Cole dissects Kendrick Lamar’s new song, unofficially titled “Watch the Party Die,” and theorizes about the possibility of new album coming soon as soon as Friday the 13th.
In the following excerpt, Cole gives an overview of his analysis, including the relevance of the cover art.
Welcome to a special episode of Dissect. I’m your host, Cole Cuchna. On today’s emergency podcast episode, we are talking about Kendrick Lamar’s brand-new song, “Watch the Party Die/Dear God.” We’re going to talk about the song in broad strokes, dissect a few individual lines. We’re going to speculate on what it all might mean, what might be coming in the very near future. Just a forewarning, this is going to be a little bit different than typical episodes. I’m not going to do a line-by-line analysis. This song dropped, what, 12 hours ago or something?
Importantly, it drops on September 11. It drops at 8 p.m. ET, prime time. We’ll talk about the significance of that in a second. It’s an IG-exclusive song, at least for now, just like “6:16 in L.A.” The cover art is a pair of beat-up, black Air Force 1 shoes—we’ll talk about that. And the song is very much, at least to me, in that “6:16 in L.A.” kind of overall feeling. It feels like a precursor to something else, just like “6:16 in L.A.” was a precursor to the main event of the battle. Kendrick is talking to God directly again, as if something is about to happen and asking him to watch over him. And so, my personal immediate interpretation of the song is that it does feel like a precursor. It does feel very much in the vein of “The Heart” series, which are the pre-album singles that he tends to drop just before an album release or rollout.
We’ll talk more about that in a second. Also, let’s remember just a few days ago he announced that he’s going to be performing at the Super Bowl, and he made an announcement video with several Easter eggs that I did an entire episode on, which you can listen to if you haven’t. But at the end of that video, he did say, “Now we can get to the real thing,” which we speculated could mean that the real thing is the album and that the battle was kind of practice or a kind of pre-event leading up to the album. So there’s more evidence pointing to that theory in “Watch the Party Die.” But let’s talk about the release date because if you’ve been listening to these Lucy episodes I’ve been dropping about the battle concerning the Super Bowl announcement, you probably already put together that September 11 continues this American theme that has been running throughout the battle, wherein Kendrick is strategically dropping or doing events on American holidays.
For example, The Pop Out show was on Juneteenth. He released the “Not Like Us” music video on July Fourth. The Super Bowl is a kind of American holiday. September 11 is obviously not a holiday, but it is very significant in American history. And the mournful tragedy of September 11 is alluded to or played on as a motif in “Watch the Party Die,” which is very somber. Even in the title “Watch the Party Die,” if that’s the title. By the way, that’s kind of the working title people are running with, although Glasses Malone—a musician from L.A. that Kendrick has worked with before—said on Twitter that the song was called “Dear God.” So that seems like a reliable source. I’m going to mostly run with “Watch the Party Die,” just because that’s what most people are saying at this point. So September 11, at least in my mind, is totally intentional, especially given the subject matter of the song.
So in the moment, especially given that there are two shoes on the cover art and there were two buildings in the September 11 attacks, myself and others online speculated that maybe there was something else coming on the same night. And I was personally driven to this theory because of what I saw on Twitter: DJ Head and a few other people close to Kendrick said things like, “Stay tuned, stay on stream. There’s more coming.” So those tweets, plus September 11, two towers, two shoes on the cover … I was preparing for something else that obviously never came, or at least didn’t come last night on September 11—though again, we’ll talk about that in a second. There definitely does seem to be something coming somewhat soon, maybe, but let’s talk more about the cover art. The cover art is two black Air Force 1s. The photo is from an eBay listing, a recent eBay listing.
It seems like Kendrick, or whoever, pulled it directly from this eBay listing. The shoes actually sold, I believe just yesterday. As you probably already know, people that wear black Air Force 1s have this reputation for being kind of diabolical; they’re sinister, they’re about to do something, they have a kind of don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. So that definitely matches the energy Kendrick is giving on the song. Let’s jump into the song itself. It’s produced by—at least this is what Genius says at the moment, I’m not sure where Genius is getting their information from but it’s kind of all we have to go on—the producers listed are Pasqué, hopefully I’m saying that right, P-A-S-Q-U-É. He is most well-known for his production with Aminé. Anca Trio Plus One is also credited. Jack Antonoff and Sounwave. Jack Antonoff, of course, most famous for his production of Taylor Swift. Sounwave, Kendrick’s longtime producer. Also, Jack Antonoff and Sounwave produced “6:16 in L.A.” and have a trio called Red Hearse with Sam Dew. Sam Dew is the singer that you hear at the beginning of Mr. Morale. They dropped a project in 2019, so that kind of explains the Jack Antonoff credits here and also on “6:16 in L.A.” Also, in case he didn’t put it together, Jack Antonoff on “6:16” was very symbolic. It was a response to Drake’s tailor-made freestyle where Drake essentially said that Kendrick was scared of Taylor Swift. And then Kendrick gets Taylor Swift’s producer to produce a song for him firing back at Drake. But I’m already getting sidetracked. Let’s get back to “Watch the Party Die,” the production. I like it. It’s definitely very understated, very melancholic, kind of running-end-credits-on-a-movie or something. ...
If this is actually the real production list, it sounds like maybe it’s not sampled. Originally I was thinking it was a sample, but the more I listened to it, it could very well be an original composition that was then affected to give it that sampled, vintage sound. In any case, it’s a kind of mournful backdrop for Kendrick’s exposé and what I’m interpreting as reflecting on the beef. Originally I was thinking that this song was a precursor to another song that might be a big revelation about certain people in the industry. And again, that was me running with this thought fueled by something said on Twitter about another song coming. So I was like, OK, two towers, this is the precursor and the second one is going to be the big bomb where maybe some things come to light that didn’t get revealed in the beef, not necessarily about Drake but just about the industry predators at large.
Some kind of revelation was coming. And the more that I listen to the song, the more it feels like an epilogue, a reflection on the battle. It feels, in part, like a reset, but also setting up things to come. So obviously it’s got a lot of lyrics. There’s three full verses on this thing, but really you can put the subject matter into two buckets and, classic Kendrick, it’s definitely a duality: kind of this good and evil. On one side you have the industry evils, things that make Kendrick sick to his stomach it seems like, and things that he wants to purge. And on the other side you have this idea of a new earth, a better future, hope for tomorrow after this kind of purge of industry evils. So we’re going to talk through each verse in broad strokes, but you’ll see that you can kind of put the lyrics in one of two buckets throughout by either applying them to industry evils or this idea of purging, of this better future, of the revelation or the exposing of these industry evils as being part of a necessary teardown before the rebuild.
Hosts: Cole Cuchna
Producer: Justin Sayles
Audio: Kevin Pooler
Theme Music: Birocratic
Subscribe: Spotify
