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  To God and the spirits: Ida Hart, Raymond Hart, Eric Hart, Loumanda Moore, and Troy Perryman.

  To Landover and Prince George’s County, Maryland.

  To Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and the countless souls we’ve lost to state-sanctioned violence against Black people.

  1

  How “You Got Robbed”

  There are musicians, and then there’s Kendrick Lamar Duckworth. A welterweight, and just five feet, five inches tall, he looks more like a Baptist youth minister than the greatest rapper of his generation. But he is the greatest rapper, and he worked damn hard to make it so. Kendrick wasn’t some sort of prodigy; he didn’t descend from his bassinet with a microphone and a composition book. Instead, he simply found something he loved and stuck with it. Through creative writing, he could say things on paper that he couldn’t say out loud. He was shy, an only child until the age of seven. He grew up in Compton, California, in the early to mid-1990s, not even a decade after the city’s police brutality and gang culture were immortalized by the rap group N.W.A in 1988. Young black and brown children had to navigate that land before they could fully comprehend street politics. They had to learn the differences between the Piru and Crips gangs on the fly, in a city where wrong decisions could mean the difference between life and death. Kendrick spent time alone, cultivating his art in hopes of becoming great. For a naturally quiet being like Kendrick, writing poetry gave him the space to reveal his innermost thoughts without judgment from others. Prowess came in silence.

  Kendrick ascended to the top of the music industry by being himself and staying true to what drove him artistically. He’s been called esoteric and downright weird, but really he’s just an old soul with a profound reverence for hip-hop, R&B, and funk—black music—and he moves throughout life with Compton in his mind and heart. Maybe that’s why he’s so beloved, because he stresses the importance of home no matter where he goes.

  Yet at the beginning of the 2010s, Kendrick was just another upstart lyricist trying to find his place in music. In July 2011, Kendrick released his first official album, the kaleidoscopic Section.80, to an unknowing public just a month before hip-hop megastars Jay-Z and Kanye West dropped their long-awaited joint record, Watch the Throne, to widespread acclaim. Where that album unpacked the pleasures of hedonism and the glory of black decadence, Kendrick’s record was something different. It had everything: brassy jazz, mid-tempo soul, and headbanging street anthems. In it, one could hear Kendrick’s love of J Dilla—the experimental hip-hop producer from Detroit, whose mix of hard drums and unique sampling techniques made him an icon in alternative rap—as well as Pusha T, the resilient Virginia Beach rapper whose explicit lyrics cut straight to the heart. Kendrick was the cerebral introvert with theatrical flair, the quiet kid who patiently absorbed the fullness of his environment and spun what he saw into heartfelt streams of pain, struggle, and perseverance. Section.80 was deemed an achievement in an era of hip-hop in which lyricists could build sizable followings online without having to come up through local open mic circuits. And while it wasn’t Kendrick’s first project (he had released five mixtapes before then—2004’s Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year, 2005’s Training Day, 2007’s No Sleep Til NYC with rapper Jay Rock, 2009’s C4, and 2010’s Overly Dedicated), Section.80 put the music industry on notice: they’d never seen a creative flair like Kendrick’s, and there was no doubt now he was here to stay.

  Section.80’s acclaim set the stage for Kendrick’s next achievement, 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, an instant classic that catapulted him to heights for which he wasn’t fully prepared. Powered by the singles “Backseat Freestyle,” “Swimming Pools (Drank),” and “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” Kendrick’s second studio album proved a massive hit, and almost overnight he went from enigmatic upstart to full-fledged superstar. Just two years later, in 2014, Kendrick was supposed to enjoy a grand coronation, at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, but destiny had a different timeline.

