Kendrick Lamar has a lot going on right now, but you’d never know it. Backstage in Duluth, Georgia, a few hours before his latest sold-out arena show, he’s radiating unearthly levels of clear-eyed serenity from his perch on a dressing-room couch. He’s wearing a peach sweatsuit and white Nikes, and carrying a plastic cup of green juice – “a little kale, apple, spinach. Shit good.” Read more…

The fuel must work: He has a Number One pop hit with “HUMBLE.,” an elaborate video with Rihanna about to drop, a couple of dozen tour dates left to go. 

Freakish things keep happening in 2017, most of them awful, but at least one anomaly is for the better. Popular music’s most exciting and innovative young artist – the best rapper of his generation, and that’s just the start – has somehow become one of its biggest. And Lamar landed there without compromise, after releasing three classic albums in a row.

His major-label debut, 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, was vivid autobiography, a virtuosic deconstruction of gangsta rap centered around tales of a childhood in Compton, where many of his friends were gangbangers and police harassment was a constant threat. The follow-up, 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, was a dense, cerebral, jazzy, dazzling meditation on race in America that spawned one of the decade’s most important songs, the Black Lives Matter anthem “Alright” – but no radio smashes. On his latest, this year’s DAMN., he switched lanes, managing to make an LP that’s just as smart and conceptual, but tighter, hookier and more accessible.

Lamar, 30, is pleased with his recent commercial triumphs, but says it’s not the goal: “If I can make one person – or 10 million people – feel a certain type of euphoria in my music, that’s the whole point.”

Read the interview and more HERE.