Kendrick Lamar Tops the Charts

Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar has the number one album in the country:

Kendrick Lamar lands his fourth No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart as his latest release, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, launches atop the list (dated May 28). He’s debuted at No. 1 with each of his last four albums.

Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers charges in with 295,500 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending May 19, according to Luminate — the largest week of the year for any album.

The Gospel According to Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar

Lisa Robinson, writing for Variety:

I tell him that Chuck D once told me that in the 1980s, “We was broke, but we wasn’t broken,” and Kendrick says, “I love that. I felt that for sure. Because the times we had to wait for food stamps every month, or we’d run out of food and had to wait for welfare to kick in, or walk to the County building—it wasn’t about the County building; it was about the walk to the building. Because if we didn’t have that County building to walk to, I wouldn’t have built that bond with my mother, or my father, to see that this is a family. What Chuck D says resonates so much with me, because we were broke, but we had us.” I ask him if he wants to start a family and he says, “This is the constant question, because I’m obsessed with my craft and what I’m doing. I know what I’m chasing for my life, even though I don’t know what it is. But it’s an urge that’s in my every day. That urge to make an ultimate connection with words to man. And I don’t feel I’ve done that yet.”

Kendrick Lamar Interviewed by I-D

Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar recently sat down for an interview with I-D:

Kendrick lives a life that befits the king of hip-hop, if you think what truly befits the king of hip-hop is to basically live in the studio looking for the perfect beat and the ultimate rhyme. “I can sometimes cut the whole world off to write a verse that is perfect to me,” he says. “I could be in the studio all day and turn the phone off and completely zone out, because I feel like this was what I was chosen to do. And I can’t let anyone get in between that.”