10 Most Badass Songs Of All Time

10. Kendrick Lamar - The Blacker The Berry

This isn't just the sound of a profoundly pissed off man raging against the institutionalised racism of America: it's the sound of a man channelling generations of the suppressed to launch a brutally aggressive tirade.

'The Blacker The Berry' is also powered by the searing self-hatred Lamar bears just by allowing himself to exist and prosper within it. "I'm the biggest hypocrite of 2015," Lamar starts, before recalibrating his focus to the real target. Lyrically, this is a masterpiece. The choices employed throughout subvert the ugliness of racism with real power. "I'm a proud monkey," Lamar spits, in a burst of reclamation.

"You hate me, don't you?" he asks, rhetorically, before delivering maybe the most killer line in hip-hop history. The genre has long doubled as a quest to prove blackness, but here, with the richest thematic power consistent to his message, Lamar arrives at its destination:

"I'm African-American. I'm African. I'm black as the heart of a f*ckin' aryan."

The beat is beyond menacing: it's the sound of being terrorised into a dark alley, only to be confronted by something far more monstrous than what is portrayed in the media, or from the White House: the truth.

And, in the end, the soothing outro is almost Lynchian, in how the levity of the melody illuminates and reveals the darkness with a sobering gut-punch.