The Gospel According to Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar understands and employs blues, jazz, and soul in his music, which makes it startling. His work is more than merely brilliant; it is magic.—TONI MORRISON

It takes guts, courage, and skill to shoulder the burden of a generation’s mind-set. Culturally, Kendrick Lamar is that compass—in fact, a GPS—in this current Hour of Chaos. That enough is worth a Pulitzer Prize or any award that sets the bar high.—CHUCK D

I love everything about his music. I can literally listen to his music and become a kid growing up with all the struggles in the inner city, but at the same time [learn] all the lessons it taught that we use as men today. If you listen to the last verse of “Black Boy Fly,” on good kid, m.A.A.d city, I know exactly what he means—because I was that kid.—LEBRON JAMES

The minute I hear good news, it just motivates me to do more. I don’t want to get complacent. If you asked seven out of ten people, ‘What would you do if you got the Pulitzer Prize?,’ they’d say, ‘I’d put my feet up.’ But that would make me feel I’d reached my pinnacle at 30 years old, and that wouldn’t make me feel good.—KENDRICK LAMAR

Memorial day, Peter Luger Steak House, Brooklyn: Kendrick Lamar orders
salmon. He is wearing a black baseball cap, white t-shirt, and
gray-and-blue pants, and I’m seated to his right at an upstairs table
for 10. To my right is Kendrick’s TDE (Top Dawg Entertainment)
label-mate, rapper, and friend Jay Rock, and the rest of our lunch party
is comprised of friends and associates of Kendrick’s: Dave Free, his
friend since ninth grade, manager, co-director of their groundbreaking
videos, and TDE president; Dave’s assistant, Keaton Smith; Kendrick’s
assistant Derrick McCall; photographer/videographer Chris Parsons; head
of TDE security 2Teez; TDE general manager ret One; and publicist Ray
Alba. Except for Kendrick’s fish choice, everyone else orders
cheeseburgers and steak—medium rare. Platters of French fries and
creamed spinach are brought to the table. Despite people sitting at
tables all around us, we are left alone. Kendrick, who has a reputation
as enigmatic and shy, warms up as we talk about music, basketball,
government, taxes, other rappers, and awards. I tell them that LeBron
James wore a TDE t-shirt at practice the day before—prior to Game 7 of
the Eastern Conference finals. We talk about Madison Square Garden,
where, the following night, Kendrick will perform his first sold-out
headlining show at the world’s most famous arena as part of the 30-date
TDE Championship tour, with a lineup of the label’s artists. We talk
about the changes in Harlem, the changes in Brooklyn, and how New York
is no longer the city that never sleeps. There is a wide-ranging
conversation about the music Kendrick grew up listening to in Compton,
California: the Temptations (he was named for lead singer Eddie
Kendricks), Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, and gangsta
rap—and I answer queries about my interviews of yesteryear. I tell
Kendrick to forget about the three times he was nominated for the
best-album Grammy and didn’t win (although I didn’t say it quite so
politely) and congratulate him on winning the Pulitzer Prize—the first
for a non-classical or non-jazz musician, and the first for a rapper.
Kendrick always appears to be thinking, or listening, until he breaks
into a gap-toothed grin, or a laugh. These guys know each other
well—especially Dave and Kendrick, who finish each other’s
sentences—and the vernacular is unfiltered, rooted in hip-hop and the
streets of Compton.

Following lunch, we all get into a Mercedes Sprinter, stopping at a
pop-up store on Hudson Street in Manhattan that sells a clothing
collaboration between TDE and Nike (with whom Kendrick also has a shoe
deal). Then we head uptown to an East Side hotel, where he and I sit and
talk for over an hour.

