K-Dot, Kendrick, Mr. Morale, Jojoruski, Good Kid, OkLama, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth. Whatever you want to call him, his lyrics are so in-depth I could have done my entire passion blog on one song.
The song that I will be focusing on is from his Pulitzer Prize-winning album, DAMN. The song DUCKWORTH is the closing track on the album. This entails a story of how the owner of his first record label, Top Dawg Entertainment, met Kendrick’s father, but they did not know until they both heard this song.
The song starts off talking about how “Life is one funny ma’fucker/A true comediean, you gotta love him, you gotta trust him” “Life” is in reference to God, as the lyric in leaked versions of the song started with God instead of Life. Also, in Numbers 27 16:18, it refers to God as “the source of all life”
Then the song breaks down into the actual story. The story of Anthony, the owner of TDE. Anthony is originally from Compton. He grew up associated with violence and avoiding the cops.
After that, it moves into the story of Ducky, Kendrick’s father. It details how he moved from Chicago to Compton. And how he started working at a local KFC.
Anthony planned to rob that KFC. But he did it before so Ducky wanted to get on Anthony’s good side, so he always gave him extra food or a discount.
When Anthony finally robbed the KFC where Ducky worked, he let him live. “That one decision changed both of their lives.” This decision was so important because if Kendrick grew up without a male figure in his life, he would have fallen into the cycle of gang violence. If Anthony killed Ducky he would have ended up in jail for murder and he would have never started his record label.
Now I have no relation to anything in the song. But this song created a very important memory for me and my best friend, Bep. No, that’s not his real name, just a nickname. We both started really getting into music around 2020 because we were bored with COVID.
One day he said “Have you ever heard of this song?” and he played DUCKWORTH. We spent at least an hour just talking about the song and each lyric with its meaning. Even though we had no relation to this song at all, we both discovered that we love looking in depth into songs, so that is what we do all the time and we send each other music all the time.
“That one decision changed both of their lives” also applies to me and Bep, we found a new passion that we can connect on together.
I have listened to this song a few times, but I never knew the deeper meaning behind it. This blog post opened up my eyes into the true storytelling of this song. Kendricks use of bringing in important issues into music is impeccable, and your analysis of it is as well. I especially love how he raps about importance of having a father figure in his life. This was an amazing song choice for your blog!