Tag: kendrick lamar

In Paper magazine’s upcoming ‘Nowstalgia’ issue, they talked to three huge names who have a big impact in Hip-Hop, to get their take on one rapper each who truly changed their worlds.

Kendrick Lamar: I remember when I was five or six years old, waking up one morning and seeing this guy bust through the TV screen, rapping over some song called “We Want Eazy” — I think the concept of the video was that he was actually in jail and he had to get to his show and the only way to get to his concert was to film him from jail, and he eventually busted through the jail and came onstage. I remember looking at that video and just feeling like, “Man, this dude feels like an action superhero.” Little did I know, Eazy-E came from my same neighborhood in Compton.

My pops would play N.W.A. records all day, every day; my uncles would play it. My older cousins would play it. And I would go outside and see the same imagery in my reality as the things they were talking about on the record. From the way these guys talked to the way they carried themselves to the type of activities that they were involved in, the whole thing was a real life introspective report from the ghetto. Looking at them and sitting inside my community, it left a big toll on me because it always let me know that no matter how far I go, I gotta stay in reach of the people and what’s going on in

the neighborhood, whether it’s a harsh reality or not.