Artist Spotlight: Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar is one of the top artists of 2025, headlining the Superbowl half-time show, winning five GRAMMY awards and currently on his stadium world tour.

Rap came back with a vengeance this year, with 37-year-old Lamar at the helm of the rocky ship — especially with his infamous diss track Not Like Us winning all five GRAMMYs, including Song of the Year and Record of the Year. In total, Lamar has racked up 22 GRAMMYs, dating all the way back to 2015.

His musical journey began even earlier, as the rap artist was always a writer, and began to implement music into the equation in high school under the alias K.Dot. He signed with Top Dawg Entertainment in 2005 and, after a few mixtapes, released debut album Section.80 in 2011. This led him to sign with Dr Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records. His next album good kid, m.A.A.d city, released a year later, was called the greatest concept album of all time by Rolling Stone.

Lamar’s music at this time was rooted in West Coast hip hop, as he rapped about his experiences growing up in Compton. Despite having hardships growing up — being somewhat of a lonely child, becoming affiliated with gangs, and experiencing police brutality and even homelessness at a young age — Lamar has fond memories of his parents’ house parties and being taught about the Bible by his grandmother.

His experiences and psychological trauma drove his impeccable lyricism, and being fond of hip hop from a young age, he was a natural fit to become a rap artist. He has spoken about being fond of writing his feelings on the page, perhaps as a therapeutic practice, or as a non-violent forum for defiance.

To Pimp a Butterfly came in 2015, an album that won Best Rap Album and consisted of three GRAMMY-winning songs: i, These Walls (with Bilal, Anna Wise and Thundercat), and Alright. Next came DAMN., the album that won Lamar a Pulitzer Prize in 2018. The Pulitzer Committee called it “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” Some of Lamar’s most well-known songs came from this album, including DNA., HUMBLE. and LOYALTY. FEAT. RIHANNA.

The rapper went on to curate the soundtrack for Marvel Studios’ 2018 film Black Panther, a rapper at the top of his game, collaborating with SZA, The Weeknd, Future, Travis Scott and more. Before his newest album GNX, Lamar released a concept album titled Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers in 2022 — a journey of therapy which explored generational trauma, infidelity, fatherhood, and other interpersonal themes.

2024 saw his ability to deliver a diss track reignited, as his globally recognised feud with Drake saw him release a series of diss tracks titled euphoria, meet the grahams and Not Like Us, and the unreleased 6:16 in LA. After Not Like Us rose to the top of practically every chart, and the song and its music video won five GRAMMYs with no album attached to it, the rap feud seems deceased with K.Dot out on top. The bar “tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor”, as an insinuation to Drake being attracted to underage girls, will go down in history as it was screamed by audience members live on television during the Super Bowl half-time show.

Lamar is currently on a joint tour with SZA — with whom he shares eight songs — for his new album GNX and her new project SOS Deluxe: Lana.

My top three favourites:

DNA. – DAMN. (2017)
This track is a powerful encapsulation of every side to Kendrick Lamar’s identity, a form of self-acceptance of harsh realities, saying “I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA”. It is a reclamation of the importance of hip hop, especially for young African-American people who identify with similar struggles that the rapper experienced in his youth. What appeals to me about this song is how Lamar hits every intended mark perfectly: the lyricism, the energy, the rhythm, the depth and the beat. Nothing is sacrificed to foreground the other. It is catchy but not cheesy, energetic but not chaotic, and retains depth but allows for surface-level understanding at the same time.

reincarnated – GNX (2024)
In what feels like a truly self-realised version of the rapper, he takes influence from poetic rap. With a toned-down, piano-led accompaniment, Kendrick Lamar embodies both himself and the fallen angel Lucifer — “My father kicked me out the house” — as he is reincarnated into different bodily forms. Each verse explores a different sinful defiance from God’s vision, whether it be gluttony, addiction or violence. The devil becomes Kendrick Lamar in the final verse, which consists of my favourite part of the track. Lamar converses with God whilst retaining rhythmic satisfaction. God tells Lamar “every individual is only a version of you” in an attempt to steer him away from conflict. The rapper ends this eye-opening track with “I rewrote the devil’s story just to take our power back, carnated”.

m.A.A.d city – good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012)
This track has such a strong effect on its listener. The song is almost split in half, with a more modern gangsta rap-derived opener that appeals to trap lovers. After a TV static marker, the second section begins, as Lamar implores a classic West Coast hip hop beat which feels reminiscent of Tupac. Yet he roots this song in his own experiences to retain an authenticity and singularity that can only be Lamar, as he raps “Kendrick, AKA Compton’s human sacrifice”. The song details the crimes, dreams, hopes and fears of Compton, told in a time-warping, narratively-entangled manner. Lamar’s first long verse is one of his best — a classic track that I would play for new listeners of the artist to introduce them to the rapper in his element.

I am very excited to see what more Kendrick Lamar will do with the reignited passion for rap in the charts, and to see how he is performing at his first all-stadium tour, which began last week and finishes in June.