Very early on, it was obvious Kendrick Lamar was one of those artists, one you knew was giving us something important. This is what makes not just the icons, but the legends. You can be thousands of feet away from them in a festival field or arena and still feel a reverberation of greatness, something flowing through them to the rest of us. They have an electricity about them, a presence. And when you come into contact with them, you can tell. They’re placed here to do a specific thing, to play a role. And to do it every time you have to challenge yourself, and you have to confirm to yourself-not anybody else-that you’re the best.Some people are just born with something else. I want to keep doing it every time, period. “I’m not doing it to have a good song,” he said. Given its popularity, Lamar’s music can be surprisingly dense, taking shape in winding, album-length narratives ( good kid, m.A.A.d city), live-band hybrids of jazz and funk ( To Pimp a Butterfly), and quasi-conceptual explorations of self (2017’s Pulitzer Prize-winning DAMN.). But he was speaking for many.īorn in 1987, Lamar grew up under the influence of JAY-Z, Eminem, and 2pac-for the wordplay, for the imagination, for the heart and sense of community.

“So to see them actually express themselves through song, through lyrics that I wrote?” For a kid from Compton whose life was transformed by hip-hop, the fame was nice, but the singing, the spirit, the possibility that his music was opening a cultural inroad for people joining the fight for civil rights- that was real. “A lot of people don’t have voices out there,” he said. For Lamar, the success was that people sang it in the streets. It wasn’t even that it broke new ground for where hip-hop might go.

In an interview with Apple Music, Kendrick Lamar reflected on his 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly-in particular, the song “Alright.” It wasn’t that it sold well (it did).

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