Last week something fantastic happened in the world of hip-hop. On a song that wasn't even his – a track that wasn't even released on an official album – Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar dropped what is already being called an instant-classic verse. It was a three-minute assault, buried in the middle of Big Sean's "Control," that essentially instructed every person holding a microphone and daring to call themselves an MC to rap better or GTFO. And in a summer that has been anemic at best for media, it felt like the sun finally coming out.
Because, let's face it – when it comes to being fans of pop culture, we're all Kendrick Lamar now. For the last few months there's been so much "meh" in music and film that it's hard not to feel so frustrated with the complacency of of Hollywood and the music industry that you want to call out the name of every single director and musician you know can be better, and implore them to do so. Yes, that's what the summer of 2013 has felt like: a parade of output that offered great promise and turned out to be a fantastic disappointment.
But for all of the hand-wringing about who Lamar dissed on his verse and who might respond (many of them did), Lamar wasn't trying to make enemies – he was trying to make competitors. He was trying to remind his industry that it's just as important to make good art as it is to make money. It worked, because while he sauntered away from the mic he dropped—via Funkmaster Flex, who released the song on radio station Hot 97 — it became the verse that launched a thousand think-pieces (OK, not that many, but quite a few) while rappers looked for open studios to record verses that fired back. There was even a "Hitler reacts" video.
Could he do that for Hollywood, please? Because, let's face it: This summer movie season has been kind of wack. There were movies that showed all kinds of promise — Star Trek Into Darkness — but were just wildly disappointing, and others, like The Lone Ranger, that were simply as bad as we expected. Then there were films like Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim lived up to their hype on a cinematic scale, but then didn't perform as well as they should've at the box office, leading to all kinds of hand-wringing about the success rate of non-franchise films. Del Toro's film eventually did alright, bringing in $384.5 million worldwide – but only $98.5 of that was from domestic theaters after a meager $37 million on opening weekend. Meanwhile, everyone dutifully went to the films with name-recognition, skipped out on the ones that were unfamiliar, and ultimately no one really got satisfied.
There wasn't really one breakout blockbuster that won the hearts of genre fans everywhere and also saw box office success, a la The Avengers in 2012, which did $200 million-plus its opening weekend and went on make $1.5 billion, or The Dark Knight, which had a $158 million opening weekend in 2008 and ultimately raked in more than $1 billion. And there were surely a few good indies this summer that did well, but when scads of money gets lavished on shoddy flicks while good movies struggle to keep up, it's hard not to cry out, "Please don't encourage them!"
Things weren't much better on the music front, where Lamar focused his frustrations. The highly anticipated new Kanye West album Yeezus was sonically brilliant, but largely composed of a lot of anger, misogyny and dirty laundry-airing that made it too intense for a "summer jams" kind of album. (Or, as Steven Hyden at Grantland put it, "I won't like this record in retrospect as much as I do now if we ever hear from this version of Kanye West again.") It was good by artistic standards, perhaps even great, but it was pretty hard to, well... enjoy.
West's big brother Jay Z (no hyphen) also dropped a new album, entitled Magna Carta Holy Grail, which was, um, fine, but not an album befitting a guy who, even Lamar noted in his lyrical call-to-arms, is one of the best MCs in the world. But Hova still managed to sell a lot of records, largely thanks to a brilliant Samsung promotion that gave the album to a million smartphone users, whereas Kanye limped to half a million sold two months after release. By comparison, Taylor Swift's 2012 album Red sold 3 million records in a month (I'mma let you finish 'Ye, but Swift won this round). Lady Gaga, generally a summer crowd-pleaser, put out a new single called "Applause," which was OK — it was no "Bad Romance"—but ended up overshadowed by Gaga's reaction to the song's leak and beef with Perez Hilton.
Meanwhile, the most popular song of the summer, Robin Thicke's collaboration with Pharrell and T.I. "Blurred Lines," has spent nearly a dozen weeks at No. 1 with millions of impressions. But even though it's ungodly catchy it's also a little creepy when you think about it, making it the worst kind of guilty pleasure. (Silver lining, Anna Kendrick's "Cups" — the pop song version of the same from the movie Pitch Perfect that found its way onto the film thanks to a popular reddit video — hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 nearly a year after the movie's release.)
