The enthusiastic response to Kendrick Lamar’s music over the past 12 years has been driven in part by the perception that he’s a political vessel. He’s not just the most lyrically gifted MC of his generation but the griot of the Obama era and its discontents, whose songs have galvanized street protests against police brutality as seamlessly as they have filled concert arenas and inspired academic books. But what exactly are his politics? Kendrick is provocative without being didactic, and his views often have to be inferred from his scattered public remarks and the imagery in his music videos and stage performances. Since his decision to headline the halftime show at Super Bowl LIX, their meaning has only become more slippery, just as his artistic output has become less polemical. It feels increasingly like a stretch to ascribe meaningful politics to his music at all.
.
2012: Young Leader
The year Kendrick released his debut album marked his first real brush with political controversy. In an interview with conspiracy website Truth Is Scary, the Compton native, then 25, proclaimed, “I don’t do no voting,” signaling his intention to sit out the upcoming election. The backlash was immediate. “He isn’t the only young leader frustrated with the state of the political process,” said Robert “Biko” Baker, president of the League of Young Voters. Yet by refusing to vote, Baker added, the rapper was “giving the very people he is frustrated with more free rein.” Kendrick clarified his stance: Americans should vote, but only for “the right reasons,” he tweeted, so they “won’t point the finger at that black man like y’all did,” presumably referring to Obama. He added of Mitt Romney, “I just don’t feel like he’s got a good heart at all.”
.
2015: Fox News Target
With the release of his next album, To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick’s designation as a leader started to seem apt. Its cover — a black-and-white photo depicting more than a dozen Black men, boys, and babies waving wads of cash and liquor bottles over the corpse of a white judge on the lawn of Obama’s White House — was a provocation tailor-made for the Black Lives Matter movement, which was then in full swing. The single “Alright,” with its defiantly hopeful hook, became a ubiquitous protest anthem; activists in Cleveland chanted it after preventing police from detaining a teenager in the summer of 2015. The line “And we hate po-po / Wanna kill us dead in the street for sure,” meanwhile, drew condemnation from Fox News. “This is why I say that hip- hop has done more damage to African Americans than racism in recent years,” complained Geraldo Rivera. The song’s music video opened with footage of a police shooting and a voice- over of Kendrick bewailing “apartheid and discrimination.”
By the time he took the stage at the BET Awards in June surrounded by flames and graffitied cop cars, the rapper had made enough of the right enemies, and captured the national mood so vividly, that his relatively conservative comments about Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin were largely forgotten. “When we don’t have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us?” he had told Billboard, referring to Brown, who was killed in 2014. (“Dumbest shit I’ve ever heard a Black man say,” tweeted Azealia Banks.) “Why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street,” Kendrick rapped on TPAB’s “The Blacker the Berry,” “when gang-banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hyprocrite!” (“The same jazz Darren Wilson supporters were spitting at protesters,” tweeted journalist Joel Anderson.)
.
2016: Freedom Fighter
One might have assumed that Kendrick’s provocations and “Black-on-Black crime” what-about-ism would make him a pariah among either advocates, the people they were protesting, or both. Instead, they all seemed to embrace him. Two performances this year endeared Kendrick to the former: First, his celebrated set at the 2016 Grammys, which featured him and his backup dancers draped in chains and prison blues and ended with a projected image of the African continent with the word Compton emblazoned across it (though he omitted the “we hate po-po” line). Then there was his appearance at the BET Awards alongside Beyoncé, whose single “Freedom” he was featured on; the duo made the track’s civil-rights subtext explicit by opening their performance with audio of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. As far as the powers that be, President Obama made it clear that he didn’t take TPAB’s incendiary White House–takeover album cover personally when he invited Kendrick to perform at his Fourth of July party, held on the same week that Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed by cops.
