My Acolyte Journey: 2014.8

Kingdom
Common (feat Vince Staples)
This is a complete poem. It wanders in places, but the necessity of the form (massive stress on end rhymes and rhythm and a love of internal rhymes as extra) can excuse the places where the lyrics drop ideas, never to come back. My post is long, so I cut down on my links this time. Try the video or rap genius if you want more.
The first time I ever understood the old hackneyed phrase "the wrong side of the tracks" was years ago when my dad, brother, and I were going to Oshkosh. We stopped in Chicago and got lost trying to find a museum. One minute, we were on Lake Street, and the next we crossed a railroad and the buildings were all precarious, leaning on the people who spread themselves on the stoop. Dad just said "well, I guess we made a wrong turn," and turned around. Chicago is not the worst city in the United States, but I know it's bad. Kingdom? Chicago.
The lyrics might be from three or four different perspectives, but it might be the same narrator throughout. I can't actually tell. It starts with what rap genius calls a "hood sonnet," which is just a sonnet that doesn't follow pentameter. He starts with an iconic admission:

I do dirt.

We all tryna eat off the same plate/Dead presidents; we want the same face

 This emphasis serves double duty: there isn't enough money to go around, and everybody wants to be white. The hood sonnet ends when he asks for the first time if he could really make it to heaven.
The first verse: is it a different narrator? I'm not sure, because the song isn't explicit. The young man is at a funeral, feeling messed up about his friend dying. Later, when he sees the killer sitting calmly on the porch, the narrator "can't afford not to hit him," and finds that the same keys that would normally set him free (I assume his feelings of family, religion, and grief) have pushed him into the murder.
Third verse: I'm not sure about the narrator. This one's dead. He might be the rapper or the boy in church or the thug on the porch. I don't know. What I do know is he had no support ("my money ain't straight, my fam ain't straight") and he did drugs to make ends meet. He blames God first for putting him in the situation and second for not lifting him out of it.

You created me from dust, that's why I did dirt.

I think he does take the responsibility for his actions, even though he's angry at God. He doesn't want his son to follow the same path (can this narrator possibly be the young man from the funeral?), and he still desperately wants to be worthy of heaven.

Standing at the gates 'cause I know you've forgiven what I've done/I'm your son: do I have the keys to get in?

Vince Staples weighs in on the last verse: it's his life. "Peep the full interview here."
I thought there was a separate narrator for this one, and I guess I was right. I don't know if I overvalue rap that comes from personal experience, but I always try to give it a second look, just like Eminem's Survival. Vince plays with guns and watches his family use drugs. He tries to be tough and he knows how precarious life is.

So now you know the basic story. The song references the bible intelligently (revenge is mine, sayeth the lord, the last shall be first, the prodigal son, and the gates of heaven) and boy does it abuse the conceit of the keys: keys to a benz, a jail cell, to heaven.
Hype Williams does the video; a story about a young man who starts slow in his family's kitchen and builds to nice cars and strip clubs when: he gets busted. The use of color is strong, all reds and blues like the lights on a cop car. It's set in Chicago and deals with dirt, but otherwise it's not the story of the song. It doesn't add as much as others we've seen, but it certainly doesn't detract. Only one real complaint: at the juncture of the spoken-word poem and the actual song, there's a distracting brea-
k in the music. I think there just wasn't a way to blend the two songs smoothly, but it still feels like powdered cheese in a five-star restaurant.

I don't know how to feel about this song. It puts me in some type of way. I love the choir. I love the metaphors. I love the rhythmic delivery. I just don't know the pain, so I don't feel the aura, so I lose out. I don't think I would pass on buying it, though, just because I would need to play it for people when they need to hear it.