Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth watched Tupac Shakur filming at age eight, perched on his father's shoulders at a gas station in Compton. It was 1995, and Marcus Raboy was directing the music video for California Love. That street scene drew him to music not for the rhythm but for the framing.

From his first demos under the alias K-Dot, the musician understood songs as a technical script with scenes and transitions. When he released good kid, m.A.A.d city in 2012 with the backing of Dr. Dre, he put a direct subtitle on the cover: A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar.

His mother's voicemail messages and car conversations structured the album like a coming-of-age short film shot with microphones instead of cameras. Each track worked as a sequence with sound-based shot changes and sharp dramatic twists.

Nobody in West Coast rap told stories like this.

The Screenwriter Who Won the Pulitzer

In 2015, he released To Pimp a Butterfly after a trip to South Africa. The album blended free jazz with raw funk and closed with a fictional interview with Tupac built from audio fragments recorded in 1994. Two years later he delivered DAMN., a work designed to be played in reverse order without losing narrative coherence.

With that work, Lamar won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a musician outside jazz or classical music in 2018. The academic board recognized a lyrical complexity unusual in popular culture.

And instead of settling into the label of poet, he chose to get into the film business.

In 2018, he agreed to supervise the soundtrack for Black Panther for Marvel Studios. He did not license catalog songs; instead, he coordinated the composition with director Ryan Coogler to fit every cut to the film's final edit. The project sold a million copies in the United States within a few months.

The Fixed Camera and the Founding of pgLang

In March 2020, he founded the company pgLang together with his frequent collaborator Dave Free. It was presented as a multidisciplinary creative agency designed to sidestep the bureaucracy of the major record labels in Los Angeles.

The company started out billing high-fashion campaigns for fashion brands before making the leap into narrative film. But the real storytelling experiment came in 2022 with the short film We Cry Together, conceived as the centerpiece of his fifth album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.

Actress Taylour Paige and Lamar rehearsed for a month a couple's argument that escalated into verbal violence. Director Dave Free set a camera on rails and resolved the piece in a single continuous take with live-captured sound, without studio dubbing or editing cuts.

The shoot was an emotional bloodbath.

The work competed on the circuit leading up to the Academy Awards and defined the restrained visual aesthetic that accompanied the subsequent stadium tour around the world.

The Satirical Clash with Paramount

In January 2022, pgLang announced a production partnership with Paramount Pictures for a live-action feature film together with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park. The screenplay was written by Vernon Chatman, responsible for some of the most radical comedy formats on cable television.

The plot follows a Black actor who works re-enacting slavery at a living history museum in the United States and discovers that the ancestors of his white partner were the owners of his own family. Filming began in 2024 after months of script revisions.

That same 2024, he surprised fans by releasing the album GNX in November and signed his contract to headline the Super Bowl halftime show in February 2025.

Paramount set the film's production budget at $45 million before starting post-production at its Hollywood facilities.