Videos : Kendrick Lamar : Poetic Justice (Feat. Drake)
Videos : Kendrick Lamar : Poetic Justice (Feat. Drake)
Who Is Kendrick Lamar?
Kendrick Lamar likes to compare himself to Tupac Shakur. But Tupac wasn’t from Los Angeles and didn’t know his father growing up. By the time Tupac was 23, he had already been shot multiple times and begun serving a prison sentence. Lamar, on the other hand, was born and raised in Compton. His parents are still married. He’s 23, and so far he has dodged the almost inescapable bullets that dart through what he calls his “mad city.” Enjoying this Kendrick Lamar Biography? Keep reading!
Even so, Lamar seems to share Tupac’s soul; better still, he seems an evolution of it. The line between “Pac the Playboy” and “Tupac the Tortured Poet” was drawn with an indelible marker, but the sides of Lamar’s personality bleed into one another. The chorus of “P&P” (an ode to “Pussy and Patron” punctuated by a girl pouting, “Hey, what’s up, daddy”), for example, is cookie-cutter braggadocio. Its first verse, however, stacks a precarious tower of thoughts almost tipped over into rage by an incident at a gas station — and leaves him searching through his phone for a comfort he admits is temporary.
Candid vulnerability and a voice that sounds as though he’s just inhaled great mouthfuls of smoke (even though he abstains from weed) are why Lamar is on everybody’s lips. Last November, Dr. Dre (who was led to Lamar by Eminem’s manager) said out of the blue on Power 106's popular morning show Big Boy’s Neighborhood that he wanted to work with the rapper.
By now, Lamar has not only worked with Snoop Dogg and Dre, he was snapped, paparazzi-style, sitting courtside at a Lakers game with the legendary producer. His buzz has ratcheted to such a roar that he’s considered a shoo-in for XXL magazine’s “Freshman 2011 cover".
But he doesn’t want to hear that he’s the next in line to wear hip-hop’s crown. No wonder, considering that honor can be as sturdy as the ones you can get from a box at Burger King. Lamar says he still wants to be making albums when he’s 45.
“The hardest thing for me to do is to get you to know me within 16 bars,” the rapper says on a track from last fall’s O(verly) D(edicated), “Average Joe,” in which he relates a story of being shot at by a gang, even though he’s not affiliated. The problem isn’t that Kendrick Lamar can’t reveal himself. It’s that there’s too much he wants to reveal. His thoughts tumble furiously; words swarm so frantically that in one song he eventually chokes on them.
“Goin’ crazy in your head is wanting to say so much, but you can’t. I think it comes from my struggling relationship with God — my whole life, I go to sleep every night and just think about God,” he says, faltering for a moment. “Is that a trip? That’s me trying to find myself in a relationship with Him. Righteous, but at the same time being so [caught up] in the vanities of the world it messes me up inside.”
Maybe the memory of that missed opportunity is what landed 16-year-old Lamar in front of the “dude to get your music to” in Compton, DudeDawg, chief financial officer of TopDawg Entertainment. “He threw me in the booth. I freestyled for, like, an hour. He said I got raw talent.” He’s been with the company, along with one of last year’s XXL Freshmen, Jay Rock, ever since. (Read More)
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