From Contradiction to Consciousness: Kendrick Lamar’s Struggle with Misogyny

By Julius Swinfen-Cranney

Kendrick Lamar’s work has always been defined by contradiction — he exposes his own hypocrisy whilst continuing to be a victim to it. This tension is especially clear in his relation to women. But the value of his music isn't in moral perfection. It’s in the precedent he sets: an artist of Lamar’s fame shows that unlearning patriarchy is messy, uncomfortable and necessary. If this approach takes hold, it could open space for a broader, more honest conversation about misogyny in mainstream music.

Looking back at Lamar’s earlier work helps show how he’s always been a self-critical artist. On good kid, m.A.A.d city, women mostly appear more as moral tests for a young Kendrick, not as people with agency. Sherane, the woman who sets the story in motion, isn’t so much a character as an embodiment of lust and the threat of falling from grace. His desire sparks a series of events that lead to his friend’s death, and to a new kind of consciousness. Here, consciousness just points to his awareness of the chaos around him, but not yet the misogyny within him. ‘Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe’, one of his biggest hits, shows a casual use of derogatory language and ‘Poetic Justice’ (yeah, the one featuring Drake — ironic, as we’ll later see), is an attempt explore Lamar’s desire, but he can’t help but silence the woman it describes: “I recognise your fragrance, hol’ up you ain’t never gotta say shit.”

Does this make him uniquely misogynistic? Not really, but it does show how sexism shaped the world around him. GKMC captures the violent and sexist experience of a young man from Compton, but Lamar isn’t yet conscious of how it shapes his own gaze. Over time, that gaze does turn inward. To Pimp a Butterfly delves deep into race, faith, and capitalism, but leaves gender at the wayside. Still, Lamar’s awareness of his hypocrisy grows: on ‘The Blacker the Berry’, he flat-out calls himself “the biggest hypocrite of 2015.” On DAMN, songs like ‘HUMBLE’ praise women’s “natural” bodies whilst policing them at the same time. He sees the double standard but doesn’t do much to correct it.

Then comes arguably the most important album in this discussion: Mr Morale and the Big Steppers. With this one, the cat is really out of the bag and the hypocrisy isn’t hidden — it’s the point. Lamar reveals his sex addiction and admits to cheating on his fiancée, Whitney Alford. The album traces a process of working through generational trauma and personal vice through therapy, vulnerability, and accountability. The album is structured like a therapy session: it’s divided into two acts, like a play, where each song is like its own little musical therapy session or scene. ‘Father Time’ examines his relationship to his father — how his father was, too, a nuanced person, but instilled sexist habits within him. In ‘Mother I Sober’, Lamar is able to track abuse through generations, connecting personal guilt to generational trauma: “I set free all your abusers, this is transformation.” He doesn’t excuse abuse but attempts to end its inheritance. 

But this newfound healing process doesn’t make Lamar perfect. Despite the accusations of abuse held against Black, he appears prominently on Mr Morale. Despite Lamar’s use of Black as an example of forgiving abusers to prevent further abuse, including Black feels like a misstep, and is another contradiction between message and practice. More recently, Lamar’s public beef with Drake, was less about masculine dominance and more a battle over who mistreats women the most. Compare that to 2Pac and Biggie: on 2Pac’s opening line on Hit ‘Em Up, “that’s why I fucked yo’ bitch, you fat motherfucker” is classic machismo. Kendrick and Drake’s clash, by comparison, was about misogyny and exploitation itself, where the two accused each other of manipulating women, domestic abuse, and even child trafficking. 

Could this culture shift truly represent a positive turn towards unlearning the patriarchy? Or does Lamar’s use of these allegations for a personal feud push aside female voices on the matter? It’s important to note the rise of female voices within hip-hop, with upcoming artists like Doechii drawing huge crowds at Glastonbury and titanic artists like Nicki Minaj setting the standard for what it means to be a female rapper in such a male-dominated genre. ‘Queen of Rap’ Minaj has directly criticised Lamar, on X, over sexism in hip-hop, stating that she would “have to wear some baggy pants n timbs for men to openly give props.” So the men in hip-hop are not entirely without scrutiny from their female counterparts — and the genre is not as male-dominated as it once was — but to what avail and how well is this scrutiny being heard? Again, I think the point being made is that, despite Lamar’s shortcomings, the discussion about misogyny in hip-hop and music discourse as a whole is becoming broader. 

So, where does the conversation go from here? Well to provide some kind of path, I would like to refer to the teachings of Eckhart Tolle (who literally appears on Mr Morale!). You might wonder why I am now pivoting to a German spiritual teacher and self-help author, but Tolle’s ideas really underpin much of Lamar’s own thinking. Tolle’s focuses on the ego, pain, and a possibility of a collective awakening. He describes the “pain-body” as the accumulation of unresolved emotional pain that resides within us, often coming from inherited emotional suffering, often found in a collective such as race, family, or gender. Sound familiar? He claims that, to break free of the cycle and dissolve one’s “pain-body”, one must “become aware of it, rather than be completely identified with it.” 

Collective awakening, in Tolle’s terms, begins when individuals confront the pain they once normalised, letting awareness  ripple through communities. “The key to spiritual awakening,” Tolle writes, “is to become aware of the present moment. / Your attention moves into the present, rather than being in the stream of thinking.” Lamar’s music gives us hope for that kind of thinking. By exposing his own contradictions, however imperfectly, he models what accountability could look like for male artists and men as a collective. And if unlearning patriarchy is a collective act, then maybe someone as culturally relevant as Kendrick Lamar can show how to turn misused influence into a confrontation with misogyny.