#54, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” Kendrick Lamar (2012)

150 Favorite Songs, #54, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” Kendrick Lamar (2012)

If you have a certain kind of personality (morbid, a little self-obsessed, very passionate about music) then maybe you’ve given some thought to what you’d like to have played at your funeral. It’s a game I’ve been playing for many years, with the answers getting progressively more sincere as I’ve gotten older. When I was nineteen, I might have said that everyone should sit through all thirteen Weird Al polka medleys; a few years later, in a bid to impress my metal friends, I’d have asked for a playlist of the most pummeling, but atmospheric, Neurosis songs (“The Tide” into “Under the Surface” into “Given to the Rising”). These days, I’ve got an answer I think I’d be happy with whenever it happens: I’d like to start with an instrumental version of “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” (probably this one by Ikey Owens) and conclude the service by getting everyone to hold hands and sing “Light And Day” by the Polyphonic Spree.

I think imagining this makes death feel a little less real, or at least a little less final—it’s a party you can plan! Just like the others!—but also, when my dad died, we ended the memorial service with everyone singing “In My Life” by the Beatles together, and it is one of the lovelier memories I have of him, even though he was gone when it happened. So I think music makes death feel a little less final for the living, too, maybe.

“Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” is an obvious choice, but it’s such a lovely one. Many of Kendrick Lamar’s songs are difficult to separate from the context in which they were released. That’s as true of much of the high art that earned him a Pulitzer as it is of his Drake disses. Some songs—“Backseat Freestyle,” “Alright,” “Humble”—are intended to work independently, but he makes big concept albums, and pulling many of his songs out means you’re missing a lot. That’s true of “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” but you don’t need all that context for the song to land. You need the melody, which comes from the first minute or so of Blue Note jazz guitar great Grant Green’s “Maybe Tomorrow,” sped up just enough to give it some pep for Kendrick to rap over. (That’s a record, incidentally, that Dr. Dre, who executive produced Good Kid MA.A.D. City, seems to have had his eye on for a long time—while Green isn’t credited on the track, it sure sounds like elements of Green’s playing made their way into “Still D.R.E.” from Dre’s 2001.) The result is a breezy jazz beat, and a vocal riff on the chorus that Kendrick, somehow, makes feel musical despite singing it in his largely atonal rasp.

I think it works because of the words he sings in that hook. “when the lights shut off and it’s my turn to settle down / my main concern / promise that you will sing about me / promise that you will sing about me” is a sentiment that makes sense to hear sung by someone who isn’t great at singing, at least as much as it makes sense to hear sung by a great singer. It’s a universal, human sentiment, ultimately the thing we all want—for the voices of the people who love to be raised in our memory when we’re gone.

But there’s more to “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” than just how much sense it makes to play it at a funeral. (Or to play it in tribute to Black folks killed too soon, as Robert Glasper did, as a piano instrumental accompanied by a children’s choir reciting the names of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and more who were murdered by police.) The rest of the song has some of Kendrick’s best writing, and provides maybe the first real sense from his early work of the levels he was interested in working on. The first verse picks up the voice of a character who’s appeared throughout the album, so it’s literally Kendrick rapping to the character of Kendrick who also appears on the album; he’s worried he’s not long for the world, and he’s right. “just promise me you’ll tell this story when you make it big,” he asks, “and if i die before your album drops, i hope—” he starts, and then the song interrupts him with gunshots, leaving the beat playing for a measure before Kendrick gets to the chorus right on time. It’s meaningful how patient he is in how the song works, letting the absence of the character in the verse weigh on us by making us sit with silence before we get to the hook. The second verse is even longer, and the death it describes isn’t quite as sudden—instead, it fades out as the character dies, a narrative choice that’s downright breathtaking in the context of the song. Then, after the third verse—which doesn’t end with death (yet, anyway; another theme of the song is that it comes for us all)—we get to “I’m Dying of Thirst.”

Conjoining two separate songs the way Kendrick does here is another bold choice. The “Sing About Me” part of the song runs for nearly seven minutes, while “Dying of Thirst” is much shorter, and in some ways unrelated—there aren’t really any musical themes in common between the two, except that they’re both heavy songs that are also prettier than they need to be, with the ethereal vocal melodies floating around the “Dying of Thirst” portion creating a sense of yearning that plays nicely with the lyrical motif that repeats throughout several of the verses—the line “tired of running,” and the idea of “dying of thirst” as a universal cause of death for people like the ones Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City is about—and where the way to avoid that fate is with “water, holy water, you need to be baptized,” as the voice who appears at the song’s outro explains.

That’s not a need I’ve ever felt, but I admire that Kendrick Lamar put all of that into a twelve-minute masterpiece, a song that speaks to the universal need that comes from the awareness of our own mortality and also to the specifics of the place he came from. Ultimately, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” is about both the universal and the specific in a way that serves to make them both feel like a part of the listener’s experience. At different points in our lives, we’re all dying of different kinds of thirsts, I suppose, and connecting that with the desire to be remembered is smart, and feels important to me. When the lights shut off for me, and it’s my turn to settle down, I wouldn’t mind sharing that with the people who are there to sing about me.