The Gospel According to Kendrick by Lisa Robinson (excerpt)
I ask Kendrick how he balances his enormous success and celebrity with his extreme work ethic. “You can get put in an environment that can bring down your integrity and your fight,” he says. “What gives me an advantage in my upbringing is the duality of seeing one of the most beautiful moments of me being 6 years old, to the most tragic moment of being 13 or 14, and make that connection so the person [listening] can really see the conflict. It was a mindfuck, for sure. I would wake up one morning, and it would be cartoons and cereal and walking back from school. And a 4 P.M., we’d be having a house party ‘til 11 P.M. . . . and people [were] shooting each other outside the door. That was my lifestyle. And it’s not only mine; it’s so many other indviduals’. And I wanted to tell that story.”
I ask him about the guns in his Piru (aka Bloods) neighborhood in Compton, and he says, “I have compassion for, and more understanding rather frustration with my homies, because I know it’s not 100 percent their fault. When I look at how society has shaped out communities, it’s been generations passed down of putting people in cages to battle each other.”
Vanity Fair, August 2018
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