K. Dot is on the cover of the newest issue of Billboard! As the story follows, “Kendrick Lamar is wearing black sandals and white socks. It’s not a look that you associate with rappers — or with anyone, really, except possibly Alpine butterfly hunters. And yet here is Lamar, striding socks-and-sandals-first through a studio that sprawls across the second floor of a funkily dilapidated warehouse building just east of downtown Los Angeles.” Read more…

Lamar has come to this scruffy corner of the city’s Arts District for a photo shoot. Someone turns on a stereo, blasting a playlist Lamar chose himself, a mix of vintage soul and old-school hip-hop: Bill Withers’ “Harlem,” Rick James’ “Give It to Me Baby,” De La Soul’s “Me, Myself and I,”2Pac’s “All Eyez on Me.” Lamar sits down in front of a mirror to get a quick haircut from one of his friends, who has brought along an electric trimmer. Another of Lamar’s friends pipes up: “Those are some interesting huaraches, Kendrick. I didn’t know you wore sandals.” Lamar chuckles. Maybe, someone suggests, Lamar will start a new footwear trend. The rapper grins. “This look?” he says. “No one can make it trendy.”

Perhaps not. But then again, the story of Lamar’s career is one of improbable trendsetting — of transforming the marginal into the popular, of smuggling counterculture into the cultural mainstream. He was a darling of the cognoscenti — the leading light of the Los Angeles-based Black Hippy collective, a favorite of rap-Internet nerds — before his 2012 major-label debut catapulted him aboveground and made him a star. That album, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, was riveting and ambitious, a gangstabildungsroman about Compton street life whose cinematic sweep justified its heady subtitle: “A short film by Kendrick Lamar.” His second album aimed even higher. To Pimp a Butterfly, released last March, is a monument to maximalism, based, seemingly, on a determination to cram in as much music, as many ideas and emotions, as its 78:51 running time will bear. There’s hip-hop and soul and funk and jazz, autobiography and agitprop and history and reportage, politics and punchlines, exultation and anger, joy and suffering, James Brown and James Baldwin. It was a self-conscious tour de force, and an undeniable one, instantly canonized by critics. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and has sold 797,000 copies and counting, according to Nielsen Music.

Read the rest of the feature HERE.