Kendrick Lamar writes an essay for the cover story of the Winter 2015 issue of XXL. In the piece, Kendrick Lamar writes, “I know I’m chosen.”
In the story, the TDE rapper says he can pinpoint when his life changed.
“For me, the whole complete world changed within six months of good kid, m.A.A.d. city coming out,” Kendrick Lamar says. “It wasn’t about the money change, although, that did happen, but it was like I stared seeing who I really was during that first run and learned more on the second. Either you notice who you are who are or what you ain’t pretty fast when you get fame.
As Lamar grew as a person, he says he paid particular attention to recent political events, including the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
“All of it has really struck a nerve with me because when you experience things like that personally and you know the type of hardships and pain that it brings first-hand, it builds a certain rage in you,” K. Dot says. “It brings back memories of when I’m 16 and the police come kicking the door in. They don’t care that I’m a little boy and they stumped me in my back two times and they dragged me out the house and have us all handcuffed. It brings back those memories. Memories of losing loved ones. It brings back some of the most painful memories and deepest thoughts of real life situations that I didn’t even want to address on good kid. Or wasn’t ready to. Rage is the perfect word for it.”
The rappers rage, though, is informed by his artistic standing.
“I know I’m chosen,” he says. “I know I’m a favorite. I know in my heart there’s a whole other energy and leadership side of me that I have probably run from my whole life. How much power do I want? How much can I handle? That’s the question I keep asking myself. ’Cause when you are a voice for the youth, nothing can stop you.”
What do you think of Kendrick Lamar writing his essay for the cover story of the Winter 2015 issue of XXL? What do you think of Kendrick Lamar writing, “I know I’m chosen?”
Other stories in the issue include pieces on Rhymesayers, Rick Ross and Ty Dolla $ign. Check the cover below:
For additional Kendrick Lamar coverage, watch the following DX Daily:
I like Kendrick for what he stand for u can’t hate on a nigga dat beat da odds and rapping about real shit and being TRUE to his self
Congrats! Well deserved. And he has the catalog to back it up
Good job, Soren. You should ask Dot to frame his response around Leila Sternberg’s work when you get a chance.
If you do get that chance, of course.
Or you can just ask Mac Mall.
Thank you.
what i have come to understand in my professional career if that it takes a certain amount of confidence or being resolution in what you do. I met a young man who was a leader of a group of charter schools who told me that he believed that he knew he was were God wanted him to be cause the door had been open and he had to walk confidently in faith because the opportunity was given to him. Some would call him conceited or brash because of what he would sometime say. I say an absolute confidence in him that wouldn’t waver. I can respect that in a man. Its not a false pretense or fugazi in nature. Blessing be to him.
Good shit brother. We all have a path, and when the right one is taken, why not walk with your chin up?! Peace!
Die Slow you worthless fuck.
#Drake is Real#Drake Is dope#
fuck that fake cock gobbling bitch made pop singer! #drakeisfakedrakeiswack
Well he most def is the chosen one. Kendrick i salute you brother. Live from South Africa!!!
i think he gets more love in South Africa than anywhere yeah… SpeezMeter live from Sandton, JHB Gauteng South Africa
Well spoken.
You sexy azz bitch. Fuck what any of these homo thugs think I’d still bust a nut all over your slutty face xx
The reason Kendrick feels chosen is because he is of the chosen seed of Jacob. Its not just Kendrick, but his brothas and sistas as well. Shalom tribes.
Shout out to K. dot an the whole TDE clique much success in the new year.. To the fans lets support that real.
This guy will fade away in a couple of years. His fake Afro-beatnik bullshit is played out. Remember when Digable Planets and Arrested Development were nominated for a bunch of Grammys and then fizzled out? Same shit, different era.
LOL you have to be joking. It’s been nearly 5 years since he first became famous and dude is still rising. Fade away? Never. Dude is one of the realest in the game right now, making classics and not appealing to the lean-drinking trap idiots listening to Future and Young Thug. He’s nothing like Digable Planets or Arrested Development.
Hater!
Never give up Kendrick, You are the voice of many 1000s and all those voices fall dead if You back down
God Bless You
Never say Never
legend in the making
the greatest bar none
he dropped the best album of our time, props to him
Ill to dca
Bro, you know exactly what I’m speaking on, dudes walking around wearing jeans female-style, let’s stop condoning emasculating behaviors and have these young black men be what they were meant to be not what the powers that be decide what they should be.
@ I’ll, that’s one of the realest comments that I’ve seen on here in a looong time. I don’t know how old you are but if you are young I sincerely applaud because today’s young cats don’t bother to think about or see the issues that plague our people. Keep being real-1
OVERRATED and his last album was ass all this pro black shit but never once stood up or spoke out for all the bs going on in the U.S on blacks and hispanics his spanish chick need to choke him out in his sleep and rip out those extensions he calls braids lol
So much stupid in your comment, it hurts.
Has Grammy Winner Kendrick Lamar Lost Touch With Our Real World?
Kendrick speaks to XXL, “The past few years or so has been very politically charged and controversial. From Trayvon Martin, to Eric Garner to Michael Brown and issues of police brutality and racism and for so many other reasons. All of it has really struck a nerve with me because when you experience things like that personally and you know the type of hardships and pain that it brings first-hand, it builds a certain rage in you.”
“It brings back memories of when I’m 16 and the police come kicking the door in. They don’t care that I’m a little boy and they stumped me in my back two times and they dragged me out the house and have us all handcuffed. It brings back those memories. Memories of losing loved ones. It brings back some of the most painful memories and deepest thoughts of real life situations that I didn’t even want to address on good kid. Or wasn’t ready to. Rage is the perfect word for it.”
______________________
Please take your time reading the next four paragraphs, consider the criminal, anti-social, people and community harming lifestyle Kendrick describes he and his three siblings were introduced to by their “living wild” parents.
1) In his 2015 Grammy award winning Rap Performance titled “I”, Kendrick Lamar writes, *”I’ve been dealing with depression ever since an adolescent.”*
2) During a January 20, 2011 LAWeekly interview (Google search) Kendrick, born in 1987, the same year songwriter Suzanne Vega wrote a song about child abuse and *VICTIM DENIAL* that was nominated for a Grammy award, told the interviewer:
3) *”Lamar’s parents moved from Chicago to Compton in 1984 with all of $500 in their pockets. “My mom’s one of 13 [THIRTEEN] siblings, and they all got SIX kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton,” he says.”*
4) *”I’m 6 years old, seein’ my uncles playing with shotguns, sellin’ dope in front of the apartment. My moms and pops never said nothing, ’cause they were young and living wild, too. I got about 15 stories like ‘Average Joe.'”*
Now go back and read how the police treated Kendrick when they raided his home TEN YEARS after he first witnessed his family members “living wild,” selling drugs, using firearms to protect and enforce their community and people harming drug operation.
Again I ask, has Kendrick Lamar lost touch with reality?
Is Kendrick actually blaming the police for him be treated like a dangerous criminal felon with the potential to cause harm to police while they are attempting to protect The Duckworth’s peaceful neighbors from armed drug dealers who do their best to profit from destroying people’s lives and derive pleasure from actively causing chaos in their community?
I read that Kendrick believes he is ‘The Chosen One’.
Frankly, if Kendrick continues denying his parents are responsible for his depression by depriving him and his siblings of a safe, fairly happy Average Joe and Josie American kid childhood, I will view him as a man who had the opportunity to make a significant change and blew it because he is not strong enough to be honest with himself and others about his abusive childhood.
“The Chosen One” is a title of high regard, exclusively reserved for an exceptionally truthful, honest common man or woman who genuinely seeks to improve the lives of others.
If Kendrick continues to deny the source of his near lifelong depression, he will not be selflessly helping others who share his abusive up-bringing, in my opinion excluding him earning the status as The Chosen One.
I wonder how little Kendrick and his classmates reacted when their elementary school teacher introduced the DARE presenter and they learned about the real dangers of drugs and how they harm people, including their parents? *Cognitive Dissonance*
[/preach]
Peace.
Black *(Children’s)* Lives Matter; Take Pride In Parenting; End Our National Epidemic of Child Abuse and Neglect; End Community Violence, Police Fear & Educator’s Frustrations
You – as with so many other critics of African American culture have missed a vital point. In your assessment of Kendrick – you’ve indicted his parents, convicting them of the crime of “doing everything that could do to destroy their peaceful community”.
Let’s begin there. Compton, has had no peace since the U.S. government (C.I.A., R. Regan, Oliver North) put crack in the streets of AFRICAN AMERICAN neighborhoods in the early 80’s. Kendrick’s parents had simply become swallowed up by the agenda of THIS NATION’S leadership. Secondly behavior is a social construct. People who are socialized together tend, with some exception, very similarly. Kendrick’s parents are from Chicago – which has had political corruption and an equally sinister relationship with its African American citizenship, and both for as long as we have supposedly been rid of Jim Crow. Being young and having grown up in Chicago during the 80’s would suggest that his parent’s behavior and social conditioning was par for the course.
Your commentary is of the sort that causes me to question whether you or not you are black. Further still, whether you are consciously black, and whether or not you have stepped foot into the hoods of this nation that are filled with the N!GGERS and the N!GGER conditions that have been socially and economically ENGINEERED to be the way they are, by our government, for the security of WHITES.
