Mortal Man is the last track on To Pimp a Butterfly, one of, if not thee, greatest album ever made. This song is not often spoken about. It doesn’t have that fast rhythmic flow of Alright that makes people dance but I think it’s one of the most important songs he’s written. In hard times, I often find myself navigating towards Kendrick Lamar for some clarity. You see, no matter what you’re going through, what you’re feeling, that nigga Kendrick has gone through it and put it on paper with jazzy instruments that make you levitate. You can say that I’m a fan of Kendrick.
The CD was completing its tracks, with one last song to play. Mortal Man. I was cleaning my room in hopes that maybe it would help with the clutter in my mind. It was not a new song, I had heard it multiple times before, but because it’s at the very end of the album, most times it skipped my mind. Immediately after the melody started, Kendrick took me with him. He and I have something in common with the way we approach art. We ask questions. Usually it’s to ourselves, and then we spend the next few lines or songs trying to answer them. In this one though, Kendrick is asking me directly, questions that made me sit on the floor, in the middle of all my overwhelming clothes.
« When shit hits the fan, are you still a fan? »
To ask if you’re still a fan is to admit fandom was never really about the music. It was about the armor. The moment someone inspires us, we stop allowing them to be ordinary. We need them fixed in place. Kendrick becomes the guy who already figured it out. I become, to the people who read me, the girl who already knows what she’s doing with her life. Neither of those people exist. We just need them to.
Shit had definitely hit the fan for me. Who was my fan now?
It had been weeks where I could not catch a break. Even in the middle of enjoying myself, even sleeping, I had things buried in my body I hadn’t dealt with. I tried to run them out, laugh them out, but as the nights passed and days began, the issue grew closer and bigger. And like every time, one thing cannot simply stay small. It creates other problems you had never noticed. It wakes the ones you thought you’d burned. My problem wasn’t just one thing anymore, one I could fix or at least convince myself I was strong enough to carry. It just ate at me until I couldn’t ignore it. At first, I stopped writing. Heck, I even wrote an article on why I wasn’t writing anymore, and though the things I said in it were very real, I was straight up lying to y’all. I knew what I was saying was one of the many reasons for my absence on Substack, but I was just lying, promising something I didn’t know I had. My words had left me, like every time things got too hard. Cowards, I know.
« Let these words be your earth and moon, you consume every message »
There’s a weight in being told your words are someone’s earth and moon. It means being consumed completely by people who need you to be a certain kind of steady. Can you allow the people who save you to remain people? Kendrick has saved people, his words did for strangers what therapy couldn’t afford to do. Mine have started to do that too, in a smaller way, but the mechanism is the same. So when I lie to my own readers, even a small lie dressed up in language pretty enough to pass as truth, I’m not just being dishonest. I’m asking them to keep believing in someone who might not be half as put together as the platform makes her look.
I feel like as someone who speaks up for the culture, for her community, I do have a responsibility for the messages I put out. I mean I want to do so much, and this is just the beginning, but all I could stumble up in a difficult situation was a lie.
Will you hit the fan because of my dishonesty?
Anyways, I was still sitting on that messy floor, eyes a bit humid but nothing would ever come out of them. I have no idea what time it was. It looked like the sun was finally giving up on me too.
« As I lead this army, make room for mistakes and depression »
I thought that having a platform, I’d finally become who I’ve always dreamt of being. I mean I’ve experienced things I never dreamt about with this but, eventually, like everything else in my life, I abandoned it. I have this odd habit of starting something and never finishing it. I don’t know, call me undisciplined or whatever. But I wonder, in all my dreams of helping my community, shit, I even went into politics to have a bit more power over governmental issues in the future. If I want to lead my generation into something great for Africa. If I want to help women who look like me, all over. If I say I don’t want children to experience the genocide my mother went through, ever. How dare I jeopardize my way of getting heard?
See, I told you there’s a lot of problems with me. Would you trust me as a leader? Like Nelson Mandela or Dr. King, I’m haunted with greater visions for the condition of my people, yet how will I do that if I cannot finish anything?
Here’s the contradiction I keep circling around; I want to become a symbol while staying painfully mortal. I want the reach of Mandela without losing the version of me that forgets to eat some days. However, nobody builds a statue of someone mid mistake. We build monuments because we hate mortality. We take a person’s flinching and their doubt and sand it down slowly, until what’s left can stand in a square without embarrassing anyone. Mandela spent twenty seven years in a cell being someone other than a monument. Dr. King had doubts he never put in the speeches, nights by his own account when he wanted to quit. I don’t know how to want their impact without also wanting their myth somewhere in me. And the myth is the part that was never real.
Now that you know that,
« Is you still a fan? »
And then, like any respectable down moment in your life on the floor with the lights dimmed and giving out, I wondered who I could call. Y’know, who would have my back if shit hit the fan, and right now it had.
« Won’t you look to your left and right? Make sure you ask your friends »
I wondered how people without a community could go through all of this. It made me think about the people who have people around them but still feel misunderstood or lonely in their pain. When everything doesn’t make sense anymore, and even you are unaware of what you need, or who to ask. And that broke my heart even more. Community is a necessity, not just for the laughs, but for the pain too. Sometimes things are too heavy for one heart to hold alone.
« Would you know where the sermon is if I died in this next line? »
A sermon is just a monument someone else has to build for you. Something spoken after you’re gone, by people who need you to have meant something. I think about what mine would say. I think about what’s true enough to survive being said out loud in a room without me there to correct it.
This made me think of what I built, or at least what I think I built. It made me think of the people who still need me. Of the people who see great things for me, even when I’m lying in the middle of my room looking at the ceiling, confused at everything. I’d probably sleep on that floor for a while before finding the energy to get to my bed. I thought of all the people in the same position as me. What would I tell them? What would I think of them? Would I think less of them? Not at all. I thought of everyone I’ve helped with my words, everyone whose heartstrings I’ve pulled with my hands, and I wonder what I’d lose if my next line never made an appearance. If im honest, I’d lose everything I breathe for.
So maybe the answer isn’t becoming the monument and hoping nobody notices the cracks. Maybe it’s staying a person and letting the impact happen anyway. Kendrick spends this whole album building himself into a leader people can lean on, and then in the very last line he takes it back. Making sure that what he’s built won’t cost him his humanity. That’s the move I’m trying to learn.
Apparently you become God’s strongest soldier when you’re a writer. Anyways, I still have a lot of questions for myself. If this will work out. If this is worth it. If this is what I’m supposed to do. But still I rise and do it, with all of them banging in my head because I know one day it’ll make sense.
I might also be wrong.
But I don’t know, I’m no mortal man, maybe I’m just another nigga
this is such a beautiful reflection!
It will all work out keep goingg❤️