Photo by Nihal Demirci Erenay via Uplash.

In 2025, Kendrick Lamar solidified his place as one of the most influential artists of the 21st century. With his unique blend of lyricism and cultural commentary, Kendrick Lamar has become a force to be reckoned with. This year, Lamar’s continued success at the Grammys, his role in the ongoing discussion about Black culture and social justice, and his culturally significant Super Bowl halftime performance have all further cemented his legacy.

Kendrick Lamar Dominates the Grammys 

2025 marked yet another historic year for Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys. This year, he not only added more trophies to his already impressive collection but also triumphed in some of the most prestigious and highly competitive categories.

Lamar’s critically acclaimed track “Not Like Us” emerged as a standout of the year, earning him an impressive five awards. The song took home Rap Song of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Rap Performance, and Best Music Video, solidifying its cultural and artistic impact.

These Grammy wins in 2025 weren’t just personal victories for Lamar; they symbolized the increasing mainstream recognition of rap. As Kendrick said himself, “This is what it’s about man, because at the end of the day, nothing is more powerful than rap music. We are the culture, it’s gonna always stay here and live forever.”

 Black Artists and the Grammys – Is 2025 a Turning Point?

Kendrick Lamar’s triumph at the Grammys in 2025 also raises important questions about the relationship between Black artists and the Recording Academy. Historically, Black musicians, particularly in genres like rap and R&B, have faced systemic barriers to receiving proper recognition for their work. The controversy surrounding Beyoncé’s repeated losses in major categories, such as her 2023 “Renaissance” loss for Album of the Year, has fueled debates about the Grammys’ treatment of Black artists.

But 2025 seems to mark a shift in how Black artists are being recognized. With Lamar’s sweeping wins in major categories, especially in categories like Song and Record of the Year, traditionally dominated by pop and rock artists, there is a growing sense that the Grammys may be moving in a new direction.

This year Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Cater” also won Album of the Year, a win that was widely celebrated. Critics and fans alike are hopeful that 2025 represents a turning point, one where Black artists are no longer sidelined but celebrated for their contributions to music and culture at the highest level. While questions remain about whether this shift will be permanent, the success of artists like Lamar and Beyoncé in 2025 is a promising sign. It may mark the beginning of a more equitable future for Black musicians in the music industry’s most prestigious award show.

Kendrick Lamar’s Symbolic Super Bowl Halftime Show

Kendrick Lamar’s performance at the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show was impactful. In a year where social justice continued to dominate conversations, Lamar used his platform to make a powerful statement about race, identity and resilience. 

Throughout the halftime show, Kendrick relied heavily on imagery and symbolism to make his point. The giant PlayStation controller that dominated the stage may have represented the idea of life as a game, with the American Dream being something that is “played” and often controlled by larger systems. At one point,  the dancers were arranged in formations of red, white, and blue, which at first seemed like just a standard patriotic gesture. However, the dancers often shifted in ways that fractured the imagery of the American flag, symbolizing a nation deeply divided by race, class and political tensions.
In addition, the decision to have Serena Williams perform the Crip Walk was laden with meaning. As Dr. Sequoia Maner, a professor at Spelman College in literature, explained. 

“A lot of people said, ‘Oh, you know, that’s a jab at Drake,’ right? Serena is Drake’s ex. But we forget in 2012, Serena was lambasted for doing the crip walk on the world stage at the London Olympics. And that was a moment in which we really saw this vitriol aimed at one of the most excellent top performers, saying that she was too loud and that she was too ghetto for a kind of respectable sport like tennis, right?” 

For a deeper dive into the symbolism in the half time show  you can read more in Halima Jibril’s article titled,  “America Has a Problem: Unpacking Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl symbolism.”

As 2025 continues, Kendrick Lamar’s influence on music, culture and social justice shows no signs of slowing down. His Grammy wins represent a new era for Black artists in the Recording Academy, while his Super Bowl halftime performance stands as one of the most significant cultural moments of the year. Lamar’s ability to use his platform to address difficult social issues while pushing the boundaries of his craft makes him one of the most important artists of our time. 

Clock face moving on a pendulum.

