I Remember You Was Conflicted
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About
I Remember You Was Conflicted is a quote from a poem that repeats often during Kendrick Lamar's 2015 album To Pimp A Butterfly. The quote has been the subject of numerous image macros and video memes in which the quote begins to play unexpectedly.
Origin
In Kendrick Lamar's 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar repeatedly reads a portion of a poem, adding another line each time the poem reappears. The poem begins, "I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence…" The full poem reads:
I remember you was conflicted
Misusing your influence
Sometimes I did the same
Abusing my power, full of resentment
Resentment that turned into a deep depression
Found myself screaming in the hotel room
I didn’t wanna self destruct
The evils of Lucy was all around me
So I went running for answers
Until I came home
But that didn’t stop survivor’s guilt
Going back and forth trying to convince myself the stripes I earned
Or maybe how A-1 my foundation was
But while my loved ones was fighting the continuous war back in the city, I was entering a new one
A war that was based on apartheid and discrimination
Made me wanna go back to the city and tell the homies what I learned
The word was respect
Just because you wore a different gang color than mine's
Doesn’t mean I can’t respect you as a black man
Forgetting all the pain and hurt we caused each other in these streets
If I respect you, we unify and stop the enemy from killing us
But I don’t know, I’m no mortal man, maybe I’m just another nigga
While it's unclear when the quote began seeing use in humorous ways, one early example, an Inhaling Seagull meme was posted on Reddit's /r/kendricklamar[2] by a deleted user on March 18th, 2019, gaining over 2,100 points in five years (shown below).
Spread
Over the following years, the quote began seeing more use in various memes. On October 11th, 2019 Twitter user @Louaista[1] included it in a Nobody meme, gaining over 20 retweets and 100 likes in five years (shown below, left). On October 27th, /r/KendrickLamar[3] Redditor HSheets72 posted an image macro putting the quote over a picture of a cat wearing Timbs, gaining over 860 points in five years (shown below, right).
In the 2020s, the quote began seeing use in video memes on platforms like TikTok. On January 17th, 2023, TikToker doozycomics[4] posted an animation imagining Lamar haunting Greg Heffley of Diary of a Wimpy Kid with the quote, gaining over 183,000 likes in roughly 15 months (shown below, left). On April 8th, 2024, TikToker zayydante[5] used it in a sketch joking about J. Cole's Apology to Kendrick Lamar, gaining over 443,000 likes in one month (shown below, right).
@doozycomics Kendrick lamar remembers you was conflicted #kendricklamar #drawing #fyp #diaryofawimpykid #kendrick #art #fypage #xyzbca ♬ Creepy and simple horror background music(1070744) – howlingindicator
@zayydante #relatable #jcole #kendrick ♬ original sound – zay dante
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