This analysis explores the intersection of Kendrick Lamar's artistry, cultural critique, and changing religious perspectives through key events like his Super Bowl Halftime Show and the album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. By juxtaposing his performance with conventional understandings of identity and power structures, Lamar challenges the hypermasculinity and phallogocentrism inherent in hip hop, advocating instead for a rhythmic epistemology that prioritizes collective resonance and inclusivity. His shift from traditional Christian notions of salvation to Eckhart Tolle's concepts of healing and the Ego reflects a broader dissatisfaction with existing religious frameworks for addressing generational trauma. Additionally, the examination of his rap beef with Drake underscores issues of racial authenticity and identity, while highlighting the importance of critical mixed-race ethics that account for multiracial experiences. This multifaceted exploration affirms hip hop's role in shaping narratives around race, identity, and liberation in contemporary society.
Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Super Bowl halftime performance subverted expectations, transforming hip-hop’s tradition of signifyin’ into an interactive video game. Through this performance, Lamar illuminated hip-hop’s negotiation with phallogocentrism—the privileging of masculine-coded lyrical dominance—and its transition toward pulscentrism, an emergent framework emphasizing rhythm, movement, and collective resonance over rigid textual authority. Drawing from Charles H. Long’s Significations, critical theory, and liberation theology, this paper examines how artists like Kendrick Lamar, Doechii, Megan Thee Stallion, and J Dilla disrupt logocentrism by privileging polyrhythmic structures, kinetic orality, and embodied knowledge. Furthermore, the rise of rhythm-driven genres like Afrobeats, reggaeton, and drill reflects hip-hop’s epistemic shift beyond masculinist lyrical consumption toward a more inclusive and transnational sonic framework. By theorizing a rhythmic hermeneutic of freedom, this paper argues that pulscentrism challenges colonialist knowledge structures, offering new articulations of identity, power, and resistance through hip-hop’s evolving soundscape.
This presentation analyzes Kendrick Lamar's spiritual transformation between DAMN. and Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, arguing that Lamar's incorporation of Eckhart Tolle's philosophy signals a conclusive dissatisfaction with the resources Christian theology offered him to deal with generational trauma. The resulting shift away from concepts like sin, salvation, and final judgment, and new prioritization of healing and freedom through Ego-attentiveness and present-moment awareness offers a stark, yet valuable challenge to Christian theology.
Attending to and analyzing Lamar's work in Mr. Morale (2022) and following--including the Drake feud and his Super Bowl LIX performance--aims to provoke reflective and cooperative conversation around Lamar's evolving spiritual perspective, its implications for theological discourse, and the resources American Christianity (and others) might offer (or fail to offer) in dealing with generational legacies of spiritual deformation, violence, neglect, and/or abuse.
This paper examines the recent rap beef involving Kendrick Lamar and Drake as a case study that highlights the need for the development of critical mixed-race ethics within religious studies. This viral rap beef captivated North American pop culture, not just for the stinging lyrics and West Coast beats, but also because of the ways it unveiled dynamics of power, race, and identity in hip hop. The paper argues that such dynamics within hip hop reflect the presence of the same dynamics in broader North American culture. By analyzing the artists' lyrics, public personas, and the reception history surrounding their feud alongside scholarly writings on multiracial identity, this paper unveils how each artist’s involvement in the beef reflects or disrupts prevailing narratives about race, authenticity, and belonging in hip hop and beyond.