The biggest misconception about Kendrick Lamar, according to Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar has a reputation as a conscious rapper, given his propensity towards addressing socioeconomic issues and inequality in his music. But he thinks this label misses a lot.
Kendrick was being sidled with this label of “conscious rapper” very early into his career, and it’s fairly easy to understand why. He was more willing than many of his peers to deal with these deeper themes of struggle and oppression, but, even so, he felt that this perception of him as a “conscious rapper” was just too limiting. He was more than that.
During a conversation with The Fader in 2012, the year that his second album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City came out, Kendrick pushed back against the tendency of music media to try to classify his music “as one particular thing.”
“It’s crazy,” he said, “because they define it after just one project, certain things I was talking about.”
Kendrick, clearly, was dealing with subjects that fit within the conscious rap tradition, but that didn’t mean he only conformed to the label. His music was wider than that, and it really annoyed him to be reduced to only this one thing.
With relief, Kendrick claimed that people started to understand he was more than a “conscious rapper” with the release of his track ‘Ignorance Is Bliss,’ which featured on his first full-length mixtape Overly Dedicated. This, incidentally, is believed to have been the first Kendrick song to capture Dr Dre’s attention.
“It was street,” Kendrick said of the track. “It was West Coast, it was a little bit more wisdom, and a person can’t really fake that.”
‘Ignorance Is Bliss’ allowed critics to understand that there was more to Kendrick than “just the introspective side” that saw him deal with social struggle. He was pleased about this, because, as he put it, he wanted to be recognised “as just a human being, period.”
Kendrick tries to capture the complexity of human experience in his music, and, while that sometimes means he writes conscious rap, it is not always so. “I talk about whatever I feel and whatever I go through,” he insisted.