  The twenty-six-year-old had pushed his way to the Staples Center, having dropped a steady stream of music that garnered universal acclaim and brightened his star to its most brilliant point. With guest appearances from hip-hop superstar Drake, and gangsta-rap-pioneer-turned-headphone-mogul Dr. Dre, good kid, m.A.A.d city debuted at number two on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and sold more than 240,000 copies in its first week out. Kendrick had been dubbed L.A.’s next great lyricist, another in a decades-long list of local rappers gone big. But Kendrick wasn’t Dre. He wasn’t Ice-T, Ice Cube, or Snoop Dogg. Those men had been synonymous with gangsta rap, a reality-based strain of hip-hop that documented L.A.’s turbulent gang culture and systemic racism in searing detail. On good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick presented himself as the conflicted soul with one foot on solid ground and the other in the streets. He’d survived the stress of L.A. gang culture to finally arrive at music’s biggest night in downtown L.A.—some fourteen miles from his childhood home at West 137th Street.

  There’d been a palpable buzz leading up to this point, yet Kendrick didn’t seem fazed by the moment. Despite all the pageantry that usually comes with the Grammys, there was a remarkable sense of calm on his face. It was like he’d been there before, like he belonged in this environment. It was the gaze of a man who’d already won, whether or not he collected hardware on that stage. He’d soon have the public’s full attention, and the awards, well, that’d be icing on the cake. (He was never one to get hopped up on accolades, anyway.) There was also a hint of resignation in his eyes; the Recording Academy hadn’t rewarded artists like Kendrick, at least not right away. They usually had to come around to people like him, eschewing his blend of intellectual street rap for palatable, pop-oriented work. Year after year, the industry rewarded safety, not the groundbreaking art of wise young poets.

  But there he was anyway, dressed to the nines in a bespoke electric-blue tuxedo with his longtime girlfriend, Whitney Alford, at his side. Earlier that night, Kendrick had ignited the crowd with a brilliant performance of his track “m.A.A.d city,” with the high-profile rock group Imagine Dragons as the backing band. On a night of scintillating performances, Kendrick’s set was perhaps the strongest, foreshadowing what would become a regular run of iconic sets from the Compton rapper on the music industry’s grandest stage. In the crowd, Taylor Swift, the industry-minted country artist turned pop star with a penchant for lovelorn breakup songs, swayed joyously on camera. Minutes later, with the music in full swing, Queen Latifah, the Afrocentric rap pioneer turned star actress, gazed delightfully at the stage—her face teeming with pride, bewilderment, and pure excitement. This was arguably Kendrick’s crossover moment, the culmination of three years of steadily increased momentum.

  Compton kids aren’t supposed to make it past the city limits—Willowbrook to the northwest or Paramount to the east. If you let the media tell it, those kids are not even supposed to make it out alive. Though the town wasn’t the epicenter of violent crime it had once been in the 1980s and ’90s, it was still fertile ground for gang activity, and by 2015, it would receive federal aid to help prevent gang violence and human trafficking while addressing the prevalence of narcotics and gun possession. Kendrick had Compton and a large swath of hip-hop culture on his side—the gangbangers
, the college kids, and the aging B-boys. He was the perfect combination of old- and new-school rap who could spit incisive rhymes in underground ciphers and beside the biggest pop stars. “He’s the king,” says Otis “Madlib” Jackson Jr., an acclaimed hip-hop producer from Oxnard with a sizable cult following. “I knew he was the king when I first heard Section.80. He’s the new king of the West Coast. And he’s spiritual. That’s rare for West Coast artists.” In the modern era of glossy pop hybrids driven by multimillion-dollar budgets, he was a throwback to rap’s “golden era” of the early to mid-1990s, when the complexity of one’s lyrics was more important than the instrumentals underscoring them. Kendrick embodied that nostalgia, and for those who grew up listening to Dre, Cube, and Snoop, his music struck the right balance of past and present, navigating both worlds with incredible ease and fluidity. This wasn’t just rap; Kendrick spoke to black and brown people on the grind, those who fought to make a way for themselves and their families against overwhelming odds. He was the voice of his community, even if the audience was much smaller.

  Still, it was somewhat surprising to hear other names deemed award winners throughout the evening. Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake? Sure. They were all bona fide stars in rap and pop music, both of whom had sold millions of records throughout the years. Rihanna? Absolutely. The pop star had a golden ear for catchy hooks and massive dance tracks that lingered inside your head.

