Kendrick Lamar: rap's poet laureate

After scooping up five prizes last year, the 38-year-old Lamar on Sunday won five more including Record of the Year, cementing his status as one of contemporary music's most impactful writers.

The Pulitzer Prize winner's music has made him a household name and a rare artist whose work is commercially successful but who is not dependent on a constant content churn.

"I'm not good at talking about myself, but I express it through the music. It's an honor to be here," Lamar said Sunday as he accepted the best rap album award for "GNX."

The Record of the Year honor came for "Luther" featuring R&B singer SZA. He also won prizes for best rap performance, best rap song and best melodic rap performance.

Born in 1987 in Compton, the California native grew up poor, with his parents reliant on welfare and food stamps to survive. He witnessed his first murder at age five, and a second three years later, he told Rolling Stone.

"After that," he said, "you get numb to it."

He began putting out music in high school, drawing inspiration from the West Coast rappers of the day such as Tupac Shakur, Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg, who embraced funk influences and graphic lyrics.

After a number of collaborations, mixtapes and tours with other rappers under the name K.Dot, Lamar eventually worked under his own name, and released his first studio album, "Section.80," in 2011.

But it was with his second album, "Good Kid, M.A.A.D City," that Lamar came into his own.

His poignant verses offering personal insights into his life in Compton, while taking on systemic issues such as race relations and structural poverty, struck a chord with listeners and critics.

Each track offers an almost cinematic look at a particular idea.

For Timothy Welbeck, a professor of African American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, that album helped make Lamar "one of this culture's most important artists."

"It showed that he had the ability to create a level of quality that could stand the test of time" and "the ability to tell his story in a way that was compelling" and understandable for those who did not have similar experiences, Welbeck told AFP.
Pulitzer Prize
The albums that followed, including 2015's "To Pimp a Butterfly," saw Lamar use more and more jazz-heavy instrumentals, along with soul and funk influences.

He also went deeper with his writing, talking about the depression he experienced after his first major success, his difficult relationship with masculinity and sexual abuse committed within his family.

In 2018, he became the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize for music for his album "Damn." The jury hailed a "virtuosic song collection... that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African American life."

And then came "Not Like Us."
Super Bowl, huge tour
He dropped the track in May 2024, the fifth of a collection of songs skewering Drake that dropped less than a day after his previous single, "Meet the Grahams."

"Not Like Us" led critics and followers to proclaim Lamar the winner of the battle, which saw the rappers trade barbs including allegations of domestic abuse and sexual misconduct involving children.

A record-breaking streaming giant, "Not Like Us" catapulted to the top of the charts and quickly became a West Coast rap anthem, beloved for its pounding bassline, rhythmic strings and exaggerated enunciation.

A week after his Grammys triumph last year, Lamar took one of the biggest stages in the world, headlining the Super Bowl halftime show.

He performed a string of classics like "Humble" and "DNA" before sending fans into a frenzy with a knife-twisting rendition of "Not Like Us."

He subsequently went on a world tour with SZA, which raked in more than $350 million, according to Forbes magazine, with more than 1.5 million tickets sold.

Lamar, who is somewhat diminutive at roughly 5'6", has been with his fiancee Whitney Alford since high school. The couple has two children.

The rapper rarely sits down for extensive interviews, and makes few public appearances. He does not comment on current events, except through his music.

Kendrick Lamar often will say that he's "not your savior and that it's not necessarily his role to be a politician in that way," Welbeck notes.

"But he believes the way he makes change is by getting people to think about difficult subjects and challenging the way that they view the world."