Kendrick Lamar has shown his love for the pioneers of hip hop on multiple occasions. Tupac Shakur has been the most notable but in a new feature piece for PAPER magazine, he pays tribute to fellow Compton rapper Eazy-E.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
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.
These amazing pieces are apart of a series that will feature rappers writing to some of the fallen legends of hip hop. Eminem will write to Tupac as well as Swizz Beats writing to Notorious B.I.G.
The influence of hip hop can so far-reaching, these letters are just giving glimpes of what these icons have meant.
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