Kendrick Lamar Slams Fox News On New Album ‘Damn’

Kendrick Lamar’s new album, “Damn” is finally here. On the follow up to 2015’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” the “Alright” rapper is once again holding back no punches and this time uses three songs on the project to call out Fox News and Geraldo Rivera.

On the album’s opener, “Blood,” Kendrick closes out the track by using a sample of a Rivera segment where he said, “This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years.” Rivera’s comment came after Lamar’s performance at the BET Awards.

On the following song, “DNA,” Kendrick once again samples the segment, but the album’s third track, “Yah,” is when he calls out Fox News and Rivera. “Fox News wanna use my name for percentage,” he raps. Kendrick also demands “somebody tell Geraldo” that the rapper is ambitious.

Following his performance of “Alright” at the 2015 BET Awards, Rivera criticized the lyrics of the song, saying they were “not helpful at all.” He added, “This is exactly the wrong message. And then to conflate what happened in the church in Charleston, South Carolina with these tragic incidents involving excessive use of force by cops is to equate that racist killer with these cops, it is so wrong. It is so counterproductive. It gives exactly the wrong message.”

The rapper eventually responded to Rivera’s claims, wondering how a message of hope could be turned into hate. “The overall message is, ‘we’re gonna be alright.’ It’s not the message of ‘I wanna kill people.’ Hip-hop is not the problem. Our reality is the problem of the situation,” he told TMZ Live.

Geraldo Rivera and Fox News aren’t the only people to be called out on the rapper’s new album. On the song, “XXX,” Kendrick also takes a shot at President Donald Trump, rapping, “Donald Trump’s in office, we lost Barack and promised never to doubt him again, but is America honest or do we bask in sin?”