8/10/2023 0 Comments Compton rappers 2015![]() “You take a person out the neighbourhood, give ’em a record deal, give ’em advance money,” Kendrick says. To paraphrase Snoop Dogg’s wry cameo on ‘Institutionalized’: you can take the boy out the hood, but can you take the hood out the homie? The monster success of ‘good kid, MAAD City’ delivered him from the evils of Compton, but the new album wrestles with a dilemma of a different sort. Andthat was a lesson to me, I had to get out of my own nutshell.”Īs even a cursory spin of ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ suggests, adapting to the trappings of fame has not been easy for Kendrick. But you gotta learn to respect different types of people. Growing up in an urban community, you don’t give a fuck. I get to socialise with people outside of what I know and meet different cultures. “The positive outweighs the negative, I can tell you that,” he says of his newfound superstar status. Kendrick might be rap royalty, but nothing about the guy shouts. Clad in off-white, unbranded sportswear, he talks in a mellow lilt just a few notches above a whisper, like a cat drowsing in the midday sun. It’s music and it feels good.”ĭuring the photoshoot, he breezes through a repertoire of worldly-wise poses a philosopher-king surveying the lay of the land beforehim. “I appreciate Taylor Swift for supporting not only my music but the hip-hop culture as a whole,” he told the Associated Press last year. The collab prompted ‘sell-out’ accusations from some, but for Kendrick the move made perfect sense. He’s in good spirits, and why not: he’s just hit Number One on the US singles chart for the first time, with a guest spot on the latest Taylor Swift blockbuster, ‘Bad Blood’. It’s the end of May when NME meets Kendrick in London, half a world away from his former LA stomping ground. You playing with fire, and you haven’t accepted change.” “I don’t give a fuck who you are, you dumb. “You gotta be a stupid motherfucker, man, to have success and still wanna hang on the block,” he says. But whereas for many people his age, going home means nothing worse than two days of dad jokes and the incessant quizzing of your dietary regime, for Kendrick, there are bigger things to worry about. Still, Kendrick is proud of his hometown – after all, it’s Compton that brought his beloved G-funk to global attention, via the music of Dr Dre. The initiative is to get out, for somebody to get out to show us some type of way of life.” “No! It’s like this: you from the hood, you wanna get out the hood. “I’m not one of those people that say, ‘When I get rich I’m gonna keep it extra 100 and be on the block all day,’” says Kendrick, who recently bought a (modest) new pad in nearby Eastvale, in Southern California. ![]() ![]() Then, in August 2013, he contributed an incendiary verse on Big Sean’s ‘Control’, which lived up to its promise to “murder” almost every new rapper on the planet still drawing breath (including Big Sean), and lit a rocket under the arse of hip-hop in the process. Dropping the K-Dot moniker, he alerted Dr Dre to his talent with ‘Ignorance Is Bliss’, a track from 2010 mixtape ‘Overly Dedicated’, but it was the following year’s ‘Section 80’ that proved his breakout release, leading to a deal with Aftermath and the release of his major-label debut, 2012’s ‘good kid, MAAD city’, which introduced him to a wider audience as hip-hop’s pre-eminent chronicler of inner city strife. Signing to Top Dawg Entertainment at the age of 16, Kendrick worked up a string of solo releases under the K-Dot pseudonym, forming the Black Hippy posse with labelmates Ab-Soul, Schoolboy Q and Jay Rock. In March, he pulled off one of the most ambitious records in hip-hop history in ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ – an album of such dazzling scope and complexity, it reportedly sent Kanye West scampering back to the drawing board on his own latest opus, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2013’s ‘Yeezus’. It’s another milestone moment in what is rapidly proving to be a momentous 2015 for the rapper. Then he comes crashing back to earth when a white policeman guns him down. The politically charged video, released on June 30, found Kendrick floating over parts of LA and San Francisco and rapping on lampposts (“Kendrick Lamar spotted on traffic light,” ran a headline on an story about the shoot) as familiar street scenes play out below. So when the 28-year old new king of West Coast hip-hop went and did exactly that in the video for ‘Alright’, it was hard to tell where the special effects ended and the superpowers began. With the amount of praise that’s come Kendrick Lamar’s way of late, you’d be forgiven for thinking the guy can actually fly. ![]()
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