  Then there was Macklemore, a rapper from Seattle who was a relative newcomer to those beyond his hometown. The lyricist had been releasing music since 2000, and over the years, he’d proved his ability to spit rapid-fire verses that delved into his own struggles with drug addiction and depression. Self-released projects like Open Your Eyes (released under the name Professor Macklemore), The Language of My World, and The Unplanned Mixtape had found him wrestling with his own identity as a white man in a black genre. Then in 2012 and 2013, respectively, he and producer Ryan Lewis scored two chart-topping hits: “Thrift Shop,” which eschewed monetary excess for a life of limited spending, and “Can’t Hold Us,” a foot-stomping party anthem about persevering through overwhelming odds. “Thrift Shop” dispelled the notion of decadence; to Macklemore and Lewis, it was unnecessary to spend so much money on cars, clothes, and jewelry. While the message resonated during the economic downturn, it also seemed to mock the very genre from which Macklemore earned his living. Hip-hop was black music, and for Macklemore to release such a song felt like a slight to the art form and to the minorities for whom Kendrick Lamar spoke. Macklemore seemed to appropriate not just a genre but black culture itself, using its music to peddle safe messages to a mostly white audience.

  Yet in 2005, the lyricist had released a song called “White Privilege,” in which he openly questioned his own existence in hip-hop. In a world that justly excoriated whites for not acknowledging black plight, one could respect Macklemore’s effort to hold himself accountable.

  However, Kendrick represented more substantively those who’d been harassed by police or denied opportunities because of their hue. Hip-hop was a way to document the trauma of racism and celebrate the unparalleled fortitude of blackness. It allowed a group like N.W.A to denounce law enforcement, and for a man like the Notorious B.I.G. to walk us through the grittiest sections of 1990s Brooklyn without stepping foot on the C train. Through hip-hop, black people were able to synthesize hardship into radiant poetry, and for Kendrick, the culture allowed room to wrestle with the yin and yang of life as a young black man in modern America. In a country still largely uncomfortable with people of color, hip-hop was a community that needed to be protected.

  So Macklemore wasn’t supposed to defeat Kendrick—not on this day, not ever. But he did, walking away with the Grammys for Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance, Best Rap Song, and Best Rap Album for his 2012 project, The Heist. Compared with the confessional good kid, m.A.A.d city, The Heist was destined for mainstream acceptance, its broad synthesis of pop and 1980s rap tailored for wider appeal. People of color were still fighting to be seen beyond hip-hop culture, and Macklemore’s skin tone allowed him to navigate black music while giving older white listeners the freedom to enjoy rap in the open. Macklemore was considered safe, discussing topics of which they could relate; by and large, those same people couldn’t fathom a young black male driving his mom’s Dodge Caravan across town to have sex, only to rob a house with his friends and witness a friend get murdered. Despite that, many fans—including Macklemore—believed Kendrick should’ve won at least one Grammy. So much so that Macklemore texted Kendrick and posted a screenshot of the private interaction on Instagram. “You got robbed. I wanted you to win. You should have,” Macklemore wrote. “It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you. I was gonna say that during the speech. Then the music started playing during my speech and I froze. Anyway, you know what it is. Congrats on this year and your music. Appreciate you as an artist and as a friend.” Macklemore wrote in the Instagram post’s caption that Kendrick deserved to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and that he was “blown away to win anything much less 4 Grammys.”