Jay Z also embarked on his Legends of the Summer tour with Justin Timberlake, which packed stadiums and largely lived up to its name, but carried its own level of melancholy when you realize it's about songs the two artists put out more than five years ago. Nothing feels as disheartening as realizing Hova and Timberlake themselves may no longer be capable of topping The Blueprint and FutureSex/LoveSounds, which coincidentally came out as end-of-summer burners in September of 2001 and 2006, respectively.
That's not to say there was no good music rocking this summer — see Chance the Rapper's Acid Rap and "Get Lucky" by Daft Punk, or the new albums by The National, Disclosure, or Earl Sweatshirt for that — but as with film a lot of highly-anticipated releases felt flat while others sounded good, but got little notice. (Timberlake, currently the biggest-selling artist of the summer, at least has a chance to end the summer in style with the second half of his 20/20 Experience, due out next month.)
There's actually a Brazilian Portuguese word for this: saudade. It has no real translation into English but roughly describes a longing for something or someone we love. It is "the love that remains" – like the feeling we have about the first time we saw Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and will continue to have any time we walk into a new film from the franchise (no matter how often those films let us down). It's not quite pure nostalgia, but instead evokes something once-beloved that is now missing, something the heart fears may never return again. (It's also evocative of one of the best pieces of writing this summer, surprisingly from Craigslist.)
How did this happen? It probably has a lot to do with expectations. We wanted too much. We ended up disappointed. Our heroes — be they K. West or Captain Kirk — have saved us so many times we've come to expect it. Genre movies and franchises have become such a sure-fire way to make money, so that's pretty much all that's getting made any more. Similarly a guy like Jay Z, who once boasted "I do this in my sleep," can literally and figuratively phone in a new album and coast on the fact that it's good enough and people will buy it (or at least stream it), even if he's not bringing his A-game.
Not only that, but the ways in which media faltered were also disappointing, with good films not getting the box office love they deserved while lackluster movies somehow managed to still make bank. So even though films like The Wolverine can be a little "meh," they still bring in $52 million on opening weekend. Same with Star Trek Into Darkness, which was similarly lackluster, but got $70 million opening weekend on its way to $227 domestically. Man of Steel made $116 million opening weekend, despite selling its soul. Whereas, say, Pacific Rim was a movie-geek favorite but only brought in $37 million opening weekend and has so far made $98 million domestically (it has, however, fared better overseas). The only movie that performed both critically and financially on par with expectations was Iron Man 3, a solid franchise film that pulled in $174 million opening weekend in May, but it was pretty much all down hill from there.
There were, however, a few bright spots this summer in the world of media, particularly on the small screen. Netflix's Orange is the New Black, which launched in July, offered a story that was far more engaging than almost anything at the multiplex, largely thanks to a compelling and diverse group of characters and the ability to watch the entire season at once on the streaming service. And as the summer wound down, Breaking Bad returned for its final eight episodes to remind everyone how good storytelling is done. Not bad for a medium that until recently remained pretty dormant from June until August.
But there's hope on the horizon. The World's End – a franchise film (of sorts) starring nerd-known names like Simon Pegg and Nick Frost – looks promising, and fall is just around the corner with its slate of cinematic Oscar-bait. There's also Janelle Monae, The Weeknd, and Arcade Fire releases coming in the world of music and a fall TV line-up packed with the return of Parks and Recreation and Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., so help is on the way.
But what does this have to do with Kendrick Lamar? That all comes down to this one line from his epic "Control" verse: "What is competition? I'm trying to raise the bar high. Who's trying to jump and get it?" It's a verse that made a case for his dominance in rap while also egging on everyone else to rise to his level, and it worked – Vibe has already thought up seven ways it'll "change the rap game." His verse is now the 2001: A Space Odyssey (or Blade Runner or The Matrix) of hip-hop, an inspirational/aspirational call for creativity that demands to be heeded.
And at the end of a long summer, it sounds like the kind of challenge that pop culture needs to hear – and step up its game.