In addition to winning this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music, Kendrick
Lamar has sold more than 17.8 million albums, been nominated for 29
Grammys, and won 12. His work is archived in the library at Harvard
University. He’s been described as the poet laureate of hip-hop,
perceptive, philosophical, unapologetic, fearless, and an innovative
storyteller whose body of work has been compared to James Joyce and
James Baldwin. He’s collaborated with—among many others—Jay Z,
Eminem, Dr. Dre, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Bono, Pharrell Williams, Jay Rock,
and Maroon 5. He writes about being young, black, poor, and gifted in
America with a candid self-awareness of who he is, where he’s from, and
where he’s been. Musician/producer Pharrell (who worked with Kendrick on
the songs “good kid” and “Alright”) had told me, “He’s the Bob
Dylan, the Miles Davis of our time, but he’s his own thing. His ability
to entertain while educating, without ever being preachy, is amazing.”
I ask Kendrick how he balances his enormous success and celebrity with
his extreme work ethic. “You can get put in an environment that can
bring down your integrity and your fight,” he says. “What gives me an
advantage in my upbringing is the duality of seeing one of the most
beautiful moments of me being 6 years old, to the most tragic moment of
being 13 or 14, and make that connection so the person [listening]
can really see the conflict. It was a mindfuck, for sure. I would wake
up one morning, and it would be cartoons and cereal and walking back
from school. And at 4 P.M., we’d be having a house party ‘til 11
P.M. . .. and people [were] shooting each other outside the door.
That was my lifestyle. And it’s not only mine; it’s so many other
individuals’. And I wanted to tell that story.”

By the end of listening to his first full album, I felt like I knew everything about him. He brings you into his world with his lyrics in a way that really paints a clear picture.—EMINEM

Among other individuals to whom his story resonates are the NBA
basketball players who grew up either in Compton or similar Los Angeles
neighborhoods. According to Orlando Magic forward Arron
Afflalo—name-checked in Kendrick’s song “Black Boy Fly” (“I used to
be jealous of Arron Afflalo”)—“If you’re in Compton, with all that
negativity and violence, and you know you have the talent that Kendrick
obviously has, and you watch someone that’s successful, I don’t think
‘jealous’ is a negative word. It’s something that made him hungry; he
knew what he could become.” Toronto Raptors’ All-Star DeMar DeRozan,
who grew up near Kendrick, says, “Everything he raps about is what we
had to overcome and grow through,” and Oklahoma City Thunder All-Star
point guard Russell Westbrook adds, “He grew up in the same
neighborhoods I grew up in, and to see him be able to explain the
struggles of his upbringing through his music is inspirational; he’s
opening people’s eyes to what people go through in the inner city.”

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was born in Compton 31 years ago to Paula
Oliver and Kenny Duckworth and is the oldest of four siblings. He
started freestyling around the age of eight, when, he tells me, he
mostly rapped about drugs. But by the time he was 16, under the name
K.Dot (his closest friends still call him Dot), he got serious about
music. “I was recording in Dave [Free]’s garage,” he tells me,
“and Dave said he had to get my music to Top [Anthony “Top Dawg”
Tiffith], who was getting into the music business. The first day in
the [vocal] booth, Top said, ‘Let me see if this is really you,’ and
I was just freestyling, rapping whatever came into my head, sweating for
two hours.” Dave Free said, “The first time I ever heard him rap, I
had to listen back because it was so developed, super-complex, and I
just couldn’t believe it, since he was so young.” (After Kendrick’s
early E.P.’s and mixtapes, Dave told him that it was time for him to
drop the K.Dot and use his real name.) And Top, now the head of TDE, who
described himself then as “a local street dude who was trying to change
his life for the better,” adds, “What impressed me was how advanced
Kendrick was at 16 years old. He spoke from an adult perspective every
time he touched the mic. Over the course of 15 years, I’ve watched him
evolve from a kid on the corner breaking down street tales to a creative
genius breaking down cultural barriers.”

Kendrick tells me that most of the kids he knew from elementary school
are either dead or in jail. But, he says, he was more grounded because
he had a mother and a father in the home. “It makes a huge
difference,” he says. “It shows you loyalty. When I look around at my
classmates and my friends, they all lived with their grandparents. To
have a mother and a father in your household—this showed me
immediately that anything is possible.” On his major label debut, good
kid, m.A.A.d city, both his parents are heard on answering-machine
tapes, and their language is tough, uninhibited. His mother, after
yelling at him to bring back her van, then turns tender and says, “I
love you, Kendrick,” and tells him to take this music thing seriously,
be a positive person, and come back and tell your stories to your city.
She adds that his music better be something that she and his father
“can step to, because we from Chicago and that’s what we do.”

