine beings will punish Kendrick like they did Achilles though; he’ll beat your ass and hide the Bible if God watchin’).

Sometimes, true intimacy requires the direct involvement of the physical body. The slaughter peaked with “Not Like Us,” because this was the moment when DJ Mustard brought all our bodies into the beef. Many suggested this track was Kendrick’s way of proving that he could make a bop just like Drake. This was a way of shutting up the OVO fans who were willing to admit that he had bars, but not the kind you could move to. So he moved the fuck out of us.

All of this is probably true, but what I think Kung Fu Kenny’s creative force also understood is the same thing all therapists and healers understand; the same thing all of us know deep inside: The body keeps the score, and the body never lies. So, when you are attempting to hammer home something you believe is true, the right beat (or the right form/presentation/genre/medium) can be the final nail in the coffin. It’s one thing to hear Kendrick Lamar call Drake a pedophile and a culture vulture; it’s another thing to feel that in your bones as you try to c-walk in the mirror to “O-V-HOE!” That’s the kind of intimacy that cannot be explained or forgotten; Genius lyrics cannot break it down for you; Grammy Awards, Pulitzers, Billboard charts and Spotify numbers can’t create it; it’s bodily, it’s intuitive, it’s a sixth sense, it’s that ancient knowing in your gut, in your soul’s gut—that OH SHIT! I am not who I was before this beat dropped.

Also known as: one of the greatest feelings in the world.

And like the greedy artist that I am, constantly looking for more inspiration to feed off of, I want to know why we can’t feel this more? Why can’t more weekends feel like the weekend of “Not Like Us”? Simply put, why can’t we make and have more great music?

One reason is that we live in a world defined by productivity and capitalism, rather than intimacy. So many of us have been trained to fear intimacy like this, which is another way of saying we have been trained to fear our own power (cue that Marianne Williamson quote). To create at a high level requires so much intimacy with yourself, your craft and your subject, and also so much repetition that many of us give up before we’ve even really begun. I’ve felt that tug often in the last year, and recently wrote to a friend asking how in the world I could continue writing the same thing over and over again, only now in a new form. He wrote back, “You’ve been given a chance to find something new where you’ve already looked. Have a sense of Ahab, Darwin, Dr. Dre.” That dirty word was staring back at me, but I saw it take a new form: Redundancy is also repetition, is also the relentless pursuit of excellence, is the hunter, is the mad scientist, the creative genius who will never stop. It’s the person who is willing to fall in love with doing the thing—their thing—again and again.

In addition to overcoming our fears of intimacy, we’ll also have to accept that true intimacy brings Elohim-levels of power and responsibility. Kendrick Lamar has done his part and put out the call—who among us is ready to fashion our own crowns and bear that burden? Of course, we can’t all answer such a mighty call, but I can imagine the world we’d have—the music we’d get—if some of us at least made the attempt.

Something shifted with these four tracks, and if we’re not paying attention, we’ll call it a dope week for hip-hop and go back to business as usual. We’ll all ignore the call, which is a surrender to the world we have today—one where honesty and intimacy with craft and subject matter are so rare that Katt and Kendrick Lamar both had us clutching our collective pearls. Anything less than an attempt to reach new heights robs the artist of expressing their greatest gifts, robs them of accessing the great duende. And all of this robbery creates a music industry that’s a reflection of our entire country, our entire world—a place filled with the shadows of truths we still cannot speak. Such silence is the reason we have an industry and a world filled with abuse and abusers; it’s the same reason a genocide can happen, the same reason so many of us can’t quite connect with people being slaughtered in a foreign land, or can’t even connect with children being killed in an elementary school a few towns over. All of this disconnect can be traced back to a fear of true intimacy and the rigorous work that it requires. The only way out is to say repeatedly, redundantly, in different cadences, with various collaborators and alternating flows, with metaphor and wordplay and cover images that speak volumes so that it’s clear: Enough is enough, we won’t participate in the fabrications anymore.

So, Kendrick Lamar’s duende has done far more than win a historic rap battle, or expose Drake’s (already much-publicized) predatory behavior. It’s given us a blueprint that we desperately need to build a new world, where colonizers are not confused with colleagues; one where we can literally take down an empire with a lot of passion, devotion and, of course, that other dirty word: time. And isn’t it time? In 2024, don’t we deserve art that cuts deeper than ever before? Don’t we deserve artists devoted to their subject matter like never before? Every time that Mustard beat drops, I can feel the answer in my bones.

Achilles dragging the body of Hector around the walls of Troy, 1648–50

Shannon M. Houston is a poet, critic and Emmy-nominated TV writer. She has written on Station Eleven, Lovecraft Country, and Little Fires Everywhere. She lives in Southern California on unceded Tongva land with her three sons and their beloved turtle.