With Kendrick Lamar‘s imminent exit from Top Dawg Entertainment soon, the talk around hip hop is why and when. In a talk with Mic, TDE president Punch touched on that very subject and had his two cents on the situation.
“I don’t even know if I would describe it that way as ready to leave, as more so ready to build his own thing. That’s a grown man right now. We watched him grow from a teenager up into an established grown man, a businessman, and one of the greatest artists of all time. So how long do you actually be signed up under somebody? It’s been almost 20 years. So it’s time to move on and try new things and venture out.
He’s doing a great job developing Baby Keem. It’s always been there, but now it’s just time and space where he can actually do it. It’s a beautiful thing to watch because that’s something that started with what we built in the beginning. To see it blossom, it’s a full-circle moment.”
In terms of the roll-out of the album and how the label will go about it:
“Yes, and no. It’s different now just because it’s different, not because it’s his last project. It’s just the evolution of where we are. Kendrick doesn’t need anybody in the studio to coach him and help him make an album anymore. He’s well capable of doing everything on his own. It’s just the timeframe that we’re in.”
And for everyone has been asking about a Black Hippy album for more than a decade, he also had something to say about the prospects of that and why it never happened:
“We definitely wanted to do a Black Hippy album. But it was such a learning experience for us, everything was new. The timing never really panned out. When one guy would be recording his album, another guy would be on tour. Everybody was never in the same timeframe. So we didn’t want to hold back; we wanted to keep going and just push further into their individual careers. In hindsight, I wish I would’ve pushed the Black Hippy album more. That was always my goal, personally. You would have to ask everybody individually to see if that’s what their goal was.”