Byron Nelson
Kendrick Lamar is relatively quiet on social media. The California native recently shared why he is not on social media
My social media, most of the time, is completely off,” he shared with the New York Times . “Because I know, like … I can easily smell my own s***, I know. … Like, I’m not one of those dudes that be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I know how good I am,’ but I also know the reason why I’m so good is because God’s blessed me with the talent to execute on the talent.”
K Dot is regularly regarded as a rap deity of Compton, but expressed that he does not want to overfill himself, “The moment that you start getting lost in your ego, that’s when you start going down.”
Speaking of Kendrick Lamar, Wack 100 was recently on Clubhouse and shared a story about Lamar early on in his career.
“Y’all look at Kendrick Lamar, and [he’s] probably worth about 500 million or $600 million right now, right? Listen, I remember when Kendrick Lamar was K-Dot, Jay Rock’s “Hype Man.” I remember their first trip to New York. Me and [DJ Kay] Slay were out in Long Island doing a talent show, Top Dawg hit me, and Two T’s said man the homie is in town. They want to pull up on you. They pulled up on me six deep in a Durango. I’m like, what are you doing out in New York, he says Wack, we just came out here, and we didn’t know what the f*** we were going to run into; we was hoping we ran into something. I said, we got a little talent show, and we got everybody coming out to perform Bun B, everybody was coming out. We got a little thing going on in Long Island let’s roll out there.
“We get out there. This was when Papoose had his buzz going. Everybody taking the stage, I get Jay Rock on stage, and Top Dawg says, “ay Wack, let’s get him up there. I’m like, Top Dawg, the n*** Papoose just did ‘Alphabetical Slaughter,” bro, you don’t want no n*** to come after that. He’s like, no, he can handle it. Could you get the mic and get him on stage? This is K Dot at this time, and he get up there quietly… Then he murders the microphone. I tell Top, hey listen; I’m a 30-hour, [Dj Klay] Slay I’m going to put you all together; I’ll catch you at 4 am [The Mid Night Express] the breakfast spot. I’m going to my room and going to sleep. Slay, take these n**** to all the strip clubs and spin the records… K Dot was under that for seven to eight years, grinding, hype manning in the studio, and writing.”
Wack added, ” Nobody knew who he was, and he drop his first project, Section.80 Independent TDE… K Dot drops his first project ‘Section.80,’ it does 20K first week. Nothing n*** might be ready to give up right? It don’t do nothing. They stay in the pocket Top Dawg and them came together at the round table. They switch somethings up K Dot becomes Kendrick Lamar and then we see these other records, and he get the [deal] with Inter Scope [records], Section.80 damn near four-time, five-time platinum.” right now.”
Lupe Fiasco was appointed MLK’s visiting lecturer at MIT in May. His appointment to the university was announced along with associate theatre professor Eunice Ferreira and documentary filmmaker Louis Massiah, who are all considered experts in the arts and humanities.
“I been holding this for a while. I’ll put together something more sophisticated later that really captures the nuance and gravity but for now I’ll just say it straight and raw: I’m going to teach Rap at MIT,” Lupe tweeted following the announcement.
He continued: “Syllabus isn’t built yet but I’m thinking its fruit to be had in looking at neuromorphic computation through the lens of Rap as a lossless data compression model with a dash of energy efficiency via refining Landauer’s principle applied to cytoarchitectonics. And some rapping…”