For a gentle dude, he throws a righteous punch; I wouldn’t get in the way of it. No single artist will ever be the antidote to a generation’s malaise, but just identifying some of the problems really helps.—BONO

Kendrick tells me his parents were young when they left Chicago with
just $500 and wound up in a Compton hotel. “Mom had to go to
McDonald’s to get hired [there]; my father had to find friends, and
it was a whole gang culture. . .. They were learning, and they did
the best they could do as far as protecting me. But they loved to
indulge in that fast lifestyle . . . the partying and everything that
comes with it. My mother encouraged me to dream—she was very proud of
my efforts. My third-grade teacher came up to my mother once at a
parent-teacher meeting and she said, ‘Your son used a word that I was
totally amazed by—he said audacity.’ Even then, it gave me an
advantage in life, to be able to take information, listen to it, and
take a perspective without judging it and do my own research. The
duality was that my father was more like ‘OK, good, now do it again.’
There never was a super-embrace—and it gave me an understanding of
being critiqued. Almost like ‘I know you can do it better, so I’m not
gonna show you how great you are already.’ It was a manipulation that
worked in my favor later in life; by the time I was being critiqued,
there was nothing you could tell me, because I know it’s not my best
anyway.” I ask if growing up he had read a lot of books. “I read the
dictionary,” he said.

We talk about the violence he sings and raps about in good kid, m.A.A.d
city, and Kendrick says, “That was our world. I remember when good kid
came out, the people I grew up with couldn’t understand how we made that
translate through music. They literally cried tears of joy when they
listened to it—because these are people who have been shunned out of
society. But I know the kinds of hearts they have; they’re great
individuals. And for me to tell my story, which is their story as well,
they feel that someone has compassion for us, someone does see us
further than just killers or drug dealers. We were just kids.” I ask
about the line that implies he shot someone at 16, and he just looks at
me, smiles, and eventually says, “I’ll put it this way: I’ve seen my
own blood shed, and I’ve been the cause of other people shedding their
blood as well. There was a split second when I felt what my homeboys
were feeling—like I don’t give a fuck anymore—and that’s when I knew
something else had to happen.” Among the “something else” in his
life: two baptisms, the first at 16 and “again in my 20s—just for
that reassurance and belief in God.”

Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s manager and the chairman and C.E.O. of Def Jam
Recordings, was the first to bring Kendrick’s music to Dr. Dre, who
signed him to his Aftermath label in a joint deal with TDE. “Kendrick
is an extremely prolific and cerebral rapper,” says Rosenberg. “Every
word is so well placed, so thought out, so meaningful—there’s no dead
space.” And Dr. Dre told me, “The thing that turned me on the most was
when I watched a video of him talking about his music and the passion he
had in his voice about the art. You just knew this guy was destined for
greatness.” Producer Rick Rubin says, “Kendrick is one of the best of
all time—making modern and challenging new music.” He adds, “He
exists on another plane.”

In addition to Kendrick’s extraordinary talent as a writer, rapper, and
producer, he has an ear for melody, and an ability to assume different
voices on his songs—which he tells me he got from listening to Prince
and the music he heard at his parents’ house parties. He also packs so
many words and syllables into one bar of a song without ever stopping
for breath. And through his music, he’s taken on the role of spokesman
for a neighborhood that goes way beyond Compton. I ask him, Why you? “I
put that responsibility on myself. I knew from jump that I thought a
little bit different, people respected me, and if I let myself down, I’d
be letting my guys down. Fast-forward to 2018, I’m in a position where
these guys have 10, 15, 20 years in prison, but I can go in there—and
I do—and tell them that when they get out, you have a job. And my word
stands.”

