Here is One of the Best Articles on Kendrick Lamar Ever Written. Guaranteed.

There have been thousands of articles written about Kendrick Lamar; maybe tens of thousands. This comprehensive piece by the New York Times’ Lizzy Goodman is hands down one of the best you will ever read, if not the best. Goodman was granted unprecedented access to Kendrick over several months and has put together a piece that is both intelligent and intimate. No matter how much you know about Kendrick, you will learn something. Check out some excerpts from the article below and a link to the full piece. This is a must read for any fan of Kendrick Lamar or impeccable Hip-Hop journalism.

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Here are some excerpts from the article:

“As arrangements were being made to leave, he quietly told me, “As a kid, I used to stutter.” It felt like an oddly personal line of conversation to begin amid the chaos, but because so many people were talking at him, no one else heard him. “I think that’s why I put my energy into making music,” he continued. “That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.”

“Lamar approaches his music career with the ambition of an exacting, if sedate, C.E.O. At one point, after he left his Barclays Center dressing room, the crew descended on the catering table, eagerly assembling double-decker sandwiches and raiding the fridge for leftover Gatorade. “I’ve never been on a tour where there’s no booze,” someone grumbled. “I need alcohol.” When I was on the road with Lamar, he didn’t drink, and in general, his crew followed suit. This is part of his commitment to staying focused on his singular ambition: greatness. “There’s a certain hunger that you can sense about Kendrick,” Eminem says. “He raps to be the best rapper in the world. He competitive-raps. That’s one of the things that’s going to drive his career. He’s going to be around for a long time.”

“You could see the West tour as the first step in setting up Lamar’s second act. Often these high-profile tour pairings are politically motivated, planned by label executives and brokered by management teams. That wasn’t the case with West and Lamar. Backstage at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, West personally approached Lamar about joining him on the road. “It’s a different kind of thrill when an actual artist asks you, when Kanye asks you,” Lamar said, pronouncing West’s first name the way he always does, with the emphasis on the last syllable, kahn-YAY. “Now I know he’s really interested in what I do.” Lamar said it was easy to make that happen after the chat, but his team remembered a lot of back and forth. “Believe it or not, we were actually trying not to do the tour,” says Terrence Henderson, better known as Punch, the president of Top Dawg Entertainment, Lamar’s label. “We wanted Kendrick to be recording that whole time.”

Click here to read the full article at the New York Times.

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