Kendrick Lamar On Portraying Drug Abuser In ‘Power’: “It’s A Character That I Know So Well”

does kendrick lamar do drugs

The Summertime Sadness singer has announced she will be touring the UK next year. The leader of City of Wolverhampton Council is in favour of a memorial in the singer’s home town. Lamar responded with a fiery verse on the song Like That, declaring that there was no “big three – it’s just big me”. During a performance at the BET Awards, he boasted that his skills had “tucked a sensitive rapper back in his pyjama clothes”. The line was interpreted as a reference to Drake, whose soul-baring blend of rap and R&B had changed the sound of hip-hop. The rapper, whose real name is Travis Savoury, pleaded guilty to assault, but the prostitution charges were dropped.

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  • After starting their family, Kendrick Lamar’s parents, Paula Oliver and Kenneth “Kenny” Duckworth, struggled to make ends meet, relying on government welfare and food stamps.
  • Other sober rappers include Macklemore, Kendrick Lamar, Ice-T, and Andre 3000.
  • We are committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what information we hold.
  • Children who grow up with incarcerated family members are also more likely to be incarcerated themselves (Martin 2017).

The Canadian goaded his Compton adversary by dropping yet another diss track. Then, on 21 April, Kanye West sided with Kendrick Lamar, releasing a remix of Like That where he took aim at Drake’s major label record deal, suggesting he’d been short-changed. “I ain’t gonna lie to y’all the past two days felt terrible,” he told the audience, explaining that he’d caved into pressure to respond to Lamar’s diss.

  • “He said Trump has got to wake up,” my mom added, likely proud of herself for having found a way to sneak some God talk into the politics of the day.
  • As I write this, he hasn’t dropped any videos for any GNX tracks yet.
  • Muller and Roehrkasse use the concept of class permeability to weigh the impacts of having imprisoned family members and living in neighborhoods with high incarceration rates.

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The Pulitzer had never gone to a work of popular music before that; it was rare for a jazz artist to even win. It hasn’t gone to another work of popular music since then, either. When Kendrick Lamar is really on, he can sound like chaos embodied.

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He’s donated thousands to Red Cross and headlined a concert benefitting homeless women and children and people in need in India. The couple subsequently packed up to move to California, eventually settling in Compton. “They were going to go to San Bernardino. But my Auntie Tina was in Compton. She got ’em a hotel until they got on their feet, and my mom got a job at McDonald’s,” Lamar told Rolling Stone. Barely getting by at the time, Oliver and Duckworth juggled between sleeping in their car and motels. “Eventually, they saved enough money to get their first apartment, and that’s when they had me,” the “DNA.” rapper added. Despite his legendary artistry, Lamar has been faced with great measures of tragedy through his years.

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does kendrick lamar do drugs

“It was outside my apartment unit. A guy was out there serving his narcotics and somebody rolled up with a shotgun and blew his chest out,” he shared during an interview with NPR. Unsurprisingly, these unfortunate incidents ended up shaping Lamar and influencing his music. Since getting his alcohol rehab big break in the industry, Lamar has continuously addressed police brutality in his songs.

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does kendrick lamar do drugs

“Until you come back to these commandments … we’re gonna be under this curse because He said He’s gonna punish us — the so-called blacks, Hispanics and Native American Indians are the true children of Israel.” He penned the longest book in the Old Testament, Jeremiah, as well as Kings and Lamentations. Think of them as his three major-label studio LPs, the same number contained in Lamar’s TDE/Aftermath/Interscope discography.

“Your third album was massive and that was your prime,” he continued, “I was trailing does kendrick lamar do drugs right behind and I just now hit mine.” Drake appeared to address Kendrick’s verse in a concert in Florida, with a pugnacious message to the crowd. The power of the verse can’t really be conveyed in print, but when it ends with Lamar promising to put all of Drake and J Cole’s “dogs” in the “pet sematary” – the name of a Stephen King 1983 horror novel – you know a fuse has been lit.

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does kendrick lamar do drugs

He’s also no prosperity pimp, pushing a gospel of good-and-plenty in the here and now. Rather, it’s God’s judgement, and our collective failings, with which he’s most concerned. In some ways I suspect this is the response Lamar set out to provoke.

  • He can do a lot of things with it, but he usually exaggerates that quality to a near-comical degree.
  • Rap moved in about a million aesthetic directions after “The Symphony,” but the primal power of that minimal gut-punch drums-and-piano beat never went anywhere.
  • In the interview with Kemp above, Lamar spoke of his preparation for the role and his satisfaction at playing someone he could relate to from real-life experiences growing up in Compton, Calif.
  • Be sure to check out the full 2025 GRAMMYs nominations list ahead of Music’s Biggest Night on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025.
  • “I know murder, conviction, burners, boosters / burglars, ballers dead, redemption / scholars, fathers dead with kids / and I wish I was fed forgiveness,” he raps.

I know it doesn’t matter either way in the sense of appreciating his music, but I find it funny that I’ve heard him say both. Lamar says that he wants to tell the public that there are times when you can’t follow a trend just because it has become popular.

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