You can tell that Lamar does not consider it a pop record so much as a work of revisionist American history: It begins with a sample of Boris Gardiner’s dreamy and uplifting soul curio “Every Nigger is a Star,” and its finale is a spoken-word torrent reminding us of the N-word’s etymological roots as a synonym for royalty. It is a work of focused intensity - one of the most incisive and imperatively timed records about race in recent musical memory. “Like Barack Obama,” a Billboard writer remarked a little while later, in a recent cover story, “Lamar is an introvert with an extrovert’s job.”īut judging by his staggering and incendiary sophomore album, To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar is done conforming to anybody else’s job description.

That was definitely what he projected that night at the planetarium as people lifted their glasses to the repeated word “ DRANK,” Lamar seemed a little puzzled and radiated this sense that he did not really know what to do with himself now that he was a superstar. And like many who claim that particular mantle, Lamar often wears a spacey, inwardly focused expression and oscillates between a vibe of jumpy anxiety and near-monastic calm. He doesn’t even consider himself a rapper, really he told Stephen Colbert in an interview late last year that he prefers the term writer. These are the kinds of scenes some aspiring rappers dream of inhabiting, but Kendrick Lamar has never been that kind of rapper.

While he played, people in rented astronaut suits traversed the floor with trays of Champagne a rumor circulated that the company was raffling off a trip to space.

Lamar’s set was short and, presumably, generously compensated. It was called “Swimming Pools (Drank),” and I saw him play it the first time I was sent to cover his live show, at an absurdly lavish party thrown in the lobby of a planetarium to celebrate the cosmically named new scent of a popular-selling body spray. It was a misunderstanding - almost a clerical error - the way the gifted Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar got to be famous in the first place: He made a very incisive song about inner-city alcoholism that a lot of people mistook for a party anthem.

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