I ask him about the guns in his Piru (aka Bloods) neighborhood in
Compton, and he says, “I have compassion for, and more understanding
rather than frustration with my homies, because I know it’s not 100
percent their fault. When I look at how society has shaped our
communities, it’s been generations passed down of putting people in
cages to battle each other.” He talks about the survivor’s guilt that
is a recurring theme in his songs, and says, “I had three or four years
of success and celebrity, but I can’t get rid of the 20 years of being
with my homies, and knowing what they go through. I can’t throw that
away. I know a lot of people who could—I’ve seen it—like ‘Fuck you,
I’ve got money now, I’m outta here, I don’t give a fuck about none of
y’all.’ But that was something I couldn’t deal with. I had to sit back
and analyze it and [figure out] other ways I could impact these
people without physically trying to bring the whole hood inside a
hotel.”

During a solo set at the Hangout Festival in Alabama this past May,
Kendrick brought a white female fan onstage to sing “m.A.A.d city”
with him, as he’s done at many of his concerts. White people usually
know to move the mic away from their mouths when it gets to the parts
with the n-word. She didn’t, and he stopped the show and called her on
it. He and I discuss the ubiquitous use of that word in rap—with the a
at the end of it—and the implicit understanding of who can say it and
who cannot. I mention that many rappers have told me that they feel they
have appropriated that word, and taken it back. But Oprah once told Jay
Z in an interview that when she hears it, even with an a at the end, she
thinks of a lynching. Kendrick is thoughtful for a long minute, then he
says, “Let me put it to you in its simplest form. I’ve been on this
earth for 30 years, and there’s been so many things a Caucasian person
said I couldn’t do. Get good credit. Buy a house in an urban city. So
many things—’you can’t do that’—whether it’s from afar or close up.
So if I say this is my word, let me have this one word, please let me
have that word.”

I ask Kendrick about how he writes. “ ‘Execution’ is my favorite
word,” he says. “I spend 80 percent of my time thinking about how I’m
going to execute, and that might be a whole year of constantly jotting
down ideas, figuring out how I’m going to convey these words to a person
to connect to it. What is this word that means this, how did it get here
and why did it go there and how can I bring it back there? Then, the
lyrics are easy.” I ask him how he delivers so many syllables and words
in one line, with no wasted words and juxtapositions like “Halle
Berry/Hallelujah” or a play on words like “Demo-crips and
Re-blood-licans” or “I got power/poison/pain and joy inside my DNA.”
“It comes from my love of hip-hop. Eminem is probably one of the best
wordsmiths ever,” Kendrick says. “There’s a whole list of why, but
just bending words. . . . The Marshall Mathers LP changed my life.”
(Eminem returns the compliment, saying, “He switches up his flow every
few bars so it’s more interesting to listen to.”) Kendrick adds, “My
other favorite word is ‘discipline.’ Discipline gives me all my
unvarnished strength and makes me curious about how disciplined I can
be.”

The following day, we’re backstage at Madison Square Garden prior to
that night’s show. Top is here, wearing a red TDE cap. SZA, the only
female on the TDE label, is determined to perform despite vocal-cord problems that forced her to cancel some tour dates. She says about
Kendrick, “He’s really committed. He takes his natural aptitude and
jacks that shit up to like 50,000. For you to be that naturally talented
already and still want to be better is weird, inspiring, and
beautiful.”

In a small room adjacent to Kendrick’s larger, dimly lit dressing room,
he and I talk some more. I tell him it’s hard to imagine that, with his
skill for such rapid-fire rapping, he stuttered as a kid, and he says he
got over it by “just not being in fear of constantly talking to
people—that’s what my mother told me.” He describes himself as
“introverted” rather than shy, and says, “I like to be alone a lot. I
need that. It’s that duality: I can go in front of a crowd of 100,000
people and express myself, then go back, be alone, and collect my
thoughts all over again.” I note that after his opening set on Kanye
West’s 2013 Yeezus tour, he seemed to have flipped a switch and was a
different guy—way more energized and confident as a performer. “I
think it was after my trip to South Africa,” he says. “It gave me a
feeling of awareness and pride, a feeling of where I belong.” One of
his lyrics is about how to be rich and black in America and not “act a
fool,” and he says, “We’ve got to get to the root of never having
these things. I look back to when I was 16 years old and thought, What
would I do with a million dollars? I’m gonna buy this, I’m gonna buy
that . . . Then I thought that me doing that is actually hurting
people I’m responsible for. I’m the first in my family to have this kind
of success, so I took it upon myself to wisely navigate this success,
because I wanted them to be successful, too.”

