The Lin-Manuel Mirandification of Kendrick Lamar
I am starting to not like Kendrick Lamar for the same reason I avoided watching Hamilton for years: I am deeply uncomfortable with anything that makes white people feel too comfortable discussing rap music with me.
There are certain rappers who white people love to bring up as a bright, flashing "I’M ONE OF THE GOOD ONES" beacon to any Black person within earshot.
It’s a well-known trinity:
Wu-Tang Clan – the safe, intellectual nine member rap group for white men who want to say “I listen to hip-hop” but also would lose their mind if they had 9 black neighbors.
Tupac – the poet-activist-martyr, conveniently frozen in time as a figure of tragic Black genius.
Kendrick Lamar – the modern equivalent of "I Would Have Voted for Obama a Third Term.”
Kendrick Lamar is the Lin-Manuel Miranda of rap music. Not in style, but in function. He is designed to make white liberals feel good about consuming Black art.
And I don’t like that.
Before we go any further, let’s set the record straight on the recent Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake rap beef with an objective, non-biased summary of events:
Kendrick Lamar raps about Black trauma. And he raps about it beautifully. His music is achingly poetic, deeply layered, and occasionally unlistenable, but in a way that makes you feel like if you don’t “get it,” it’s your fault. White people love this. It’s the musical equivalent of 12 Years a Slave or that god awful “This Is America” song Donald Glover put out a few years ago.
Drake is a half-Jewish Canadian child actor. He makes fun, shallow, completely unserious rap music that exists solely to keep bottle girls employed. His music is universally loved, yet somehow not considered serious rap, because many people believe a key element of rap music is “niggas must be angry.”
Kendrick, seeing an opportunity, accuses Drake of being a pedophile. A serious accusation, made with zero proof, but in the world of rap beefs, accusations don’t need evidence, they just need rhythm.
This happens after Kendrick drops an objectively bad album. Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is so heavy-handed it feels like a Pound Cake sermon no one asked for. For an example of how horribly dogshit this album is, Kendrick get outrapped on the best song on the album by Kodak Black, a man currently on trial for sexual assault. This alone raises certain moral inconsistencies that Kendrick fans would prefer you not mention. However, to be fair, inconsistency has never been an obstacle for Kendrick. This is the same man who threatened to pull his music from Spotify if they removed R. Kelly’s catalog. The same Kendrick Lamar who repeatedly championed XXXTentacion, a serial abuser who was awaiting trial for beating a pregnant woman before Drake bravely murdered him in cold blood like a dog in the street.
Drake releases a song with J. Cole. In First Person Shooter, the message was clear: The best three rappers alive are me, Kendrick, and J. Cole.
Kendrick loses his mind. He begins questioning Drake’s blackness and even says Drake isn’t allowed to say nigga no more.
I assume this is because Kendrick Lamar is short, and nothing sends a short man into an unrelenting spiral faster than not being perceived as the greatest at all times. See The Bagel Guy.
To be clear, Kendrick won the rap beef.
But why he won is a far more interesting question than whether he won.
The answer, simply, is optics.
Drake isn't perceived "Black enough" in the way rap purists want him to be.
Drake is also aggressively corny. We must acknowledge his self-inflicted wounds. But he is an ex-theater kid. Has anyone known any former theater kid to not be a walking embarrassment?
Kendrick performs Black trauma in a way that is palatable to white audiences.
Therefore, Kendrick wins—not necessarily because of his music, but because of his role in the ecosystem of race, rap, and respectability politics.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is simply a pattern.
The way Blackness is measured in music is deeply unserious.
Drake, like Tyler, the Creator, like Danny Brown, and like many other Black artists before him, is penalized for not presenting Blackness in a way that makes people, especially white people, feel comfortable.
Which is interesting, because if Kendrick is allowed to rap about his real experiences (poverty, gang violence, systemic oppression) why is Drake not afforded the same grace?
His lived experience is different. He is a Black man who grew up Jewish in Canada, in a middle-class household, raised by a single mother. He had health care growing up.
Drake’s life may not mirror that of what many white people perceive blackness to entail, but that does not negate his blackness. What does it say about how white people perceive black people if they only accept you as black if you grew up poor surrounded by violence?
Why must every Black rapper prove they are Black enough by adhering to a set of forced, trauma-centered narratives?
It is no accident that white audiences prefer Black artists who center pain. How many Black kids have been encouraged to write about the struggle in their college essays? How many times has a Black man had his Blackness questioned because he grew up in a safe neighborhood instead of a war zone? Why is rap only taken seriously when it is miserable?
Drake is Black. But Drake’s Blackness is the wrong kind.
It is not aesthetic. It is not dangerous. It is not tragic.
It is just a man having a good time.
And for some reason, people hate that.
I put off watching Hamilton for years because I have a deep, natural distrust of white enthusiasm for sanitized Black art.
And I was right.
Hamilton is a musical about the Founding Fathers that features some rapping, but not so much rap that it would scare anyone. It’s hip-hop with a seatbelt. A safe, family-friendly introduction to the genre, like if PBS tried to make a rap album. It’s just enough “urban culture” to make white people feel cultured, but not enough to make them uncomfortable. (Think back to the Wu-Tang example I used earlier. We have to give this thing some semblance of structure here folks).
And that, ultimately, is what Kendrick Lamar has become: Kendrick Lamar is rap music for people who don’t actually like rap music. I routinely question white Kendrick fans about his catalogue to which they are wholly ignorant on. They don’t actually *listen* to Kendrick Lamar. They just want you to know that they are aware of him.
That’s not his fault. He’s a talented man. Very talented. No one’s denying that. He just happens to make the kind of rap music that white people can confidently discuss in the presence of black people. You know, rap with themes, rap with narrative arcs, rap that makes them feel like they learned something. School House Rap.
White people love Kendrick because he makes them feel engaged with Blackness without actually having to engage with Black people. If we are being fair, over the past 5 years, neither Kendrick or Drake have put out an album better than Vince Staples last three. White people don’t know this.
This is not about Kendrick. This is about why white people like Kendrick.
Watching the Super Bowl, we witnessed one of the most deeply funny, reality-shattering moments of all time:
A stadium full of white people: drunk, rich, and wearing $400 jerseys, sitting in $2000 seats screaming “They Not Like Us” at the top of their lungs… without the slightest hint of irony. I don’t know what the dictionary definition of “missing the point” is, but this has to be in the top five.
Kendrick was perfectly happy to lean into this weird xenophobic chant, because at the end of the day, Mr. Morale is a charlatan.
Which, hey, good for him, but let’s not pretend it’s anything else.