Kendrick Lamar Covers The Holiday Issue Of GQ Style; Wears A Fur Coat

Rick Rubin: What were the inspirations along the way for you—musically, lyrically, or philosophically—that got you to this stage?
Kendrick Lamar: Oh, man. First off would have to be how I was raised. The environment. My father being a complete realist, just in the streets. And my mother being a dreamer. It starts there first, before I even heard any type of melody or lyric. That’s just DNA. It’s always the yin and the yang, the good versus the evil. And that pushed me toward the music that I love to listen to. You know, Tupac, Biggie, Jay. Your usual suspects. These were the people that was played in my household.

Was the music playing in your house your choice of music, or was it the music your parents were listening to?
Definitely my parents. My parents were fairly young in the city of Compton. So the things that they played—you know, that was the hip crowd. So I was being exposed to all these ideas, from Big Daddy Kane to Eazy-E to the Bay Area—Too Short, E-40—you know, back to Marvin Gaye and the Isley Brothers. This field of music just broadened my ideas to come. We never would’ve thought in a million years that I’d be doing it.

When did jazz find its way into your world?
It’s a trip, because I was in the studio one day, and my guy Terrace Martin noticed something about the type of sounds that I was picking. He was like, Man, a lot of the chords that you pick are jazz-influenced. You don’t understand: You a jazz musician by default. And that just opened me up. And he just started breaking down everything, the science, going back to Miles, Herbie Hancock.