Many observers agreed that the rapper’s cryptic nods to Pan-Africanism — a 2014 trip to South Africa had “inspired” him to view the world as “bigger than Compton,” he explained — and the ills of the prison-industrial complex suggested an artist who was deeply attuned to the political crises du jour. But how did that square with him celebrating Frederick Douglass’s least favorite holiday alongside the leaders of the very system that was causing the problems?
.
2017–18: Critical Darling
Kendrick again aligned with BLM activists when he defended Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who provoked the ire of the NFL and Donald Trump by kneeling during “The Star-Spangled Banner” to protest racism and police brutality. “He wants to stand for something,” Kendrick said at a Forbes 30 Under 30 event. “You don’t look at the moment, whether it’s gonna work or not. No, you look at what the next generation is gonna receive from it.” What Kaepernick received was exile. Meanwhile, Kendrick was becoming the belle of the ball among the elite while continuing to be outspoken about politics. “The Heart Part 4” didn’t make it onto his next album, DAMN., but it took direct aim at the president. “Donald Trump is a chump, know how we feel, punk,” Kendrick rapped. On the album itself, he seemed more conflicted about his status as a political emblem and even as a Black American, gesturing at his flirtation with Black Israelism. “I’m not a politician, I’m not ’‘bout a religion,” he rapped on “YAH.” “I’m a Israelite, don’t call me Black no more / That word is only a color, it ain’t facts no more.”
His ability to probe his own psyche over innovative instrumentals earned him the first music Pulitzer for a nonclassical/jazz composer. Hollywood took notice as well. Disney’s Black Panther movie had developed an unlikely folk status as a Black liberation text before it even hit theaters, and its financiers enhanced that perception by hiring Kendrick to mastermind the film’s soundtrack. By the end of 2018, he looked like the rare Black popular artist who was able to have his cake and eat it, too — lavished with praise by the upper strata of racist institutions that he simultaneously seemed to be subverting.
.
2020: Stealth Resistance Participant
Kendrick had not released a solo album in three years when George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, sparking nationwide protests. The rapper attended a “peace walk” through Compton that June. Because he did not speak or lower his mask at the event, fans were left to interpret how he felt from his “weighed down, overburdened” affect, as the music site Consequence of Sound described it. He seemed content to let his presence suggest where his solidarity lay and declined to comment on the uptick in streams for “Alright” that followed Floyd’s death. On 2021’s “Family Ties,” he alluded to his quieter approach: “I been duckin’ the social gimmicks / I been duckin’ the overnight activists / I’m not a trending topic, I’m a prophet.”
.
2022: Mr. Morally Gray
As the embers of America’s most recent racial-justice movement faded with few objections from politicos, let alone pop artists, the bar for being considered a socially conscious rapper seemed as low as ever. It was evident that Kendrick too had grown less interested in stoking the flames of dissent. He had already performed during the Super Bowl halftime show in February with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre when Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers hit that May like a sonic assault — formally diffuse, full of anguish, and Kendrick’s most inward-looking album to date. Its politics were also more oblique, less recognizably ideological, and seemingly more interested in mashing together messy ideas and messy people. His deepfake-heavy music video for “The Heart Part 5” saw Kendrick’s own face transformed into a murderer’s row of controversial Black visages — Kanye West’s, Jussie Smollett’s, O.J. Simpson’s. The album’s vague mentions of COVID-19 and Kyrie Irving’s refusal to get vaccinated (“I caught COVID and started to question Kyrie / Will I stay organic or hurt in this bed for two weeks?”) were eclipsed by lengthy riffs on his life as a family man.
The politically tapped-in version of Kendrick that many fans had come to expect surfaced briefly at Glastonbury after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. “Godspeed for women’s rights,” he chanted at the end of his headlining performance of “Savior,” a statement undercut by both its context (he appeared to be rejecting the notion that it was his problem) and the fact that he gave Kodak Black, who assaulted a teenage girl in 2016, a guest feature on Mr. Morale.
.
