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After his performance at the BET Awards of hit single “Alright,” Kendrick Lamar became a bull’s-eye for Fox News commentators. The right-wing extremists audaciously took offense to him rapping from on top of a cop car. They even used his outspoken lyrics regarding police brutality to support their claims.
“This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years,” Geraldo Rivera said. “This is exactly the wrong message. Then to conflate what happened in the Charleston church in South Carolina with the tragic incidents involving excessive use of force by cops is to equate that racist killer with these cops. It’s so wrong. It’s so counterproductive.”
“The message – the overall message – is, ‘We gonna be all right.’ It’s not the message of, ‘I want to kill people,’” responded Lamar.
Kendrick Lamar called in to TMZ Live to address Rivera’s claims saying, “I think his attempt is really diluting the real problem, which is the senseless acts of killing of these young boys out here. I think, for the most part, it’s avoiding the truth.”
The Compton, California rapper uses his lyrics as a platform to address the issues facing the Black community. For him, hip-hop is a relief, not a problem.
“This is reality. This is my world. This is what I talk about in my music. You can’t dilute that. Me being on the cop car, that’s a performance piece after these senseless acts. Of course I’m going to be enraged about what’s going on out here. Of course I’m going to speak on it. But at the same time, you can’t dilute the overall message: Yeah, we angry about what’s going on. Yeah, we see what’s going on, but you can’t do that. You can’t take away our hope that things will be okay at the end of the day. Hip-hop is not the problem, our reality is the problem in the situation.”
