Chapter 10: Hearing All of the Americas: Coloniality and Authenticity in the Music of Kendrick Lamar and Residente

Recent hip-hop musicians like J Cole, Lil Baby, and Kendrick Lamar have brought needed attention to the systems of violence that strike at the heart of historically marginalized communities and the power of music to push for social change. These musicians are prophetic storytellers voicing anger, hope, and joy on behalf of their communities. I recently began to teach hip-hop in my undergraduate liberal arts seminar with the aim of exploring with students the intersection of music and racial justice in hip-hop today. Our conversations have helped me to see the ways hip-hop music can expose what scholar Walter Mignolo (2007) has called the “colonial matrix of power.” Mignolo uses this term to indicate the ways in which the modern nation-state has come to coexist with the colonial nation-state in four interconnected domains of control: the economy, authority, gender and sexuality, and subjectivity and knowledge” Kendrick Lamar (Compton, United States) and El Residente (Puerto Rico, United States) address the power of coloniality in the Americas today in distinct ways. I bring these artists into conversation with each other because I believe their responses to injustice reveal dramatically different ways of seeing their own identities as Americans. Undergraduate students see personal relevance in their learning when they can explore the rich historical intersections between racism, coloniality and identity found in popular music.