To celebrate his Grammy Award-nominated fifth studio album, Kendrick Lamar dropped a music video for the single “Rich Spirit.” The music video comes one day after Lamar was nominated in eight categories for the 65th Annual Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, Best Rap Album, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Music Video, and more. Acting as a visual mirror to the powerful lyrics, "Rich Spirit" serves to honor self-perseverance and reconnection with the self, while motivating others to do the same.

Putting polish before people rob us of the opportunity to connect and go deeper. Our naked selves are rarely shown to others, and that's what makes them precious. "Rich Spirit" was meant to reconnect the audience to the idea of slow living. Directed by an award-winning music video director, the video stars Kendrick Lamar as he dances around a barren home. It’s every bit as minimal as the song itself, which shows a whole new side of the artist. Here – set against a textured, minimalist, mid-century modern house – he is safe, free of restrictive expectations, and uninhibited. It reminds us of a time when living slow gave us the opportunity to collect our thoughts and act with intention.

"Rich Spirit" is a celebration of connection. The director was intent on breaking down the barriers of Lamar's "celebrity" to show a man who, like all of us, craves a safe space to live authentically. Viewers have connected with "Rich Spirit" because, unlike most music videos, this one offers a sense of Lamar's emotional multidimensionality. We can't help but empathize with him as we see that his emotions – like ours – can be whimsical and ephemeral but also barbed, deep-rooted, and dense. We see Kendrick Lamar as his unguarded self, which allows others to let their walls down and escape into a place deep inside.

"Rich Spirit" taps into the ecstasy found inside solitude. Despite the curtains being closed – signaling a disconnect from the outside world – the film acts as a candid window into the artist's unwatched world; the freedom to be who you are when you're by yourself. Vignettes come together to depict a man liberated from the pressures of the outside world – reconnecting with himself and motivating others to do the same. Over a series of sporadic vignettes, we explore the dimensionality of Kendrick's rich interior life. While it may look as though his materialistic needs are more than met (based on the luxury setting), we see that his true desire is something money can't buy: enlightenment.

Over the course of the video – which is as minimalist as the song itself – the camera gradually grows closer, feeling more comfortable with him in this sacred space. Action is intercut with composed conceptual frames that drip with symbolic detail. Taking cues from impressionist paintings, the space is curated so that everything from lighting to wardrobe feels entirely considered. Shots aren't overloaded with exposition. Instead, they only offer hints as to whose house this might be so that the viewer has the freedom to come to their own conclusions.

The director wanted to cultivate a sense of closeness with Lamar; watch him without judgment, and learn more about the man behind the celebrity.

Since its premiere a little over four months ago, the music video has been watched over 16 million times and written about in major publications, including Rolling Stone, Billboard, Pitchfork, The Fader, and more. On the artists' Twitter page, the music video was retweeted over 8,000 times and garnered over 44 thousand likes. "Rich Spirit" was also named as a nominee for the Music Video of the Year award for shots Americas.

Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Kendrick Lamar has been hailed as the voice of Black America through his sharp-shooting lyricism about systemic injustice. He has influenced hip-hop and Black culture indefinitely by encapsulating the Black experience in the United States. In 2018, The New Yorker wrote an article titled "The Cultural and Political Forces Behind Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer". They stated, "...The board also chose to commend a musician working in a popular, vital idiom, and not just any idiom, but hip-hop, a genre that has been unapologetic if not brazen about its own profitability. Disruptive genres are often only retroactively acknowledged, usually decades after their commercial and creative zenith. But Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize in an era in which rap music is as alive and as pervasive as it’s ever been."