Kendrick Lamar Proves There’s More to Hip Hop than Sex and Drugs

Kendrick Lamar Proves There’s More to Hip Hop than Sex and Drugs

Kendrick lamarHip hop traces back to the 1970s when DJ Kool Herc pioneered the breakbeat revolution. The music genre has since evolved immensely and has a number of factors that gave rise to its current popularity, albeit not all positive. According to Storify.com, hip hop ignited as teens and young adults led the Universal Zulu Nation peace movement to reduce gang violence in NYC, but today it’s slated as a method to promote controversial issues such as sexism, violence, and drug use.

For those that aren’t versed in hip hop or rap, it’s possible they perceive the culture in a negative light, though it’s important to know that there’s much more to the world of hip hop than weed, gangs, and intercourse. Sex and drugs often find themselves intertwined as revealed by a survey conducted by Adam & Eve, in which 79 percent of participants who drink alcohol or take drugs before copulation responded positively to the experience. With an audience heavily influenced by alcohol, drugs and sex, rappers are giving them exactly want they want as they produce songs about weed culture and curvaceous women. Notably, there are a myriad of artists out there that remind us that there’s a greater depth to rap than what you’d normally hear on the radio or watch on YouTube, one in particular being Kendrick Lamar.

While Snoop Dogg and Redman are recording tracks based on their adventures with marijuana, the young Compton rapper strives to be a role model of sorts by sharing with listeners that anything is possible, despite whatever socioeconomic woes they’ve been dealt with. Even though he has a history of smoking weed, he shared in an interview with Hip Hop DX in 2012 that it was never about dependency and that it’s all the past, as he wanted to make sure he wouldn’t use it as a crutch in his career like some others are.

His latest album To Pimp a Butterfly is a politically charged modern masterpiece, a thorough lyrical compilation of his transition from hardship to fame critically acclaimed across various media outlets, with a near perfect score on MetaCritic. Before the album release in March, Lamar had already been publicizing that his new songs which he describes as “honest, fearful and unapologetic” would be “taught in college courses someday.”

It might be hard to believe that an album can teach us so much about race relations, provoke thought and activism in racial equality, but Lamar makes it possible by using it as a platform to divulge his academically and historically informed opinions on culturalism and structuralism within his society and black culture as a whole. Though some have criticized his latest work as he suggests that racial inequality is also perpetuated by African American society as well. Whether you agree with this assertion or not, every single one of his tracks play in integral role in explaining that race relations are far more complex than the culturalist/structuralist argument, and that hip hop is more profound than what first meets the eye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-48u_uWMHY

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