This article is taken from the July 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The moment kendrick Lamar rapped the words “What the fuck is cancel culture, dawg?” he must have known he’d fixed the kind of response he’d be getting from certain quarters. The line — from “N95”, the lead single from his album, Mr Morales and the Big Steppers — is calculated to aggravate too-online liberals the kind of people who’ve been among Lamar’s biggest boosters.

Lamar has established himself as a voice of smart, savage political commentary on American politics

Since his first album in 2011, Lamar has established himself as a voice of smart, savage political commentary on American politics. He’s the only hip hop artist to have won a Pulitzer (for 2017’s Damn). He’s the only popular musician full stop to have won a Pulitzer. He’s significant. Respectable. And he’s got a reputation for dropping the kind of hard truths that are actually easy to swallow for an NPR-type audience.

So he’s not supposed to say things like “what the fuck is cancel culture, dawg?” For reviewer Spencer Kornhaber in the Atlantic, this is the moment the song stops being “inarguably excellent”. “Lamar throws in disclaimers and anti-disclaimers to anticipate critics. This tendency deadens some of the music,” writes Kornhaber.

But then it turns out that Kornhaber does in fact have the kind of criticism that Lamar is anticipating. One of the standout moments on the album — which is altogether extraordinary, plucking everything from gangsta rap to choral music and using it as the backdrop to a sprawling, prickly confessional of black male pain and sin — is the track “Auntie Diaries”. And it’s “Auntie Diaries” that Kornhaber has beef with.

The track itself tells a story that can be summed up in one line: “My auntie is a man now.” Well, two lines, because it’s also about a second family member, a cousin: “Demetrius is Mary-Ann now/ He’s more confident to live his plan now.” It’s an account of choosing kindness over prejudice, of accepting the people you love as they are because you love them.

It’s a beautiful, rich song that permits the listener their own uncertainty. Lamar reckons with his own unthinking cruelty: Demetrius, he raps “didn’t laugh as hard when the kids start joking/ ‘Faggot, faggot, faggot,’ we ain’t know no better.” What does it mean that the auntie “wasn’t gay, she ate pussy, and that was the difference,” or that Demetrius’s girlness can be traced back to a love for Barbie dolls?

Culture war watchers will note that Lamar has done forbidden things here

Is this about personal liberation or negotiating homophobia? Does that matter so much as the principle of love? I don’t know the answer. But culture war watchers will note that Lamar has done forbidden things here: used pre-transition names, referred to a male-to-female transexual as “he” and, of course, used the F-word.

Kornhaber picks him up on them. “If I were Lamar, I would simply have found a way to write a pro-queer song without repeating the word faggot, deadnaming people, and playing fast and loose with pronouns,” he writes, with remarkable confidence for someone who has never written a Pulitzer-winning album.

It’s also — well, let’s say intriguing — that there’s been more angst about “Auntie Diaries” than about “Worldwide Steppers” where Lamar raps about what it means to have “fucked a white bitch”: “She paid her daddy’s sins … Ancestors watchin’ me fuck was like retaliation.”

If I were Lamar, I would simply have found a way to write a song about the vicious conflicts of sexual and racial resentment without … Without what? Without saying “white bitch”? Without delineating the storm of history and hatred behind that knife of a phrase? You can’t make art that starts from the “correct” output and works backwards. That isn’t art, it’s Lego.

It’s disingenuous for critics to deny the existence of cancel culture while simultaneously dictating what art should “simply” do

It’s also morally vacuous. If we all pretend to be justified from the outset, none of us will ever bother to do the hard work of getting saved, and who gets to be saved is a question that hangs heavy over this album. One reviewer criticised Lamar for collaborating with Kodak Black, a rapper who took a plea deal on a rape charge. Lamar is questioning the violence of masculinity on many songs here, so why platform a specifically violent man?

But I don’t think this is hypocrisy. Throughout the album, Lamar alludes to the abuses inflicted on black Americans — a history of enslavement and abasement leading to a present generation that shows its damage in self-destruction and cruelty. “I know the secrets, every other rapper sexually abused/ I see ’em daily buryin’ they pain in chains and tattoos,” he raps on the climactic “Mother I Sober”.

Including Black is a way for Lamar to extend grace. I don’t know that Black is someone I’d extend grace to — but I do know I’d rather hear Lamar showing his working here than consume pre-sanitised “good art”. It’s disingenuous for critics to deny the existence of cancel culture while simultaneously dictating what art should “simply” do. Art consists in complexity, in tension, in the difficult. If Lamar is wrong, I want to hear every bar of it.