My experience as a debater has allowed me to pursue and study many niche concepts that most people would overlook or simply dismiss due to how irrational they seem. Meanwhile, us debaters spend entire weekends ranting at almost incomprehensible speeds about how the state is bad and going to kill us all. When we aren’t doing that, we are looking for the next argument with a credible base of scholarship that we can employ against opponents to catch them off guard.

Nevertheless, debate has been instrumental in teaching me never to dismiss any argument on its face not only because this could be the argument I need in elimination rounds, but also because thought, of any sort, deserves its due consideration.

When debate is a monologue, arguments are presumptively false because they have been proved to be through well-researched scrutiny. So it is understandable that when I say Gregorian dating is an active form of Western cultural hegemony that endows imperialism with durability and effectiveness while also constructing time as a linear epistemology that reduces life to production, you furrow your brow and ask “are you sure about that?”

Despite your reservations, the fact still remains that history corroborates the claim that time as a linear understanding is simply a function of western cultural hegemony – meaning our holistic western conception of time is largely built on a facade we have created for ourselves.

The first concept important to understand in order to grasp my argument is that subtle machinations of cultural imperialism, while subtle, are still invaluable indicators of the broader implications of that specific culture. Western modernity, as the spirit of imperialism, pours into non-Western societies and begins to dominate them.

Encyclopedia Britannica identifies cultural imperialism as “the imposition by one usually politically or economically dominant community of various aspects of its own culture onto another, nondominant community.” In this instance, the specific form of cultural imperialism we’ll explore is that of time.

The second concept we need to understand to grasp this argument, and the hardest part to understand, is that time constructs epistemology.

The pre-existing knowledge we all have comes from the presupposition of the plot on which we have collected this knowledge with that plot being linear time. The way that we understand the past, the present, and the future – which encompasses most of our understandings – comes from the presupposition that the plot is linear.

This understanding of time is a direct result of Western cultural imperialism and hegemony. Cultural imperialism supplanted traditional temporality with modern temporality and, therefore, transformed the rhythm and the experience of time.

Johannes Fabian, professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, would label this trend as the denial of coevalness. Denial of coevalness describes “a way of seeing the world in which various contemporary societies are interpreted as literally living in a different historical epoch. Its interpretive, moral, and political limitations – its misplaced confidence in progress and its unfounded hubris – are by now clear to most scholars”.

You witness the denial of coevalness everytime Western society is portrayed as more sophisticated, advanced and capable than other forms of Eastern culture. This is materialized simply through the categorization of countries as third world vs. first world.

It is explicitly the differentiation between the anthropologist’s time (modern, moving time) and the time of the Other (static, less developed, older) which constitutes the denial of coevalness. The denial that anthropologist and interlocutor exist in the same time, or in other words its allochronic (occurring in different times, asynchronous) discourse.

By creating the otherness of the past and the past of the other, modernity and colonialism were able to be established by the empire.

Geopolitically, particularly since the nineteenth century, the translation of geography into chronology was the work of colonization, of the coloniality of knowledge and power. It has served as the justification for the ideology of progress in the 20th century of development and underdevelopment.

Traditional episteme did not rationalize time as chronological but rather circular. Traditional episteme emphasized that humans were a natural part of the cycle of the universe rather than at the center of it, pushing it forward.

As the traditional episteme was thought to be incompatible with Western modernity, it was slowly replaced with the modern episteme by those who accepted Western modernity.

Modern episteme entails a subject/object dichotomy, distinguishing I from the rest. The subject, “I,” makes the “rest” objects of recognition and conquest. Consequently, the body comes to be seen as a sort of machine, and disease as certain disorders within that machine. And as the outer realm of nature, unrecognizable by reason, is named the supernatural, religion is relegated to the realm of the supernatural and to irrational inner emotions. All of these are parts of the modern episteme as a whole.

Modernity, progress and development cannot be conceived without a linear concept of time defining a point of arrival.

Time thus became a central factor in formulating the modern episteme. To understand what tradition and underdevelopment mean, it was necessary to have, first, the concept of modernity.

But the fact still remains that time, as we understand it, is not naturally the central category of human experience. Western identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion. Time is rather a fundamental concept in the forming of the modern/colonial world and an instrument for both controlling knowledge and advancing a vision of society based on progress and development.

Photo courtesy of mexperience.com.