Kendrick Lamar is on the cover of the new Rolling Stone issue, and it comes with a bold statement as the title: ‘The Greatest Rapper Alive.’ As bold as it may be, many can disagree with it.
In the feature interview with Brian Hiatt, K.Dot talks about his biggest vice, carrying himself as a man even when he was a kid, growing up with a dad around unlike a lot peers, taking action rather than speaking on Donald Trump, sitting inside the prison Nelson Mandela was jailed and much more.
Check out an excerpt below.
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. What are your vices at this point?
My biggest vice is being addicted to the chase of what I’m doing. It turns into a vice when I shut off people that actually care for me, because I’m so indulged spreading this word. Being on that stage, knowing that you’re changing people’s lives, that’s a high. Sometimes, when you’re pressing so much to get something across to a stranger, you forget people that are closer to you. That’s a vice.Do you ever feel like you should be having more fun?
Everybody’s fun is different. Mine is not drinking. I drink casually, from time to time. 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. Shit, that’s fun for me. You see it through their eyes and you see ’em light up.On “ELEMENT.” you make that funny distinction between “black artists and wack artists.” What, to you, defines a wack artist?
I love that question. How would I define a wack artist? A wack artist uses other people’s music for their approval. We’re talking about someone that is scared to make their own voice, chases somebody else’s success and their thing, but runs away from their own thing. That’s what keeps the game watered-down. Everybody’s not going to be able to be a Kendrick Lamar. I’m not telling you to rap like me. Be you. Simple as that. I watch a lot of good artists go down like that because you’re so focused on what numbers this guy has done, and it dampers your own creativity. Which ultimately dampers the listener, because at the end of the day, it’s not for us. It’s for the person driving to their 9-to-5 that don’t feel like they wanna go to work that morning.
Read the whole interview over at Rolling Stone’s website.
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