There isn't an inch of room open for debating who is in control on UK singer Clare Maguire's hurricane-sized single "Don't Mess Me Around." From the opening gut-shot handclaps and rumbling bass right through to the final few wails, it's obvious that Maguire "owns" everything around her. The pitiable boyfriend with the wayward eye. The overly jealous girl giving the death stare from the corner of the bar. Anyone who dare throw shade at her girls. They're all under her domain, the simple screams of "don't mess me around" is all it takes for Maguire to assert her dominance.
Since she's a female Brit with a penchant for soulful reclamations of WOMANHOOD, the comparisons to Adele are going to come fast and furious, but they're unwarranted. Maguire's far more ferocious than Adele. The latter would never attempt a line like "you have been erased, that's how easy you are to replace," and she certainly wouldn't scream it. I can't remember the last time a soul/R&B track had me reaching to turn the volume down, but "Don't Mess Me Around" does. Earsplitting, domineering, grooving, this song is all of those things and so much more. Run from it if you want, you won't get far.
Weird.
Claustrophobic. Ferocious. Militantly black. Proud. Conflicted. I could be at
this all day long and not exhaust the Oxford Dictionary for adjectives
describing "King" Kendrick Lamar's head turning "The Blacker the
Berry." The dude's grasp of the language and his knowledge of its potency
is greater than entire English departments, so you're "better
off trying to skydive..." than parse one of his tracks. It's
far less of a Herculean effort to sit back and listen, though listening can be
taxing too.
That's
undoubtedly true of "The Blacker the Berry," which pummels you with
Boi-1da's "Funky Drummer" percussion and makes
you shiver with the zombiefied guitar circles. It most closely resembles "m.A.A.d. city" in terms of suffocating
atmosphere, but even that feels tame in comparison to this. Lamar snarls a lot
more on this one and plays into the utter paranoia of it all by suggesting
schizophrenia in the intro. It's unnerving when he pointedly asks "you hate me don't you? You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture." Where before the city was "maad," now the
kid is. And he's not sure what to do.
The
"naïf," "idealistic" teen that accompanied us then has
rotted into a man who can't come to terms with the fact that he's internalizing
all of the racial hatred faced by Black Americans and unleashing it on his
"kinfolk." He's weeping over the death of Trayvon Martin, and then
killing someone "blacker than me." Whatever preaching he's doing with
the Panthers is being negated by penitentiary trips. The chains binding his
ancestors now entice Lamar to snatch and run, without the least bit of concern
for his fellow man. Arguably that's the greatest tragedy of the Ferguson or Los Angeles riots; entire groups of people feel
so "institutionally manipulated" that they stop giving a shit about
their own communities. What's the smell of a dead neighbor when the trash has been picked up in weeks?
Despite the savior status he's often tagged with, Kendrick doesn't have any answers on "The Black the Berry." That's not what the song, which pays homage to the similarly conflicted "Keep Ya Head Up," is about. It's all about painful self-reflection, the sort that leaves you realizing "I'm the biggest hypocrite of 2015." If you leave the piece unaffected that's your fault, not Kendrick's. He's doing everything he can to expose generational plots and see through deceits. What other "King" works that hard?
(Details on the new LP are still scarce, but I wouldn't be surprised if it dropped at some point between now and festival season.)
