Since his critically acclaimed album, To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar has been wrestling with the devil. But on GNX, his surprise album released last Friday, Lamar stops wrestling and writes a reconciliation between Satan and God.
The bold retelling may strike listeners as sacrilegious. But ending Satan’s story in restoration places Lamar squarely in a theological tradition that takes seriously the connectivity of all creation. In the process, Lamar asks if we can embrace and accept the scandal of being liberated from our own sin and evil.
Kendrick and ‘Lucy’
GNX is far from the first Kendrick Lamar album to dip into religious imagery. Christianity as a cultural power and Lamar’s own wrestling with the implications of his faith have soaked music like the video for “Swimming Pools (Drank),” the song “How Much a Dollar Cost?,” and the entire album DAMN.
But Lamar wasn’t always so keen to write a reconciliation story for the chief accuser. On To Pimp a Butterfly, “Lucy,” short for Lucifer, takes prime placement as Lamar’s antagonist. In a poem, told in stages throughout the album, Lamar confesses: “The evils of Lucy was all around me.” On the interlude “For Sale?,” Lucy taunts and tempts Kendrick with money, fame, and a promise to be ever-present in the life of the rapper:
Lucy just want your trust and loyalty, avoiding me?
It’s not so easy, I’m at these functions accordingly
Kendrick, Lucy don’t slack a minute, Lucy work harder
Lucy gon’ call you even when Lucy know you love your Father.
This imagery is classically Christian. The devil is the antagonist, tormenting Kendrick with “her” presence. Kendrick understands what Lucy has to offer, understands the weight of it, and like the rest of us, often struggles to resist. The devil is not solely to blame for Kendrick’s sins, as the rapper reckons with his own greed and violence throughout his discography, but Satan is at the forefront of temptation.
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GNX and ‘reincarnation’
Unlike Lamar’s other albums, the 12-track GNX is unusually straightforward. He’s referencing other rappers by name, he’s telling plain, chronological stories, and he’s denying any fourth wall by yelling his producer’s name at a beat-switch.
The simplicity of GNX does not make it easier to reckon with. Instead of asking, “What does this song mean?” the listener is forced to ask, “What do I do with this?”
But on “reincarnated,” the sixth song on this, his sixth album (surely not a numerological coincidence), Lamar dives back into the well of mythology. Lamar writes a song of his “past lives,” rapping from a seemingly distinct perspective in each of the three verses.
Truth be told, I’ve been battling my soul
Tryna navigate the real and fake
Cynical about the judgment day
I did past life regression last year and it f---ed me up
Reincarnated on this earth for a hundred plus.
His first two “lives” are marked by supreme talent and extreme rebellion, addiction, and self-destruction. In the third verse, Lamar turns inward. “My present life is Kendrick Lamar,” he raps. The music shifts slightly; Lamar’s voice is less aggressive.
Lamar again explains his excellence and talent before describing his state of estrangement — his father kicked him out of the house. “Son, you do well, but your heart is closed / I can tell residue that linger from your past creates a cell ... your pride has to die,” his father tells him. A rapper with a plethora of character voices in his arsenal, Lamar weaves a paternal dialogue for the rest of the song.
Eventually, we’re cued into the fact that in this song the devil isn’t an antagonist — the devil and Lamar (and the “past lives”) are one. The father narrates:
Every individual is only a version of you
How can they forgive when there’s no forgiveness in your heart?
…
You fell out of Heaven ’cause you was anxious
Didn’t like authority, only searched to be heinous
Isaiah 14 was the only thing that was prevalent.
Here Lamar leans on historic ideas like Satan falling from heaven and having been the music director in the angelic choir. But he adds his own flares: “Centuries you manipulated man with music / Embodied you as superstars to see how you moving.”
As the song reaches a crescendo, the father and son reach reconciliation, alternating each line.
So can you promise that you won't take your gifts for granted?
I promise that I’ll use my gifts to bring understanding
For every man, woman and child, how much can you vow?
I vow my life just to live one in harmony now.
The devil’s story and our own
But why rewrite the devil’s story? Here, Lamar sounds eerily reminiscent of 20th-century Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov.
Bulgakov was a theologian who stressed God as a reconciling, restoring father and saw all of creation as unified through God in Jesus Christ. Bulgakov might not have cosigned all the mythology on “reincarnated,” but the crescendo of the song is a close echo of the systematic theologian’s essay “On the Question of the Apocatastasis of the Fallen Spirits (in Connection with the Teaching of Gregory of Nyssa).”
The essay explores apocatastasis, a form of Christian universalism, and asks whether one can confidently conclude from scripture that God’s work of restoring creation will include Satan and other fallen angels. Of course, Bulgakov’s essay is a long, drawn-out exploration of Hebrew and Christian scriptures and theology — and it’s not nearly the bop that GNX is.
But the essay uses scripture to combat two misconceptions of the devil. Pop culture views Satan as God’s equal rival — Facebook memes where God and Satan arm-wrestle for likes. While more serious versions of the devil correctly understand him as a creature beneath God, they forget that, as Bulgakov wrote, “Satan ... like all creation, was created by the love of God.” (Translation by Roberto J. De La Noval in The Sophiology of Death.)
The strongest connection point in Bulgakov and Lamar’s theologies is that they both understand the devil’s story as connected to God’s plan to redeem creation. God’s promise in 1 Corinthians 15 to be “all in all” is the basis for Bulgakov’s claim that “the salvation and glorification of Satan is necessarily included in this ‘all in all.’”
For Bulgakov, it is the redemptive power of Christ’s incarnation and defeat of death that brings fallen angels a “liberation from the darkness of sin.” For Lamar, the song ends with him narrating the devil vowing his “life just to live one in harmony now,” and Lamar announcing: “I rewrote the devil’s story just to take our power back.”
For both, the redemption of the devil is tied closely to the liberation of all from sin and evil. Lamar ties the devil’s story to his and to others who suffered under ego and pride.
It’s a fitting rewriting. Where many (including Lamar) have seen the devil as the most evil, most unredeemable, most unlovable, Lamar on GNX declares that, yes, God’s love extends as far as all existence. On Monday, Lamar released a video for a different song from GNX; the cover image is Lamar holding a sign that references a Los Angeles ministry: “JESUS SAVES GANGSTERS TOO!”
If there’s hope even for Lucy, what might that say for the rest of us?
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