Kendrick Lamar recently faced criticism from famed reporter Geraldo Rivera over his BET Awards performance of "Alright", which Rivera said "hip-hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years."
The West Coast emcee spoke out against the reporter's statement, telling TMZ, "How can you take a song that's about hope and turn it into hatred? The overall message is, 'We gonna be alright.' It's not the message of I want to kill people."
Lamar then addressed Rivera's problem with him using a cop car as a prop, and he explained, "I think his attempt is really deluding the real problem, which is the senseless acts of killings of these young boys out here. I think for the most part [he's] avoiding the truth. This is reality, this is my world, this is what I talk about in my music. You can't delude that. Me being on a cop car, that's a performance piece after these senseless acts, you dig what I'm saying? Of course I'm gonna be enraged about what's going on out here. Of course I'm gonna speak on it."
He ended the interview by saying, "Hip-hop is not the problem. Our reality is the problem of the situation. This is our music. This is us expressing ourselves. Rather than going out here and doing the murders myself, I want to express myself in a positive light the same way other artists are doing, not [by] going out in the streets. Go in the booth and talking about the situation and hoping these kids can find some type of influence [from] it in a positive manner. Coming from these streets and coming from these neighborhoods, we're taking our talents and putting 'em inside the studio."
What do you think of Kendrick's response?
Source: TMZ
