“Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” is the 10th track off of Lamar’s album. The track runs just over 12 minutes, and accordingly covers a lot of themes. Three different voices and characters are offered during the narrative, each verse containing different perspectives of Compton and cover four distinct themes. The first deals with violence and the connection with identity, the second with a female voice and through that different views on masculinity, and the third offers a stream-of-conscious view of an isolated character, lost in his own thoughts. Ending the track is a skit, a throwback to classic hip-hop albums, a way for the artist to give a shout-out to the heritage of hip-hop.
The first character recounts the death of his little brother the previous night. The narrator gets his revenge – “A demon glued to my back whispering, ‘Get em’ / I got em, and I ain’t give a fuck.” The implied violent retaliation is more menacing than a lyric detailing the revenge killing. This depiction of violence seems a bit over the top at first but later the narrator admits “I’m proud and well devoted / This piru shit been in me forever / So forever I’mma push it.” Retaliatory violence is nothing new to this character; its a part of him, he takes pride in it and when his family became involved his reaction was one that he was comfortable with. Violence is how the character defines himself and his situation. Violence as a defining factor of life comes forward in Stiff Little Fingers’ “Law and Order“ as well, but where the Belfast group deals with the brutality of the law regularly, Lamar’s character adheres to a street law that seems to be even more brutal. Stiff Little Fingers just gets beaten by those that are supposed to protect them, while the first voice of “Sing About Me” ends up being presumably shot dead in retaliation for the revenge killing he participated in, creating a cycle of death. His identity was defined by violence, and now it has been snuffed out by violence as well.
This idea of a perpetuation of death is echoed in Stiff Little Fingers’ “No More of That” as well, with the final lines remaining poignant to Lamars’s story as well:
The man who pulls the trigger’s not to blame
He’s only playing their deadly game
And he knows he just can’t win
Or someone else will pull the trigger on him.
These lyrics could have easily followed the final line of Lamar’s first verse, operating as an epitaph.
The second voice is a female character, one whose interactions with the males in her life critique the views on traditional masculinity. She explicitly talks about the men her life paying her for sex, cheating on their wives with her in their cars, passing her around to friends and family members. Her narrative certainly does not paint her in a positive light, but whereas her actions stem from desperation and necessity, the men are all driven by lust. With this verse comes Lamar’s critique on masculinity, showcasing exploitation. Here men are not supporters or stand-up guys but users and abusers. Further critique comes in the form of “her’”reference to the 2-Pac track “Brenda’s Got a Baby” in which a young preteen girl has a child. Her father “was a junkie” who was not there for her and the father of this child is not around. Lamar uses this 90s title drop to show that there is a history of this exploitation, that this form of immoral male behavior has been present in previous generations too, a heritage of warped masculinity that continues.
The third voice is a character talking/thinking to himself, introspecting. He is alone with his thoughts, and the monologue is at times worrying – “I suffer a lot / And every day the glass mirror get tougher to watch / I tie my stomach in knots / And I’m sure not why I’m infatuated with death / My imagination is surely an aggravation of threats.” These thoughts of uncertainty portray an aloneness and isolation reminiscent of lines from Stiff Little Fingers’ “Here We Are Nowhere” – “Here we are nowhere maybe that’s where we belong.” Identity is rooted in isolation here, a single figure contemplating his worth and his meaning. This uncertainty and unhappiness portrayed here are really a reflection of all adolescence, whether it be Cal in Bernard MacLaverty’s novel or Lamar in his decision to portray his heritage as “my angry adolescence divided.”
The line on an “infatuation with death” echoed loudly when we read it, immediately brings us to Stiff Little Fingers’ “Barbed Wire Love.” While the most prevalent theme of this track is the relationship between love and pain, this particular line from Lamar’s song brings a nihilistic worry that the themes of isolation do not quite reach. The characters in “Here We Are Nowhere” and Cal are certainly alienated but Lamar’s character in this final verse seems to be a step further in the wrong direction.
For all characters, identity is struggle: a struggle to find a balance of violence, a struggle against misguided sense of masculinity, a struggle to end a perpetuation of heritage, or a struggle to use alone time to think proactively and not get caught up in everything and lose faith. The ending skit shuns the perpetuation of the past; most hip-hop skits are based in comedy but here Lamar uses a skit to further his concept of the struggle for identity, tying together the themes explored in the previous verses to close a bleak take on identity across all types o f individuals.
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