Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When he was eight years old, Kendrick Lamar had his first brush with rap royalty. Tupac Shakur and Dr Dre were shooting the “California Love” video in the Compton neighbourhood of Los Angeles, and Lamar’s father took him to watch the action unfolding not far from their home. “It was like pandemonium . . . He put me on his shoulders, and there they was: Dr Dre and Tupac right there [with] a white Bentley,” Lamar later recalled. Fifteen years later, Lamar had the chance to recount that story to Dre in a recording studio, a full-circle moment he described as “very surreal”. Yet he also believes that seeing the two rap legends in 1995 had led him to that studio. “It was already designed and destiny.”Today, the 37-year-old Lamar stands without peer in the rap world. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2017 album DAMN., which the committee called “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism”. Last week, he captured five Grammy awards for “Not Like Us,” a “diss” track that accused fellow rapper Drake of predatory behaviour towards young women and triggered legal action from Drake in response. And on Sunday he will perform at the Super Bowl, which is expected to draw an audience of more than 100mn. Onstage at the Grammys, after prevailing over stars including Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, he declared: “Nothing more powerful than rap music. I don’t care what it is. We are the culture”. Lamar says these accolades help him in his mission to prove rap is an art form. “When people talk about rap, man, the conversations I hear, they think it’s just rap and it’s not an actual art form,” he told Apple Music this week. “[People] kind of belittle it. So I love to see it get that kind of recognition.” Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was born in 1987, a moment when a distinctly West Coast brand of rap music was coming to life in Compton’s roller rinks and house parties. A year and a half later, NWA’s influential Straight Outta Compton brought Compton’s gang violence and police brutality to life with tough beats, inventive sampling and lyrics that were violent, misogynistic and often wickedly funny. Lamar’s parents, Paula Oliver and Kenny Duckworth, moved to Compton in 1984 from Chicago’s South Side. Kenny had been running with an infamous street gang, and Paula demanded that he stop. The family relied on food stamps and lived in subsidised housing. From an early age, Lamar witnessed gang wars and shootings. “I would wake up one morning, and it would be cartoons and cereal and walking back from school. And at 4pm, we’d be having a house party ’til 11pm . . . and people [were] shooting each other outside the door”, he told Vanity Fair. He fell in love with hop-hop at just four years old. As a teenager, an English teacher introduced him to poetry and encouraged him to pursue creative writing. Lamar began making music in the studio “to do something other than being in the streets”. In 2012 Dre signed him to Interscope, the outlaw record label that Jimmy Iovine and Ted Field built in the 1990s, home to Snoop Dogg and other California rap stars. With the release of good kid, m.A.A.d city, Lamar was transformed from an underground act to a major label artist capable of selling millions of albums. Today, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant rappers in the history of the genre, on a level with his childhood heroes. Long before their beef, Drake and Lamar — the two biggest rappers this century — were occasional collaborators. While Drake helped make rap into the most popular genre in the US, Lamar cemented rap’s position as a form of poetry. The two men are keenly aware of these stereotypes. Drake wrote in the diss track “Family Matters” that Kendrick is “always rappin’ like you ’bout to get the slaves freed”. After releasing a couple of monster albums — including DAMN., which sold more than 600,000 copies in its first week — Lamar seemed to turn away from the spotlight. In 2022 he debuted an introspective concept album about therapy that made less of a commercial splash. But last year, his feud with Drake catapulted him back into the forefront of pop culture. The two rappers spent last spring hurling increasingly personal insults. At the height of the frenzy, Lamar dropped four songs in the span of five days, culminating in “Not Like Us”, which was widely deemed as the knockout punch that defeated Drake in rap’s civil war. The song has become one of the biggest in Lamar’s career. The audience at the Grammy’s erupted when it won record of the year, singing along to one of the most lethal lines: “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A Minor”. Off the back of that success, Lamar in November dropped his sixth album, GNX, named after the Buick muscle car that was released the year he was born. GNX is something of a victory lap, as well as a tribute to LA: its lyrics reference Compton, the I-10 freeway and film director Spike Lee. On Sunday, Lamar will become the first solo rap artist to headline a Super Bowl show when he takes the stage at the Superdome in New Orleans. He says he wants to bring his “LA energy” — a sense of “being in the now and being just locked into how I feel”. “This is me, this is Kendrick Lamar, 37 years old and I still feel like I’m elevated”[email protected], [email protected]