I tell him that Chuck D once told me that in the 1980s, “We was broke,
but we wasn’t broken,” and Kendrick says, “I love that. I felt that
for sure. Because the times we had to wait for food stamps every month,
or we’d run out of food and had to wait for welfare to kick in, or walk
to the County building—it wasn’t about the County building; it was
about the walk to the building. Because if we didn’t have that County
building to walk to, I wouldn’t have built that bond with my mother, or
my father, to see that this is a family. What Chuck D says resonates so
much with me, because we were broke, but we had us.” I ask him if he
wants to start a family and he says, “This is the constant question,
because I’m obsessed with my craft and what I’m doing. I know what I’m
chasing for my life, even though I don’t know what it is. But it’s an
urge that’s in my every day. That urge to make an ultimate connection
with words to man. And I don’t feel I’ve done that yet.”

We talk about the soundtrack he curated and produced for the blockbuster
film Black Panther, and we discuss what’s involved in an Oscar campaign,
should “All the Stars”—his song with SZA from that soundtrack—be
nominated. (“That would be crazy,” says SZA about a possible Oscar
nomination, “but that’s everything that Dot does.”) Kendrick says that
the TDE Championship tour—the lineup at the Garden included Sir,
Ab-Soul, Isaiah Rashad, Jay Rock, Schoolboy Q, SZA, and Kendrick—has
always been a dream: “To have our own tour, our own artists,” he says.
“The model was Motown, Bad Boy, Roc-A-Fella, Def Jam, Aftermath.”
Pulling up his long-sleeved t-shirt, he shows me the tattoo going all
the way up his right forearm—“Hustle Like You Broke $”—which he
says was something Top said: “Always have that mentality, don’t be
lax.” We talk about the NFL and the national-anthem protests. He says
he was a football fan, but now “I’m less enthused. It’s enraging; I
think what Kap [Colin Kaepernick] is doing is honest, and it’s not
just his truth, it’s our truth.”

Our talk continues to cover a variety of topics. I say that even though
he lives in Malibu now (and moved his family out of Compton) he’s not
showy, he’s not rapping about bling (he says his father had
jewelry—he’d seen it, and it didn’t interest him), and he doesn’t
boast the same way a lot of rappers do (I tell him that I love that he
didn’t rhyme “Grey Poupon” with “Louis Vuitton”). Still, he calls
himself “the greatest rapper alive,” and, he says, “I owned up to a
lot of hours of just listening and studying and throwing thousands of
pieces of paper away that were garbage. Hours of Top saying, ‘Nah, that
ain’t it, you’re better than that,’ or me saying, ‘Nah, that ain’t
shit.’ ” Are there enough hours in the day for him to do everything he
wants to do? “That’s one of my phrases,” he says. “We need more
hours! I look up, and it’s five in the morning, six in the morning, and
I’m still in the studio. I need 26 . . . 27 . . . we good.”

Then, at 10:15 P.M., with a backdrop that says, “Pulitzer Kenny,”
Kendrick Lamar takes the stage at the Garden for a raging 75-minute
performance. Even with all of the lights, videos, lasers, and pyro, you
cannot take your eyes off him as he delivers a breathtaking, joyful live
set that proves he really does rap all those words without stopping for
breath; a set that includes songs from his three major-label albums:
good kid, m.A.A.d city, To Pimp a Butterfly, and DAMN., the album that
won him the Pulitzer.

