In a just-released promotion for the National Mentoring Partnership program, Kendrick Lamar announced that he and President Obama met at the White House and discussed “topics concerning the inner cities, the problem, the solution, and furthermore embracing the youth.”Their meeting shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: the President is, after all, doing his unofficial pop cultural “I’m almost finished” tour — talking to Jerry Seinfeld (partially) in a car with coffee, eating salmon with Bear Grylls — and neither Seinfeld nor Grylls released Obama’s favorite song of the year. (Towards the end of 2015, Obama announced that Lamar’s “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his pick for song of the year.) Nor, for that matter, are either of them as vocally attuned to the social issues a president should be concerned with as Lamar, whose album To Pimp a Butterfly was of course not only masterful, but a harrowingly relevant dissection of American racial injustice. (And notably, the album’s cover art was a photo of a crowd of Compton residents revolting outside of — and overtaking — the White House.)
As Rolling Stone notes, before the video for the National Mentoring Partnership was released, Obama’s senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, spoke to BuzzFeed and mentioned Lamar’s visit with the president. She said:
He was at the White House. He came and he visited the president, and you know what the president said to him? [Because] he was a little nervous — bless his heart, he’s really a very nice young man, and the president said, “Can you believe that we’re both sitting in this Oval Office?”
Watch the video: