It's a story that sounds great. Just days after being criticized for implicating the black community in the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner in an interview with Billboard, Kendrick Lamar releases a new verse in which he comments on police brutality. This is exactly how a song making the rounds today was sold by a number of music sites, but it isn't even remotely true.

The song is called "Heaven Help Dem," by the Canadian artist Jonathan Emile, and it does indeed feature a new verse from Lamar, one of the most trusted commentators in rap music. The first few seconds feature Emile dedicating the track to Brown, Garner, Trayvon Martin and Fredy Villanueva, their faces flashing on screen. The connection is explicit, and many music bloggers took that and ran with it.

From MTV:

Kendrick Lamar caused a stir last week when he addressed some of the recent violence against blacks in America, including the killing of Michael Brown, and wondered, "when we don't have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us?"

On "Heaven Help Dem," he bounces back from the interview mic to the one in the booth to again tackle these issues, rapping alongside Canadian artist Jonathan Emile.

From Complex:

The release of this song comes on the heels of Kendrick's recent comments on Ferguson to Billboard, where he condemned the killing of Brown, but also said, "When we don't have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us?" Kendrick has yet to elaborate on his comments that were made to the magazine last week.

From XXL:

Kendrick Lamar links with Montreal rapper, producer, and poet Jonathan Emile for a track paying tribute to the victims of police brutality like Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin.

It's an easy sell, but if you stop for a second and think about the song, it doesn't exactly make sense. Why would Kendrick Lamar, who has been extremely judicious with his music since releasing the 2012 masterpiece good kid, m.A.A.d city, respond to public backlash on a song by an artist very few people have heard of? Of all songs to directly address a great social crisis in America, why this one?

Some of these questions, at least, were asked by Pitchfork's Jeremy Gordon (a friend of mine), who found out from the publicist pushing the track that Lamar's verse was actually recorded in 2011, some time before the rapper had any real national notoriety.

And if you actually listen to Lamar's verse, the story being pitched here doesn't really add up. Emile makes those open references to police brutality, but Lamar takes a much more broad approach, rapping generally about the death of young black men, alluding more to gang violence—as he does across his discography—than to police brutality, which he doesn't explicitly mention at all.

This sort of thing happens frequently and is instructive in understanding how music news sausage gets made. A publicist emails a song, a writer takes his or her word and passes it along to us no questions asked. Here is how "Heaven Help Dem" was described in the PR email sent to music websites:

Canadian emcee Jonathan Emile and Kendrick with about a timely a record as I can imagine. A tribute to the victims of police brutality hot on the heels of Kendrick's Billboard comments.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Naturally, the only thing that is "timely" here is Emile's decision to release the song at the crest of a backlash against his collaborator. The press release, of course, omits the one detail about when Lamar's verse was recorded so as to not bust its own story before it can even be disseminated.

This is a minor fuck up, all things considered, but there are people out there who care what Kendrick Lamar—one of the most visible black men in America—actually has to say about police brutality at a time when the subject has reached critical mass. Emile is muddling Lamar's message, to say nothing of his own, and the music press gladly played its part.

For Lamar's actual rapping about Ferguson, meanwhile, we wait.

[image via Getty]