Kendrick Lamar’s work represents some of the most important music being produced today, period. He fits squarely onstage in the artistic community, like any other cutting edge, musical genius.—Dana Canedy, administrator, the Pulitzer Prizes

Rap is the biggest music out there, and it’s nice that it’s finally getting the recognition it deserves. For his album to make it onto that platform is great for all of us. Oh, and I’m also jealous.—Eminem

MAY 30, 2018: The Low Library, at Columbia University, in Manhattan,
where the Pulitzer Prizes are handed out, isn’t very hip-hop—with the
exception of the table of Kendrick’s friends and colleagues. The room
has a cathedral-like domed ceiling and marble columns, and the vibe is
academic. (Previously, Toni Morrison had told me that the Pulitzer
“ought to shape up; their canvas is not wide enough—it’s narrow. So
this means it’s wider.” And Pharrell told me that “this is the
universe winking at us.”) Kendrick is wearing a blue shirt with a shiny
gold pattern, tan pants, and Nike Cortez Kennys. He sits at table number
one with his fiancée, Whitney Alford; Dave Free; Dana Canedy; her son
and two of his friends; Gayle King; and CNN’s Don Lemon. Kendrick is
clearly the star of the show—everyone is trying to take selfies with
him. After the prizes are handed out, he races out with the TDE team,
avoiding reporters but stopping to take photos with kids. Then it’s back
into the van for the trek to Jones Beach, on Long Island, where the
Championship tour will do another show. Backstage, Kendrick works out at
his mobile gym—a pull-up bar and weights (he does between 500 and
1,000 push-ups a day)—and then he and I sit in a small room and talk
about the Pulitzer Prize. “It was one of those things I heard about in
school,” he says, “but I never thought I’d be a part of it. [When I
heard I got it], I thought, to be recognized in an academic world
. . . whoa, this thing really can take me above and beyond. It’s one
of those things that should have happened with hip-hop a long time ago.
It took a long time for people to embrace us—people outside of our
community, our culture—to see this not just as vocal lyrics, but to
see that this is really pain, this is really hurt, this is really true
stories of our lives on wax. And now, for it to get the recognition that
it deserves as a true art form, that’s not only great for myself, but it
makes me feel good about hip-hop in general. Writers like Tupac, Jay Z,
Rakim, Eminem, Q-Tip, Big Daddy Kane, Snoop . . . It lets me know
that people are actually listening further than I expected. When I
looked up at that man on the podium today, I just had countless pictures
in my mind of my mother putting me in suits to go to school. Suit and
tie, from the dollar store, from thrift shops, when I was a kid.” He
recalls his seventh-grade teacher Mr. Inge, who turned him on to poetry:
“It wasn’t a traditional English class,” he says. “It was more of an
artistic exercise. He told us to ‘write something only you can
understand, then pass it on to the next person.’ ” He tells me about
the visit with his parents to the White House (“Obama reached out”).
“My mother wore a black-and-brown dress; she made sure to wear her
best.” And, he tells me, “it [took me back] to talking to my
grandma, when she was alive, and I was always thinking what it would be
like if we had a black president. She had some hope . . .”

And even though Kendrick has had political songs, such as “XXX” and
“Alright”—which became an anthem for Black Lives Matter marches—he
says he doesn’t talk much about politics because “I just get too
frustrated.” I ask him how he feels about Kanye West’s statements about
Trump and about slavery and, after a long pause, he says, “He has his
own perspective, and he’s on this whole agree to disagree thing, and I
would have this conversation with him personally if I want to.” I ask
about his song “LOVE,” on DAMN., and he says, “That’s one of my first
real personal love songs; it’s personal for me, but it’s a universal
feeling when people listen to it.” But as for his own personal love
relationship with Alford, he doesn’t talk about it, he says, because “I
want something that’s just for me.”

Since he says he was confident as a kid, and he’s confident now, why
were there all those self-doubts he’s written about that came in
between? “I never thought about it like that,” he says. “That’s a
question I’m going to ask myself tonight. Maybe it’s that fear . . .
a lot of artists have a fear of success, they can’t handle it; some
people need drugs to escape. For me, I need the microphone—that’s how
I release it. And just figuring out a new life. Maybe thinking that I’m
doing something wrong, or that I’m a little bit different or gifted.
It’s the same thing as not wanting to accept compliments. Just wanting
to work harder.” As for what’s next: “I don’t know,” he says. “And
that’s the most fun part, the most beautiful part.” I ask him if, as he
sings in “ELEMENT,” he would “die for this shit,” and he says,
without a second’s hesitation, “I would.”