Good parent’s come from GOOD COMMUNITIES. Either by one’s native birth into a GOOD COMMUNITY or their adoption into one by some social benevolence of either empathetic people, or pure luck. In the neighborhoods being discussed here, I suppose these good parents were supposed to acquire their goodness through some form of magic??? What is to be said of the political and socio economic dynamics that have been engineered by people with real power, to stifle the uprising of consciousness and economic stability among the Africans who live there??
I grew up in Greenwood, MS, where the local economy is cotton and soy beans, and the education level is SH!T. I have seen the asshole of depravity in this nation. I have seen the, near psychotic state of HUMANITY that is created for people who have been forced to practice capitalism, and so, without capital. All while every image of someone who looks like me, coming through a television or radio, book or film, somehow happens to be morally and spiritually defunct, having no regard for his own survival individually nor generationally, being completely bewildered, lost in both time and history, seeking comfort from jumpman logo’s and big booty women. Then seeing those images reinforced with children who only want to belong, and to do so in a world that for half a millennium has continued to very persuasively convince Africans that they indeed do NOT BELONG. I will not even begin to explain the origins of the self hatred and mental illness that MUST NECESSARILY accompany this the types of abhorrent being exhibited by Africans in America. However I will say that the FARMING of these mental illness into the soil of our collective consciousness was necessary to JUSTIFY white supremacy both in the minds of Africans, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY in the mind’s of whites.
I wonder if you can say you have the first hand, traumatic experience of living with these realities?
I would like to know where you think the substance of GOOD parenting is to be acquired, in people who have been products of communities that have historically been marginalized and have had the few exceptional people who manage to succeed be sucked out of the hood and into white corporate America – WHERE THEY HAVE DONE ALL THEY CAN TO DENOUNCE THEIR AFRICAN CONNECTION TO THE OTHER 46 MILLION OF US ????
As for Kendrick being the chosen one. It seems to me that Kendrick is choosing HIMSELF. He seems to be doing so without the permission of his critics. He seems to be doing so without the permission of ANYONE. Seems to me that Kendrick has freed himself. He seems to have emancipated himself of any debt to society accept the ones that he has imposed upon himself. It seems that from his position of experience and of observation, that he has a unique perspective of both a boxed in view of our condition from the block, AS WELL as the GLOBAL condition for African’s the world over.
How arrogant is it that you and others like you assume that if Black folk would simply just BE GOOD PARENTS, that our condition’s and our relationship with a system of POLICING that has its VERY ORIGINS in ANTI BLACKNESS, some how we will achieve the American dream. Black folk in America have been put to sleep by a constant barrage of terrorism at the hands of this nations leadership, it’s institutions, it’s religion, it’s media, it’s ENTER TAIN MENT industry, and most tragically of all – by the self perpetuating bewilderment of generation after generation of lost people.
Kendrick has demonstrated the 180 degree perspective change that occurs when those of us who can find a way to wake up eventually do so. He has done so from a position of great influence, which has NOT been allowed throughout our history to go unchecked as can be observed with the taking of the live’s of EVERY effective outspoken leader of African’s this nation has ever known.
If Dot is so inclined to call himself a leader, to a people who now have almost allowed every mechanism of culture be co-opted by this demonic capitalist system, I for one – am prepared to carry the banner.
As a 35 year old student of hiphop, it is our voice and it has almost been snuffed out.
Public Enemy
BDP
Tribe
Goodie Mob
OutKast
Nas
2pac
and now
J. Cole
Kendrick Lamar
-DowJonez
You need a life
You have to know your comment was pure ramblings–nothing more, nothing less.
This will surely go over most of the readers that frequent this sites head. Don’t fret intelligence can’t be taught it’s a gift most don’t have. Good to know someone else can connect the dots.
It’s my life that I’m here to defend. By what measure have you concluded that I have some deficiency of livelihood ?
Look at all those f*ck niggas hatin on King Kendrick and been doin just that since he made it to the top and is sittin on the throne. HiiiPower bitches, stand for something or die in the morning.
King Kendrick? Lol ok Armonio you should start a Kendrick blog and join his fan club and get some free stickers to put on your ten speed
Good job kenny!????????
Shoulda went to the million man march. I don’t trust Kendrick no more.
Props to you, bro. These idiots walking around with their tight jeans on, acting feminine et al., might learn how to be men, black men at that, fuck all that fake ‘liberalism’ /emo/homo/metro-sexual b.s they are being fed. Just know filter the weak ones out of your circle because the powers that be will try to come at you.
just so you know iv seen kendrick in tight jeans stop worrying about how they dress and listen to te music
To Pimp A Butterfly sucks unless your poor and black then its the best album ever made lol
Im in the top 5% of income for Africans in America-
this is one of the best albums ever created – in ANY genre!
King Kendrick