The Story of Kendrick Lamar in 20 Songs

With the surprise release of GNX and the wind-up to the Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show, we’re looking back at the work of Kendrick Lamar—an era-defining artist who’s made a seismic impact on hip-hop, with no sign of stopping.

Kendrick’s 2012 breakthrough good kid, m.A.A.d city felt like an instant classic, the kind of album that took the whole history of hip-hop and rolled it up into something new. He wasn’t a conscious rapper, but he radiated ideas—about art, about society, about his Southern California hometown, about Blackness, masculinity, and faith. And yet his music was so viscerally entertaining it never felt like he was preaching so much as giving the listener the opportunity to think. Having grown up in Compton, at a moment when it was the epicenter of ’90s West Coast hip-hop, he sounded like the product of a specific time and place, shaped by the sounds of DJ Quik, Tupac Shakur, and his former label boss Dr. Dre. But he also captured the stylistic omnivorousness of the streaming era. In other words, he was a rapper who could speak to everyone. “I wanna challenge the way you think and the way you take in music,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2017. “’Cause that’s what excites me, you know? When I listened to JAY-Z coming up as a kid, when I listened to Eminem, Pac: Those things I couldn’t understand. But as years progressed and I go back and listen to it again, and I’ve learned and I’ve grown and I’ve matured, these things blew me away.”

Where good kid was a deeply personal story, marked by harrowing images of his youth in Compton, 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly was almost explicitly about community—in particular, Black America after the killings of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and others. “It was something I wanted to shed light on,” he said. “What was going on in my community, what was going on in the world, what was going on with my people.” The density of the album could be overwhelming, but the ambition of it elevated Kendrick from “great rapper” to something like a generational voice, someone who could bring together past and present, live jazz and synthetic G-funk, the outrage of protest rap and the comforts of ’70s soul. He originally called the album Tu Pimp a Caterpillar in tribute to 2Pac, but the music felt bigger than any influence or sound, and the morality too complex to boil down to an easy message. That’s part of what made it so powerful: The knottier and more specific he got, the more vividly he reflected the world. “This record has to live and teach,” he said. “The same way Talib [Kweli taught], the same way Jay, the same way Common, the same way Ice Cube back in ’91—I went back 15 years later and I learned from it. This album has to teach not only in these times, but for the future.”

2017’s DAMN. made Kendrick Lamar the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize—an extraordinary distinction that illustrated how far hip-hop had come in the broader culture. He’d always been an expressive performer, but DAMN. dove into the world of human emotion with forensic intensity, each track a meditation on a very specific feeling: loyalty, lust, pride, and so on. In some ways, it was a retreat from the politics of To Pimp a Butterfly; in others, it was a step further into a world where Black artists could take up the same emotional space as their white counterparts. Kendrick embraced his contradictions because that’s where he found his art. “No matter how many times I come into my own, I will always have that sense of reaching a certain standard as far as empathy and compassion toward a record the way Pac approached music,” he said. “People can write about anything, but if I don’t feel it, then the listener sure ain’t gonna feel it.”

Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer, but Kendrick took a little break—sort of. In the wake of DAMN., he quickly turned his focus towards curating and co-executive-producing the blockbuster soundtrack to 2018’s Black Panther, a wildly successful project that found him realizing a vision that included contributions from SZA, The Weeknd, Future, and Anderson .Paak, among others. He became a parent, started a creative agency (pgLang), and generally enjoyed the fruits of his labor. But in 2022, he released Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, an album that took his ruthless self-examinations to new depths, even as his work at pgLang signaled a desire to become a full-fledged executive—a move that many of his heroes have also made. “I’m so passionate about hip-hop,” he said. “I don’t know what era everybody else comes from, but I listened, man. When I heard these artists say they’re the best, coming up, I said, ‘I’m not doing it to have a good song or one good rap or good hook or bridge. I want to keep doing it every time, period.”

More than anything, Kendrick’s the kind of rapper who can make you go back and fall in love with hip-hop all over again. It’s not that he’s a throwback. If anything, his ability to continually refresh the tropes and forms of classic hip-hop—the diss track (“Not Like Us”), the protest anthem (“Alright”), the wit and wordplay and pain and joy—reminds you what an infinitely rich tradition rap music is. Young listeners connect because he’s passionate; older listeners connect because you can hear the footsteps of everyone who got us to this point: the Jay and 2Pac, the Outkast and DJ Quik, the East, West, and South. Somehow, Kendrick captures it all: In 2024, he released GNX, a party album whose West Coast tapestry of G-funk and hyphy might be the most regional—and least high-concept—music he’s ever made. “This is not something you just play with,” he said. “You know, get a few dollars and get out. People live their lives for this music. Period.” He sets the bar for himself, but he always delivers for the culture.

• Kendrick Lamar’s Road To Halftime