Kendrick Lamar has been making waves lately and it has nothing to do with his music. The public has been entrenched with the thoughts of the 27 year-old recently. The GKMC rapper is featured on most of the hip hop blogs simply based on the opinions he shares on the state of hip hop. Is he destined to become the heel rap needs? Has this genre become too friendly, much like the NBA?
The New York Times’ Lizzy Goodman joined the TDE star for three weeks during his time on the Yeezus tour. Goodman encapsulates all things backstage and tour life in general.
“If my edge is dull, my sword is dull, and I don’t want to fight another guy whose sword is dull,” Lamar later told me. “If you’ve got two steel swords going back and forth hitting each other, what’s gonna happen? Both of them are going to get sharper.” He laments what he sees as the impotency that has taken over the rap game. “Everybody that’s in the industry has lost their edge,” he said. “There’s really no aggression. You gotta say things particular, and everything is so soft.” Last August, in a guest appearance on “Control,” a track by Big Sean, Lamar named himself, alongside Jay-Z, Nas, Eminem and Outkast’s Andre 3000, as the best M.C.s of all time. He also called himself “the king of New York” (a big no-no for a West Coast rapper) and sent out a message to his immediate peers: “I got love for you all, but I’m tryna murder you niggas/Tryna to make sure your core fans never heard of you niggas/They don’t wanna hear not one more noun or verb from you niggas.” The influential hip-hop magazine XXL called it “the verse that woke up the rap game.”
“I’ve never been on a tour where there’s no booze,” someone grumbled. “I need alcohol.” When I was on the road with Lamar, he didn’t drink, and in general, his crew followed suit. This is part of his commitment to staying focused on his singular ambition: greatness. “There’s a certain hunger that you can sense about Kendrick,” Eminem says. “He raps to be the best rapper in the world. He competitive-raps. That’s one of the things that’s going to drive his career. He’s going to be around for a long time.”
Backstage at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, West personally approached Lamar about joining him on the road. “It’s a different kind of thrill when an actual artist asks you, when Kanye asks you,” Lamar said, pronouncing West’s first name the way he always does, with the emphasis on the last syllable, kahn-YAY. “Now I know he’s really interested in what I do.” Lamar said it was easy to make that happen after the chat, but his team remembered a lot of back and forth. “Believe it or not, we were actually trying not to do the tour,” says Terrence Henderson, better known as Punch, the president of Top Dawg Entertainment, Lamar’s label. “We wanted Kendrick to be recording that whole time.”
“I’m the worst,” he eventually said, breaking the silence. “Whenever I get good news about anything . . . man, I guess I’m bad at receiving compliments.” He stopped typing but didn’t look up from the phone, his face all but obscured beneath his black hood. “Like yesterday with the nominations, things like that — it made me feel like I had to be in the studio because I had to do it, not again, but. . . .” He couldn’t quite finish his thought. “It just bothers me,” he said finally. “I don’t want to be something that just comes and goes.”
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