It’s not every day you see artists from today’s generation pay homage to those who came before them, but Kendrick Lamar is one of the few that does so on a consistent basis. Not only did he do it in song form through “Mortal Man” on To Pimp A Butterfly (keeping 2pac‘s name alive), he also penned a letter to Mr. Shakur on the anniversary of his death.
Now K Dot is paying homage to another West Coast legend, Eazy-E, writing a letter about the importance of his music and how it affected him growing up.
Straight Outta Compton is fresh in everybody’s minds after the movie came out, but Kendrick has known about Eazy and N.W.A. way before that. He was listening to their music as a toddler and it had a great impact on how he gets his own message across in his raps and recognizes the influence he had on a whole generation of artists that came after him.
“I remember when I was five or six years old, waking up one morning and seeing this guy bust through the TV screen, rapping over some song called “We Want Eazy” — I think the concept of the video was that he was actually in jail and he had to get to his show and the only way to get to his concert was to film him from jail, and he eventually busted through the jail and came onstage. I remember looking at that video and just feeling like, “Man, this dude feels like an action superhero.” Little did I know, Eazy-E came from my same neighborhood in Compton.
What made Eazy special was that he was telling a different type of truth, a truth that wasn’t heard in music yet. Before them, rap was fun — you had your battles and whatnot, but this time around, when it came to what Eazy wanted to do, being a visionary, he had the idea of speaking the honest truth, and I think it really resonated with a lot of people because it was the shock value of, “Okay, these guys are really standing out and focused on telling their reality, no matter how pissed off you get by it.” And it got interest from people. People actually wanted to hear it and wanted to know what was going on.
I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Eazy and I wouldn’t be able to say the things that I say, talk about my community the way I talk about it, for good or for bad. He’s 100% influenced me in terms of really being not only honest with myself, but honest about where I come from and being proud of where I come from.”
Read the entire letter over at PAPER Magazine.
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