“In partnership with his longtime collaborator, Dave Free, the greatest rapper of his generation is pushing himself — commercially and creatively — onto unexpected terrain.”
Kendrick Lamar
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Confessions of a Conscious Rap Fan
Mychal Denzel Smith’s musical upbringing sounds a lot like mine: copious amounts of hip-hop that was deemed “underground,” “backpack,” or (perhaps most conspicuously brandished) “conscious.” Elitism disguised as authenticity. Yet, with the recent returns of Black Star and Kendrick Lamar, Smith found himself unmoved — and in this crystalline essay, he unpacks exactly why. The […]
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Story
White Looks
Should white critics cover black culture? Only if they’re able to own their whiteness.
Posted inArts & Culture, Blog Post, Culture, Current Events, Highlight, Profiles & Interviews, Reading List
A Kendrick Lamar Syllabus
The Pulitzer Prize-winner’s work always feels honest, as writers have found when they dive deep into his literary influences.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How To Be, In Silence
The social world, for all of its fundamental gifts — love, empathy, the lessons arguing provides — obscures the whole self, allowing each of us to mute what is harder to absorb about ourselves in a din of habit and distraction. When an artist breaks through that din, which seems to grow ever louder, she […]