While the candidates vying for the top spot in this year’s presidential race have made their views (woefully) known on everything from immigration to gun control to whether you should buy a bag of peanuts, we have yet to hear where any of them stand on To Pimp a Butterfly.
Not so the man in the White House. Last month, President Barack Obama declared Kendrick Lamar’s “How Much a Dollar Cost” his favorite song of 2015, which, if I understand our system of government correctly, means that you are now legally obligated to purchase it on iTunes. Last night, Lamar’s record label, Top Dawg Entertainment, released a short video about a meeting the Compton rapper had with the president in the White House. The two talked about the importance of mentoring—Lamar contends that strong leadership is what helped him to avoid the pitfalls of his environment growing up in Compton—in support of the president’s Pay It Forward program.
As Rolling Stone reports, President Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett recently told BuzzFeed that Lamar was a little nervous to meet the president. “Bless his heart, he’s really a very nice young man,” Jarrett said of the rapper, “and the president said, ‘Can you believe that we’re both sitting in this Oval Office?'” Which even after eight years of Obama’s presidency is still hard to fathom—a two-term African-American president and a rapper from Compton can just sit and have a private meeting in the White House. But maybe Kendrick was nervous that Obama was going to call him out for “Hood Politics”?
Either way, check out the video of the meeting below.
(via Rolling Stone)
