Kendrick Lamar, public theologian
On Damn, the hip-hop artist draws connections between guns, gangs, Wall Street corruption, and the 2016 election. It's a bold indictment of collective sin.
If you didn’t know Kendrick Lamar before, you probably heard the news in April that his most recent album, Damn, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, becoming the first hip-hop album—indeed the first album outside the classical and jazz traditions—to win the prize. The Pulitzer committee praised Lamar’s virtuosic skills as a composer. His work draws on musical traditions as diverse as jazz, Afro-futurism, soul, classical instrumentalists, and gospel, as well as hip-hop and R&B.
But Lamar’s compositional genius can’t be separated from the force of his lyrics. Indeed, it is the aesthetic blending of sound and word (not just the voice as sound) that defines rap as a genre. I could live in Lamar’s lyrics for a very long time and not exhaust their complexity.
Theological themes permeate all his work, but the full range of his theological power unfolds in his 2015 album, To Pimp a Butterfly. Over 16 tracks, he tells his story of growing up in poverty, rising to fame, wrestling with the temptations of wealth and power, and trying to use his influence for good.
