Kid Capri Addresses Taking Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. & Putting It In Reverse (Video)
With decades worth of credentials, Kid Capri was asked about the state of Hip-Hop within the first few minutes of his interview on Ebro In The Morning, today (October 2).
The Bronx, New Yorker DJ/producer, who also dabbled with rapping declared that today’s Hip-Hop isn’t “for everybody.” He further explained that there are those who attempt to try their hand at rapping, producing, etc. merely because it seems like the trendy option.
“I’m not complaining about it,” Kid Capri said. “I will say that it’s not for everybody. What I mean by that is we’re in an area right now where anybody can slap they name up on something. [They can] call themselves something that they’re really not…Then you go to see them at their show, and they don’t have half the talent that they say they have—or what they might put out there. So, it becomes a thing where anybody just becomes a part of it because it looks cute.”
Given that Capri has worked with everyone from Madonna to JAY-Z to Big L, he explained that he wasn’t surprised when Kendrick Lamar reached out to him about appearing on April’s platinum #1 LP, DAMN.
“I did not know what [‘what happens on earth stays on earth‘] meant when I said it,” said Kid, at the top of the interview. “What happened was he said he wanted to do the album. I went down to the studio, and he started, ‘Kid, say this. Say this. Say that.’ He’d write stuff [and ask me to say it]. That’s what I did. We have a whole lot of stuff that we [did not use].”
He did add that he is appreciative of the newfound fan-base he’s received. “[Kendrick Lamar] didn’t over-saturate it with [my voice]. And the things that were said were important, and it meant something, and it left the question. For example, when I said, ‘We gonna put it in reverse,’ so many people were so messed about [what that line meant], ‘what does that mean?’ Listen to the album backwards, you’ll know…,” the 50-year-old DJ said of his vocal contribution to DAMN. “The things that was said was important. And it meant something. And he left a question…It’s so many different people I worked with. It didn’t really surprise me that he called me, but it made me happy that he called me…And it gave me a whole new fan-base. People that might have heard who Kid Capri is, but have never experienced the experience.”
In April of this year, Kid Capri provided a detailed first-person account of Boogie Down Productions’ stage hi-jacking (and stage tossing) of P.M. Dawn in the early 1990s.
#BonusBeat: This video examines the theory behind Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. being two different albums, depending on its front-to-back, and back-to-front sequencing. This was an Ambrosia For Heads theory in April, ahead of Kendrick’s confirmation in September: