Kendrick Lamar Analysis

For me, Kendrick Lamar is a very good rapper, he makes music that is very reliable to the youth who grew up in rough neighborhoods who were just trying to survive, but weren’t gang banging. The way he contracts his verses is interesting to listen to, and the way his debut album tells a story about growing up in the ghetto and making yourself better despite that. Even before his debut he had some incredible, meaningful songs. And honestly when he deals with things like weed or alcohol in his music, he doesn’t glorify them. He rarely participates in either, and his songs don’t paint them in a positive light. For instance, Kush and Corinthians is about a young man trying to reconcile his marijuana use with his Christian sense of morality. He doesn’t have the answers, so all he can do is ruminate, and try to find them within himself. And Swimming pools is about how a youth who tried drinking just to fit in got dragged into a drinker’s lifestyle by peer pressure at a club.

He had an ability to capture the moral ambiguity of the hood with a novelistic eye for detail. His songs were complex as they were catchy. He knew how to create tension, maintain a narrative, cultivate drama, and then deflate it all with a good joke. The little refrain at the end, I ride, you ride, bang, is tying the idea of peer pressure as a reason to drink to the idea of peer pressure as a reason to gang