  The rap community reacted sharply: in the days and weeks following the Grammys and that now-infamous screenshot, Macklemore was roundly criticized. It was one thing to text Kendrick privately, but letting the world know about it felt disingenuous. “I think it was uncalled for,” Kendrick told New York radio station Hot 97 in November 2014. “When he sent it to me, I was like, ‘Okay.’ I could see him feeling that type of way because he’s a good dude, but I think for confirmation from the world, he probably felt like he had to put it out there, which he didn’t need to do.” Drake felt the same way, telling Rolling Stone that Macklemore’s text was “wack as fuck.” “It felt cheap. It didn’t feel genuine.… He made a brand of music that appealed to more people than me, Hov [Jay-Z], Kanye [West] and Kendrick. Whether people wanna say it’s racial, or whether it’s just the fact that he tapped into something we can’t tap into. That’s just how the cards fall. Own your shit.” Macklemore had gone to Hot 97 before the Grammys and predicted he’d probably win the award for Best Rap Album, even though he didn’t think he deserved it. “Then he came back on afterwards and said the same thing again,” cohost Ebro Darden told Kendrick at the time. “I think everybody knows the politics of it, where it’s kinda like, ‘Here’s this white kid who had Top 40 success,’ so he was… on the radar of all these old people who vote in the Grammy academy.” In his own Hot 97 interview following the 56th Annual Grammy Awards show, Macklemore said racism was to blame for his receiving the statue. He also chastised the voting process, which supposedly allowed members to elect potential winners even if they weren’t familiar with the music at all. “Knowing how the Grammys usually go, I knew that there would be a great chance that we’d win that award and in essence rob Kendrick,” Macklemore said. “I think we made a great album, I think Kendrick made a better rap album. In terms of people who are voting on those ballots that are filling out those bubbles, we have an unfair advantage due to race, due to the fact that we had huge radio success.” In subsequent interviews, Macklemore took it a step further, admitting that he could have worded his text differently. “The language that I used was a bad call,” he told Hot 97 in December 2014. “White people have been robbing black people for a long time—of culture, of music, of freedom, of their lives.”

  But while the Kendrick-Macklemore exchange was the most dramatic example of a good deed gone wrong at the Grammys, it certainly wasn’t the last time something like that would happen. In 2017, UK singer Adele won Album of the Year for her record 25, beating Beyoncé’s Lemonade in the process. Powered by “Hello,” a soaring piano ballad steeped in romantic heartbreak, 25 had shot quickly up the charts, selling more than 10 million albums to mark Adele’s grand return after five years away from the music industry. In her speech, a tearful, almost frantic Adele gave Beyoncé all the praise, even saying she couldn’t accept it. “My artist of my life is Beyoncé and the Lemonade album was just so monumental,” she pro
claimed, her voice audibly shaken. “We all got to see another side to you that you don’t always let us see, and we appreciate that. And all us artists here, we fucking adore you. You are our light.… The way that you make my black friends feel is empowering and you make them stand up for themselves.” Some criticized Adele—a white artist—for using the term “black friends,” and the Recording Academy for once again shunning a black artist for the Grammys’ top honor. Beyoncé was the biggest pop star in the world and this was her third time being denied. In a New York Times article published shortly after the awards show, critics predicted that black musicians would soon start boycotting the ceremony altogether. “They absolutely, positively got it wrong,” said popular radio personality Charlamagne Tha God, according to the Times. “The Grammy committee should all feel foolish this morning, because even Adele acknowledged that she should not have won album of the year.” Frank Ocean, one of music’s most popular singer-songwriters, said he hadn’t submitted music for the 2017 Grammy Awards because there was a cultural bias within the Recording Academy that blindly awarded white artists year after year. “Believe the people,” he wrote in a blog post. “Believe the ones who’d rather watch select performances from your program on YouTube the day after because your show puts them to sleep. Use the old Gramophone to actually listen.”

  There was a precedent for this. In 1989, rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, nominated for Best Rap Performance for their crossover hit “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” boycotted the Grammys after the academy decided not to televise the award presentation. Though the duo won the award, they, Public Enemy, and Slick Rick did not attend the ceremony.

  According to the Recording Academy, album submissions are reviewed by more than 350 experts throughout the music industry, all of whom work to make sure the records are sorted into their appropriate categories. Once the submissions are filed into rap, jazz, classical, and so on, first-round ballots are sent to members in good dues standing, and they’re asked to vote only in their areas of expertise. Both the first-round ballots and final ballots are tabulated by an independent accounting firm, and the winner is announced.