Kendrick Lamar calls out white fan for saying N-word on stage
Kendrick Lamar called out a white woman for using the N-word during his performance at Hangout Fest in Gulf Shores, Alabama on Sunday. Lamar invited the fan onstage to rap his 2012 song "M.A.A.D. City."
The fan started to rap a verse from the song and repeatedly included the N-word without censoring herself. Then, Lamar stopped the music to interrupt the fan.
The confident young woman joked, "Aren't I cool enough for you? What's up, bro?"
Lamar responded, "You got to bleep one single word, though," and the fan said, "Oh, I'm sorry. Did I do it? I'm so sorry … I'm used to singing it like you wrote it."
Audience members booed, especially when Lamar asked if the woman should get a second chance. But Lamar let her rap along with the song again, this time with her leaving out the offensive word.
She then got a second chance to rap along to the track while censoring herself. You can watch the expletive-filled video here.
In the past, Lamar has talked about using the N-word in his songs, and says that he tries to reclaim the word by relating it to the word "negus," which means emperor in Ethiopian history.
"I don't know if I can stop," he told NME in 2015 of using the word. "The closest I can do to stopping is putting the root word, negus, on my album. But I don't know if I'm there mentally to stop saying the N-word yet. I dunno, maybe one day. That's 27 years of reversing that word, I probably been saying that since I was one year old."
In April, Lamar became the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. The 30-year-old won the prize for "DAMN.," his raw and powerful Grammy-winning album. The Pulitzer board called the album a "virtuosic song collection" and said it captures "the modern African American life."