Kendrick Lamar Thesis

Rap has always been associated with sex, money, drugs and narcissism. It has always been considered to be just vulgar language and threats to the lives of other rappers by some people, and that train of thought will likely be continued by ignorant people until rap dies out. However, before you can even begin to talk about rap as if you know it well, you need to have a proper understanding of the genre. It's very much a lyric-based type of music, almost like musical poetry. The only rappers that still consistently fill their songs with sex and bragging are the bad ones. One look at Kendrick Lamar's works could tell you this. He only has two songs that one might incorrectly consider to be brag songs, and that's only what can be seen on the surface,

is a song released as a sort of diss track, where he calls out other rappers for constantly bragging and then proceeds to brag about his own wealth. Now this might seem a little nonsensical at first, however, if you're familiar with Kendrick's other discography, you'd know he's generally a humble person who almost never brags, which further drives home the meaning of the song from a lyrical perspective; "I blow you and your wealth out of the water, but I don't sit around and write songs about it all day, so stop it, sit down, and learn some humility." DNA. is not just a fast rap song about everything Kendrick likes or something as ridiculous as that. Upon analysis of the lyrics, you'd find that it's actually a discussion of black people, their history, and how they're perceived in general, from multiple standpoints. I believe both of these songs, and the potential misunderstanding they could get, mirror rap as a whole; something deep and profound that it requires lyrical analysis to understand properly, yet because people are unwilling to dig deep enough to understand it, it's considered to be simplistic and

A lot of rappers don't care about making art that can stand the test of time, they just care about making money. Mumble rappers, like Lil Yachty and Future, aim specifically to slur their voices in certain ways, making their words nigh indecipherable. Of course, that isn't to say you're missing much, because they often aren't the greatest lyricists. I will not quote any, and I mainly remember some of the more ridiculous ones, which are hardly suitable for anything, let alone a writing task like this, however some of their lyrics you'd expect to hear come out of someone both high and drunk. Along with these mumble rappers we have other rappers that don't care about lyricism at all, and just leap from one song to another, aiming to make as much money as possible in the short amount of time they remain famous. This attitude creates songs that require no thought to analyse and are specifically made to get as much play time on the radio as possible, such as nearly everything Rihanna's ever been on, and a lot of Drake's songs. However, there are of course some recent rappers that are quite skill. Kendrick Lamar is, in my opinion, the best