Free Republic

In American society, it is widely acknowledged that white people should not say the n-word. Nor should they rap it. Nor should they rap it on stage at a Kendrick Lamar performance in front of thousands of people. One white-appearing woman, identified in a video as "Delaney," learned that lesson the very public way at Alabama's Hangout Festival on Sunday. Lamar invited Delaney onstage during his song "M.A.A.D. City," which chronicles the rapper and recent Pulitzer Prize winner's experiences growing up in Compton. The song contains 15 instances of the slang word "n---a," three of which Delaney rapped with abandon....

Kendrick Lamar was forced to step in after the white female fan he invited up on stage at a music festival dropped the N-word three times while rapping along to the star's song. Lamar, 30, was in the middle of his Sunday night set at the Hangout Music Festival in Alabama when he invited several lucky fans on stage to join him in performing his 2012 track "m.A.A.d city." After a concertgoer named Rohan "killed it," as one Twitter user said, and respectfully avoided rapping the racial slur, a young attendee named Delaney hopped on stage to join Lamar. Delaney...

If we valued black art, Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer would have been for literature. When will the education system wake up to black creativity? I can’t help thinking that the Pulitzer prize committee missed a trick in their award to the rapper Kendrick Lamar this week. If they had given him the Pulitzer for literature rather than for music it would have elevated his artform and sent a message that would have resonated around the world: that rap is a legitimate form of poetry and should be put on a par with, and treated with the same deference as, Shakespeare and...

Kendrick Lamar and his label Top Dawg Music are being sued for a Bill Withers sample used in the Compton rapper's song "I Do This" off 2013's Kendrick Lamar EP mixtape, according to a lawsuit obtained by Billboard. "The musical composition "I Do This" consists of nothing more than new, so-called Rap or Hip Hop lyrics, set to the existing music of "Don't Want You To Stay," reads the suit filed by Mattie Music Group, who claims to own the rights to Withers' 1975 record, which appeared on the Making Music, Making Friends album. The plaintiffs are pursuing damages, accusing...