Early in the show, Kendrick—dressed in a black dress shirt and black dress slacks with black-rimmed glasses—won Best Rap Album for To Pimp a Butterfly, an award that was announced and fittingly given to him by West Coast legend Ice Cube. Taylor Swift was there again, in the front row, clapping profusely as Kendrick ascended the stage to collect his trophy. When Cube announced Kendrick as the winner, everyone from actor Don Cheadle to hip-hop legend Run (of Run-DMC fame) stood and applauded the young man for what was a monumental feat. Kendrick was the toast of the Grammys, and his peers genuinely wanted him to win. Now onstage, with industry leaders in one room and a captivated TV audience at home, Kendrick flashed a big smile, took his award, and stepped to the microphone.
“Kenneth Duckworth and Paula Duckworth,” he began. “Those who gave me the responsibility of knowing and understanding, accepting the good with the bad, I will always love you for that. Whitney [Alford, his significant other], I will always love you for supporting me and keeping me motivated.… ‘Top Dawg,’ us eating you out of house and home, we’ll never forget that. Taking these kids out of the projects out of Compton, and putting ’em right here on this stage to be the best they can be. This is for hip-hop.… We will live forever, believe that.”
Kendrick was a big winner that night, taking home five Grammys. And while he didn’t win the award for Album of the Year—that went to Taylor Swift for 1989—Kendrick was easily the talk of the night. And it wasn’t because of any text messages he received from a peer. He had a performance—the performance of the Grammys that year.
Before the show, Kendrick had a very clear vision of what he wanted to do with this production. It had to be his grand coming-out party, bigger than the set he did with Imagine Dragons two years earlier. The 2016 show had to make a strong statement and be one of the grandest shows ever in the Grammys’ long history. The message needed to be bold and fearless. Much like the album that brought him to this awards show, it had to make people uneasy, if not angered by the history of slavery and the prison pipeline woven into the fabric of the United States.
Kendrick found a photo of a chain gang on an unnamed road in Miami, near the South Florida Reception Center, captured on November 21, 1995. The group was mostly black, their hands and feet bound by handcuffs and shackles. He sent the photo to his stylist, Dianne Garcia. “This is my inspiration,” Kendrick told her. “I want them [the performers] to look like this.” The image meant a lot to him; he’d openly spoken about the history of incarceration in his family, and as he planned this epic showing, Kendrick still had family and friends locked behind bars. So this set was for them and people like them, those stuck in the system, and those who’d just gotten home and were trying to reassemble their lives, fighting against a society that still sought to keep them shackled. It was one thing to hear it on To Pimp a Butterfly, but to see the history right there on that stage was something different. Never before had an artist used that platform, with mostly white faces in the foreground, to be so brazen.
There he stood the night of the show, his face damp and tattered with concern. He was in a crisp prison-blue shirt, dark blue jeans, and fresh white sneakers. His shoulders were taut and there was a dip in his step as he sauntered to center stage. He lifted his hands, his wrists and ankles bound by bright silver chains. It was quiet—deathly quiet—and when Kendrick moved, you could hear the shackles clatter in the stillness. There was a black microphone stand, and Terrace Martin wearing a matching prison-blue shirt, blowing the sax in a cell onstage to Kendrick’s left. As the tension mounted, Kendrick had a bold declaration for those in attendance at the awards show. “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015,” he asserted. He repeated himself, this time more forcefully than before, punctuating his resolve. “I’m African American / I’m African, I’m black as the moon, heritage of a small village / Pardon my residence.”
The lines opened the rapper’s hit track “The Blacker the Berry.” The song was a relentless Fuck you to assailants of black culture, and with all its bleak dissonance, the track was delivered boldly to the millions tuned into the Grammys. “You hate me, don’t you?” Kendrick declared. “You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture.” The song escalated into a spirited number with backup dancers and a bonfire, and Kendrick stumbled from one side of the stage to the next as if in a dream state. He was connecting the prison pipeline to his own roots as a black man, sending the message that we didn’t come from incarceration. We were more than the chain gang, deeper than the prison blues in which they trapped us. Society would have you believe that we weren’t worthy of equal treatment, but Kendrick was breaking down the narrative surrounding his people on the grandest platform possible. To come out there in
