“What is a hit record?” Kendrick Lamar asks, reclining on a couch at Milk Studios in Hollywood after his photo shoot. There’s a certain irony in the question, because if anyone should know how to define a hit, it’s him. And it’s key to Lamar’s appeal that he would ask this and expect an answer. Released in April, Lamar’s fourth studio album, “Damn,” was his third consecutive Billboard chart-topper. Read more…

It not only stayed at the summit for three consecutive weeks but had enough legs to return to first position 13 weeks later.

Its breakout track, “Humble,” had the most audio streams of any single this year, per BuzzAngle Music, and was one of a quintet of singles from the album to place in the top five of BuzzAngle’s singles charts.

While “Humble” surely has the raw data to prove its success, what’s harder to measure is the cultural impact of the song, or that of 2015’s “Alright” as the unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement, or the way his 2012 non-single album track “Money Trees” seemed to be blasting from every slow-moving car in Los Angeles for the better part of a year.

“What makes a hit record?” Lamar continues. “Because it has some kind of numbers behind it? Is it the amount of streams or the amount of sales or the amount of spins on the radio? Nobody can really justify which one it is, because I’ve heard hundreds of records from inside the neighborhood that were quote-unquote ‘hit records’ and never stood a day outside the community.”

The rapper argues that “Alright” was probably “the biggest record in the world” because of the sheer number of people it touched. “You might not have heard it on the radio all day, but you’re seeing it in the streets, you’re seeing it on the news, and you’re seeing it in communities, and people felt it.”

For now, those distinctions seem happily irrelevant for the 30-year-old artist, who is inhabiting the kind of rarefied sphere where the various standards of success — pop chart dominance and cultural relevance, street-level authenticity and worldwide stardom — all seem to align. Ever since he released his major label debut, “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City” via Interscope in 2012, consummate Gemini Lamar has been building a résumé as the defining hip-hop artist of his generation while also challenging conventional ideas about what the greatest rapper on Earth ought to look like today.

Read the rest of the feature HERE.