That’s where the initial change will start from. On the record, I made an action to not speak about what’s going on in the world or the places they put us in. So, on and off the album, I took it upon myself to take action in my own community. It weighs you down and it drains your energy when you’re speaking about something or someone that’s completely ridiculous. Are we gonna keep talking about it or are we gonna take action? You just get to a point where you’re tired of talking about it.
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Other than a few lyrics, you’ve been quiet about Donald Trump. That shit is terrible ! I always say that the best entertainers have to have the most wickedest sense of humor, to be able to take pain and change it into laughter. I didn’t even know God invented hairlines like that. This guy right here ? He got something under his hat that makes me bust up laughing every time he takes it off. These things countered the negative shit, helped me to be able to understand tragedy, but not break from it. My mom’s a crazy-as-fuck, funny, loving person. All of the funny shit with my crazy-ass uncles and my pops – he’s funny as fuck. Well, you know, it was also just a lot of mothafuckin’ parties and a lot of humor, which sometimes blocks the fucked-up shit that I’ve seen. How much have you grappled with it as an adult? There’s a certain amount of trauma implicit in the stories you tell – you witnessed murders, even as a little kid. I’m gonna say, “I know murder, conviction, burners, boosters, burglars, dead, redemption, scholars, fathers dead.” I’m-a give you a breakdown of my life from the time I was born all the way till I was 21. I can’t tell you the shit that I’ve been through without telling you the shit that I’ve been through. You have that line “Shit I’ve been through probably offend you,” and you do that rundown of “murder, conviction, burners. People that are around me that are energy-suckers or someone that is not driven the same way I’m driven. My peers, their mothers and grandmothers may have taught them the love and the care, but they couldn’t teach them that. When you have a father in your life, you do something, he’ll look at you and say, “What the fuck is you doing?” Putting you in your place.
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When you see kids doing things that the world calls harmful or a threat, it’s because they don’t know how to deal with their emotions. It taught me how to deal with … emotions. You’ve said you were one of the only ones among your friends with a dad around – and at the end of the new album you suggest that may have saved your life.
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Everybody was always bigger and older than me. Anybody my older cousins was hanging with, that’s who I wanted to hang with. I was seven years old playing tackle football with 14-year-olds. It just came from being around older motherfuckers, man. But it made me go back in the booth and go harder. My first time in the studio, Top Dawg was like, “Man, that shit wack.” Other artists around couldn’t handle that. I ended up getting tough skin, too, even with criticism. That put a lot of responsibility on me, got me ready for the responsibility my fans put upon me. Was there a sense that you were special as a kid?įrom what my family tells me, I carried myself as a man – that’s why they called me “Man Man.” It put a stigma on the idea of me reacting as a kid sometimes – I would hurt myself and they would expect me not to cry. I’m always meditating on the present or the future. It felt like I was always in my own head. I guess that can go back to when I was a kid. Is there maybe something of the monk about you, though? People treat you like you’re a saint or a monk, which must be weird.īut the people closest to me really know who I am. You see it through their eyes and you see ’em light up. I like to get people from my neighborhood, someone that’s fresh out of prison for five years, and see their faces when they go to New York, when they go out of the country. That’s a vice.ĭo you ever feel like you should be having more fun?Įverybody’s fun is different. Sometimes, when you’re pressing so much to get something across to a stranger, you forget people that are closer to you. Being on that stage, knowing that you’re changing people’s lives, that’s a high. It turns into a vice when I shut off people that actually care for me, because I’m so indulged spreading this word. My biggest vice is being addicted to the chase of what I’m doing.
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You rapped about teenage dreams of “livin’ life like rappers do” – but your own life as a rapper has turned out to be pretty sedate. Lamar, 30, is pleased with his recent commercial triumphs, but says it’s not the goal: “If I can make one person – or 10 million people – feel a certain type of euphoria in my music, that’s the whole point.”