Grace and Conversion in Good Kid, M.a.a.d. City

Kendrick Lamar’s critically acclaimed sophomore album Good Kid, M.a.a.d. City turned

eleven years old, and consequently the album has officially become the longest-charting Hip-Hop record in the genre’s brief history. 

The album covers a multitude of common rap tropes, but Kendrick uses them to tell a much deeper story of the power of influence on the young mind. For example, a motif of the record is the amount of name-dropping Kendrick does to convey celebrities’ sway in the young Kendrick’s beliefs. 

Among the references to famous 90’s figures, God has a prominent undertone throughout the album and Kendrick even ends up getting baptized and leaving his gang at the climax. The catalyst of Kendrick’s conversion was a monologue given by his neighbor in between the songs “Sing About Me,” and “Dying of Thirst,” but this was not a one-on-one conversation. The neighbor addresses his entire gang, yet Kendrick is the only known member who decides to leave. 

This moment has proven monumental in Kendrick’s life, as it generates the peace found in the song “i” and the crippling survivor’s guilt described in “u,” on his following album To Pimp A Butterfly. How is it that a group of guys in the same gang hear the same speech, yet only one turns to God? To put it shortly, it is by the grace of God, but Kendrick helps unravel the term in real-time for his listeners.

To give a formal definition, grace is “favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives

us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine

nature and eternal life.”  Catholic Theology also divides grace into two categories, actual and sanctifying (CCC 1996). Thankfully, Kendrick’s exceptional storytelling allows for both graces to be illustrated within Good Kid, M.a.a.d. City. 

Essentially, sanctifying grace is full participation in the eternal life of God, and actual grace pertains to the inclinations we have to fully participate in the eternal life of God. In more practical terms, sanctifying grace typically refers to the Sacraments, authentic Scriptural meditation, and works of mercy. 

With this in mind, Kendrick’s baptism acts as his reception of sanctifying grace, thus saving his life on earth and after earth. However, the climactic final scene is not what makes Kendrick’s depiction of grace so profound; rather it is how he shows the work actual grace had in his life.

The album covers many vices people face in their youth: peer pressure, drugs, alcohol,

despair, and lust, yet these moments are always juxtaposed with the underlying Christian values

that have been suppressed deep in Kendrick’s heart. Early examples come in the first two tracks

which both start with prayers for forgiveness. 

Despite these prayers being mostly empty as reflected in the unapologetic nature of the lyrical content, they act as a foundation for God having some sort of role in his life. God is distant, acting, in Lamar’s eyes, as a figure of authority he is consciously disappointing. As the stories progress, references to God dwindle to mere references in a singular line or two within each track, signifying that God’s role in Kendrick’s life was shrinking to a point where He falls below that of the friends, women, and celebrities in front of him. 

Some interpret the decrease in references as Kendrick’s faith fading, but his continual sprinkling of God in the narrative could imply an acknowledgment that even at Kendrick’s worst moments in the album, God was working in his life. 

In the song “Money Trees,” Kendrick faces the fact that he cannot live a lukewarm life. He refers to this choice in the chorus as “Halle Berry or Hallelujah.” Halle Berry represents the stranglehold celebrities and wealth had on his beliefs and aspirations. 

Despite rappers and movies seeming to have happiness fulfilled, Kendrick realizes that his gullibility to this empty influence was because he never truly knew what wealth was like. If he had unlimited money (money trees) to begin with, he would have learned that “a Louis belt will never ease [his] pain.” 

Still, these tidbits of wisdom are overshadowed by the money-hungry lifestyle around him. The carnal pleasures personified as “Sheranne” compounded with the lifestyle previously described brings Kendrick to, in my opinion, his most important breakthrough leading up to his reception of sanctifying grace. 

In the song “Good Kid,” Kendrick, for the first time in the album, outright denounces the celebrity worship and greed within his neighborhood, referring to it as a “mass hallucination” everyone is under. 

He laments about the temptations of rage and revenge that he further illustrates in “M.a.a.d. City,” and how many yearn for faith and prayer yet they fear that such self-offering makes them vulnerable to being the next victim. 

He wants, like many teetering the line between faith and disbelief, something definitive that can instantaneously make him realize that one way of living is correct. He knows that being a servant of God is the right way to live, but he feels that it is impractical in the murderous cycle he is partaking in. 

These small doses of eternal life overflow in “Dying of Thirst,” where Kendrick finally can see with clear eyes the brokenness that is around him. He describes the feeling as exhaustion from maintaining a coarse exterior, from constantly mourning, and from placing allegiance to a gang rather than God. 

His focus shifts from material to spiritual, as his fixation on death causes him to contemplate his own life. He asks, “How many sins? I’m running out. How many sins? I lost count,” as a frantic realization of the gravity of his actions. 

While Kendrick has been conditioned to know God’s forgiveness since the beginning of his youth, the participation in a “hereditary” cycle of depraved wickedness creates scrupulosity in his consciousness. His newfound faith did not bring consolation, rather it brought an overwhelming guilt of having offended the one being who loved him in the most righteous way. This spiraling of despair gets halted by his neighbor, who offers them the invitation to receive Baptism. What is important about the nine-and-a-half tracks preceding “Dying of Thirst” is both the supernatural lingering God has in Kendrick’s heart and the active contemplation Kendrick has throughout his journey. 

If not for these tiny revelations that, while profound, were not enough for him to fully commit to a moral life, he would have never been able to encounter and receive the massive grace he experienced through the woman’s hand. 

So to answer Kendrick’s later question–why he out of the group was able to escape the lifestyle–it is a combination of undeserved actual grace and his own continuous desire to dig deeper and search for meaning in this broken world. 

Although I doubt many readers are gang members from Compton, many reversions and conversions have a similar sentiment. There might be a massive climactic moment that calls people to completely commit, but that moment isn’t possible without the countless tiny tugs from the Holy Spirit. Within a mad city, kids can still be redeemed when they orient themselves toward the eternal goodness that is Our Lord.