Kendrick Lamar's Complicated Political Score-Settling

“Hip hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years,” the Fox news pundit Geraldo Rivera in 2015. He was commenting at the time on Kendrick Lamar’s performance of his protest song “Alright” atop a police car at that year’s BET Awards.Now Lamar has a reply, and he doesn’t so much debunk Rivera’s dubious statement as use it for kindling on his explosive new album . The newsman’s voice threads through the roiling chorus for the tracklist’s first proper banger “DNA,”lays it out: “You mothafuckas can't tell me nothin' / I'd rather die than to listen to you / My DNA not for imitation / Your DNA an abomination.”