2024: NFL Poster Child
Kendrick spent the bulk of this consequential election year engaged in a high-profile feud with Drake. Both rappers seemed eager to weaponize Kendrick’s political reputation. On “Family Matters,” Drake claimed that his adversary was “always rapping like you ‘bout to get the slaves freed / You just acting like [an] activist, it’s make believe.” Kendrick retorted on “Not Like Us,” “You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars / No, you not a colleague, you a fuckin’ colonizer.” Neither seemed interested in applying these critiques to actual political events, whether it was the presidential race or the U.S.-sponsored carnage in Gaza. But that didn’t mean their feud was absent from the campaign trail. Kendrick had created a vacuum: He wasn’t speaking up about politics per se, but he was making headlines for taking down Drake, which meant candidates interested in attracting young or traditionally disengaged voters had reason to invoke him anyway. Kamala Harris was confident enough in his political views to signal his tacit endorsement, using “Not Like Us” and “Freedom” in her campaign, without fearing he would object. But the more unsettling reality was that Kendrick’s reticence felt intentional — he very probably was not interested in being a political mouthpiece.
In September, he was announced as the Super Bowl halftime-show performer — a first for any rapper as a solo act — a decision highlighting his continued knack for straddling contradictions. The NFL’s status as a suppressor of Black dissent had not been resolved, yet here he was planning to headline its biggest advertisement. Whatever Kendrick once found admirable about Kaepernick’s protest appears not to have compelled him to continue it. But what seems clear is that fans will continue to ascribe political profundity to Kendrick’s music whether or not it actually exists: Last summer, when young protesters in Kenya mobilized to prevent a proposed tax hike on essential goods, the movement’s anthem was a reworking of “Not Like Us.”
.
2025: Not Like U.S.?
The most politically on-the-nose Super Bowl in living memory — one in which the NFL removed its “End Racism” message from the Caesars Superdome end zones before Donald Trump arrived as the first-ever sitting U.S. president to attend the event — produced an oblique halftime performance by Kendrick. Once again, the depth of his political messaging was up for debate: Was his choice to have the show emceed by Samuel L. Jackson, dressed as a minstrel-esque Uncle Sam who periodically interrupted the music to admonish the rapper for being “too ghetto,” a defiant bid to reclaim the American project from racial demagogues, a roundabout plea for inclusion into it, or a winking dismissal of it? Was the performance part of a scrambling effort by a left-leaning cultural “regime” to recuperate after “Trump’s historic gains with Black men” in the last presidential election, as former MAGA representative Matt Gaetz claimed on X, or did its overt deployment of patriotic imagery and color schemes simply confirm that this so-called regime is now playing defense? Then there was an incident that didn’t directly involve Kendrick but implicated him in an ironic way: “The revolution is about to be televised,” he half-jokingly declared early in the set; toward the end during “TV Off,” when one of the on-the-field dancers unfurled a banner displaying the Sudanese and Palestinian flags with the words “Sudan” and “Gaza” inscribed on it, security guards detained him, and the NFL later permanently banned him from games.
Clearly it was an overarching goal of this Super Bowl’s organizers to minimize controversial political messaging, even as its signifiers were unavoidable — most notably Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce saying it was a “great honor” to play in front of the same president who would later troll his girlfriend, Taylor Swift, on Truth Social for getting booed at the game. Kendrick’s performance was sly enough to double as either acquiescence or subversion, depending on who was doing the interpreting. But it mostly showed that Kendrick is more significant as a lyricist and destroyer of industry rivals than as a political voice. As he delivered his Grammy-winning Drake diss “Not Like Us,” sending the crowd into hysterics, it was evident that this more compartmentalized approach was what most people wanted, rather than another reminder that Trump is coarsening our political culture and looting the government. (Even “Alright” was conspicuously absent from the set list.) And if Kendrick’s goal was to protest the president, he may have missed his opportunity to score a direct hit: By the time he finished performing, Trump had reportedly already left the venue.
More on Kendrick Lamar
- Drake Turns the Dial on iHeartRadio Legal Action
- A Complete Track-by-Track Timeline of Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s Feud
- Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Set a Viewership Record