If God Got Us: Kendrick Lamar, Paul Tillich, and the Advent of Existentialist Hip Hop
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The African-American experience within the history of the United States of America has been one in which their existence has been constantly threatened. From the conclusion of the Civil War to the present moment, the hegemonic system of white supremacy has represented a ubiquitous challenge for survival for members of the black community. The difficulties endemic to this system have been foundational to the advent and growth of the hip-hop culture and the art form of rap, which has emerged as being of central importance to the dissemination of hip hop's language and symbolism. The rap artist Kendrick Lamar, in his masterful record To Pimp a Butterfly, seeks to elucidate the black experience in the United States by describing the manner in which the threat of death always affects the way African Americans view their lives. In addition, on the album, Lamar celebrates the ability of members of the African-American community to courageously face this danger while still declaring power and strength within their race. This experience of the omnipresence of death and the determination to live life from within that shadow mirrors the theological system employed by the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich. In this article, Lamar's album will be interpreted employing Tillich's categories of finitude, anxiety, and new being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".