Since his inception into Hip-Hop, Kendrick Lamar is looked upon as one of the most influential storytellers of his generation. Be it his work in ‘Section 80’ or his work in ‘Untitled Unmastered’ or anything released between the two to be honest, his music has played a huge role in changing the way people perceive hip-hop.
He is a role model not just by hip-hop heads but by many significant figures from different spheres of the entertainment industry. Lamar won 5 Grammy awards these year including the ‘Best Rap Album’ and also gave probably the best performance of the night.
Though he has already given several hits which have become anthems it is not possible to cover all track but we try to cover 5 of his wickedest tracks till date.
1. “Fuck Your Ethnicity”
The very first track off Kendrick’s album set the bar high for bars as well his competitors. He sets up the theme of a young man lecturing a group of inner-city teenagers around a campfire sets the narrative tone for the album and how Kendrick chased his ambitions as a rapper and how it helped him escape the ghetto.
2. “Alright”
Kendrick Lamar successfully uses hip-hop channelize the proud history of music and the conflicted social history of racism in America. A mournful jazzy saxophone persists throughout this Grammy-winning single, a lovely reminder of the history of race in America as Kendrick raps over a tinny complex beat about that same history, offering a positive, affirmative opinion that they are indeed going to be, “alright.”
3. “King Kunta”
Kendrick is definitely not the type to keep his mouth sealed about issues affecting the black community. This is Kendrick’s version of a boastful rap track, featuring a menacing, strutting beat and painting himself as a modern incarnation of the rebellious slave Kunta Kinte, trying to get out a message of race in a world.
4. “ADHD”
In Section 80 touches Kendrick epeatedly reflects upon the struggles of the medicated and almost poverty-stricken children born to life in the ghettos during the Reagan era, when children were increasingly medicated or affected by the raging crack epidemic. “ADHD” is without a spec of doubt a direct to such issues. It uses a lazy but dreamy production for Kendrick’s trademark poetic storytelling about an entire generation that feels as though they were born into lifelong misery.
5. “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”
Two of good kid, m.A.A.d. city‘s most powerful, depressing tracks rolled into one 12-minute long epic, “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” finds Kendrick slowing things down with a gorgeous beat that chugs along as he does some of his strongest straightforward storytelling to date. He takes on the voices of a few different characters in the long first segment, including a young gang banger headed toward his own demise thanking Kendrick for comforting his brother as he died in the streets and a prostitute doing her best to overcome a conflicted past in the foster system. The moving track embodies how Kendrick often treats his music as a source to tell the tragic, unheard stories of people from his past in a way that makes their struggles relevant to the entire world.