Kendrick Lamar - Influential Rapper from 2016

The musical artist, Kendrick Lamar has gone beyond the traditional rap that is out there, creating a new genre of “movement music”. The music brings up some hard questions in the attempt to bring listeners together but provides no real answers.

Lamar’s “conscious rap,” started after a trip to South Africa that made him want to share his experiences in an album. He wanted to translate what he was seeing into an experience someone could understand through music, from the ghettos of Compton to living in South Africa.

His music should be celebrated for bringing us “face to face,” with uncomfortable issues and being audacious enough to bring up these hard questions. Lamar celebrates the “will to survive” and will always look for answers to the problems in the world.

This can all be heard in songs from his album “To Pimp a Butterfly,” which moves listeners with troubled, uplifting, and challenging lyrics. The album was nominated at the Grammy Awards for Album of the Year and won Best Rap Album. In fact, Time named him "one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2016.”

The masculine name Kendrick is taken from a surname that has several different origins. First, the name could be from the Old English name Cyneric that means “royal power”; or the name Cenric that means “bold power”; even the Welsh name Cynwrig that means “chief hero”. While others believe that the name might be the Anglicized version of the Gaelic surname Mac Eanraig that means “son of Henry”.