Kendrick Lamar’s impact will be studied.
The songwriter and rapper, who broadly reps Compton, CA, had quite a year. The release of his rap diss “They Not Like Us” in 2024 led to five Grammy awards including “Record of The Year” in 2025. Lamar also was the headliner at the 2025 Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show held in New Orleans.
While this last year has been electric for the rapper, his talents and contributions to the world of Hip-Hop had been undeniable as a result of albums that include “To Pimp A Butterfly” (2015), “Mr Morale & The Big Steppers” (2022), and “DAMN” (2017), which earned him a Pulitzer Prize.
“Throughout his career, Kendrick Lamar hasn’t met the cultural moment so much as he’s defined it,” Rachel Newman, Apple Music’s global head of content and editorial, said in a news release.
He’s defined it so much so that it will now be taught in higher learning. According to WHYY News, Temple University Professor of Africology and African American Studies Timothy Welbeck will lead a course, titled “Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of M.A.A.D City,” during the Fall 2025 semester that will include guest speakers and professionals who have worked directly with Lamar.
The goal of the class is for students to explore Lamar’s career trajectory and the key influences that shaped it through an Afrocentric perspective.
“Kendrick Lamar is one of the leading voices of his generation and has a keen ability to articulate various dynamics of black life and the quest towards self actualization and particularly also capturing the narrative of marginalization and rising from that,” Welbeck told the outlet.
As AFROTECH™ previously reported, this isn’t the first time an artist has made its way into the classroom. Though Beyoncé is already the focus of several courses, a new course, titled “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music,” had been introduced at Yale University for the Spring 2025 semester.
“[This class] seemed good to teach because [Beyoncé] is just so ripe for teaching at this moment in time,” Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American Studies who’s teaching the course, said in a news release. “The number of breakthroughs and innovations she’s executed and the way she’s interwoven history and politics and really granular engagements with Black cultural life into her performance aesthetics and her utilization of her voice as a portal to think about history and politics — there’s just no one like her.”
