The Literary Discography of Kendrick Lamar

February 11, 2025

Lifestyle

Literature

Nesha Ruther

Writer at Bond & Grace

Even when we think his artistic and cultural significance has reached new heights, Kendrick Lamar continues to surprise us.

The 57-time Grammy nominee has won 22 times, and his 2017 album DAMN. scored an award no other rapper can claim—a Pulitzer Prize. On Sunday, February 8, he became the first solo rapper to headline the Super Bowl halftime show, a feat noteworthy enough on its own, but of course, there is always more when it comes to Lamar. If his 2024 track Not Like Us—which won Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance, and Best Music Video at the 2025 Grammys—was the character assassination of one of music’s biggest names, the inclusion of Not Like Us in his Super Bowl setlist was dancing on the grave.

And the thing that remains most staggering about Kendrick Lamar is that he truly deserves it. Every new high and glittering prestige is wholly earned. Because aside from his undeniable musical talent, he is a phenomenal writer. His albums are feats of storytelling, layered and dense, thematically ambitious, and shockingly nuanced; his career establishes itself in not only a musical lineage but a literary one.

Lamar’s place among great American writers has been a topic of discussion since his 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly. But to truly understand his work’s cultural significance, we’ve collected a list of some of his most sophisticated, influential, and powerful literary references.

Section 8.0 (2011)

“HiiiPower”

The final track on Lamar’s first album, “HiiiPower” opens with the lines:

Everybody put three fingers in the air

The sky is falling, the wind is calling

Stand for something or die in the morning

These lines reference both Revelation 7:1–3 (which describe the four angels standing at the four corners of the earth and holding the four winds) and a famous quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.”

In the next line, Lamar says: Malcolm X put a hex on my future, someone catch me I’m falling victim to a revolutionary song. Lamar has stated that reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X changed him and helped him learn to communicate with people from different walks of life.

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good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012)

While good kid, m.A.A.d city doesn’t contain many overt literary references, it is difficult not to include it simply by virtue of the entire album being a bildungsroman—a classic coming-of-age story. The album chronicles Lamar’s adolescence in Compton, California, and the harsh realities he was exposed to. It employs a sophisticated, non-linear narrative that follows him from an impressionable teenager facing the dangers and joys of grief, love, sexual desire, and violence to his hard-earned and more mature adulthood.

“Poetic Justice” (which ironically features Drake) references the actual literary technique of Poetic Justice—in which virtue is rewarded and sin is punished, typically through plot twists or turns of fate—to describe his desire for the album’s love interest, Sherane.

And it might be a stretch, but this writer feels it’s noteworthy that “Swimming Pools,” which chronicles the peer pressures that lead young men to alcohol and drug abuse, ends in a shootout. The title of the song feels reminiscent of Jay Gatsby getting shot in his pool at the end of The Great Gatsby and the culture of drinking and partying in the Roaring Twenties.

To Pimp A Butterfly (2015)

No doubt Lamar’s most literary album to date, 2015’s To Pimp A Butterfly is chock-full of references to classic African American works of literature. The album chronicles Lamar’s struggle to reconcile personal fame and success while feeling entrapped in a system that ultimately dehumanizes him.

Track #3 “King Kunta” references Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots about Kunte Kinte. When Lamar says:

King Kunta, everybody wanna cut the legs off him, he is explicitly referencing the moment in the novel where Kunte Kinte has part of his right foot brutally removed after multiple attempts to escape the plantation where he is enslaved.

Later in the song, Lamar says: When you got the yams—(What’s the yams?) The yam is the power that be. You can smell it when I’m walkin’ down the street, he is referencing Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man. In Ellison’s novel, the unnamed protagonist is walking the streets of New York when he smells yams, triggering memories of his childhood and feelings of pride and comfort. Ellison uses yams as a metaphor for embracing one’s self and culture and even has the narrator famously proclaim, “I yam what I am.”

This reference is twofold—by saying that yams are “the power that be,” Lamar also references Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart. In Achebe’s novel, yams are one of the most important crops grown by the Igbo people and symbolize health, the sustainability of life, and a man’s ability to care for his family.

Track #5 “Alright,” which became an anthem and rallying cry for Black culture, opens with a direct quote from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: All my life I had to fight.

In the novel Sofia states: “All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house.” Like Alice Walker, Lamar writes not simply about the Black community, but for them, unafraid to describe their struggles, flaws, and prejudices as well as their triumphs.

Track #13 “The Blacker The Berry” uses the 1929 novel by Wallace Thurman as a reference point for Lamar’s frustrations with feeling his race dictates how the world perceives him.

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DAMN.

2017’s DAMN. is more biblical album than literary, with references to the Old and New Testaments serving as a vehicle for Lamar to chronicle and analyze Black life in America, but there are a handful of literary references as well.

DNA. Cocaine quarter piece, got war and peace inside my DNA

The 1867 novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

ELEMENT. Most of y’all throw rocks and try to hide your hand Just say his name and I promise that you’ll see Candyman.

The 1999 film Candyman was based on the short story The Forbidden by Clive Barker.

FEEL. I feel like the enemy you should know.

Reference to Sun Tsu’s The Art of War: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

XXX. Yesterday, I got a call, like, from my dog, like 101, Said they killed his only son because of insufficient funds.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s infamous “I Have A Dream” speech states: “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”

GOD. I kill ’em with kindness Or I kill ’em with diamonds

The line “Kill them with kindness” originates in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Pertrucio says “This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.”

Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers

‍Mr Morale is perhaps Lamar’s most introspective album. It uses therapy as a structure and narrative arc, with each song being a single session, facilitating Lamar’s emotional openness and transparency as it grows throughout. Also central to the album is the German spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle and his book The Power of Now (1997).

The Power of Now pulls from multiple spiritual and religious traditions to develop a belief system centered around living in the present moment. For Lamar, whose trauma and early exposure to violence forced him to be hypervigilant, this philosophy was no doubt impactful.

Eckhart Tolle is mentioned by name in the second line of “Worldwide Steppers”. In “Father Time” Lamar’s fiancée Whitney opens the song by saying “You really need some therapy” and “Reach out to Eckhart”. From there, Tolles own voice is featured throughout the album, serving as a counselor and guiding presence for Lamar’s healing journey.

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While Sunday’s Super Bowl may seem like a career high for Kendrick Lamar, we have no doubt he will soon surprise us with even more ambitious performances and feats of writing.