Kendrick Lamar, who graces the cover of the latest Variety, questions the definition of a "hit record.”
He said: “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 neighbourhood that were ‘hit records’ and never stood a day outside the community.
“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.”
Lamar admitted that chasing commercial success in the early stages of his career stunted his musical growth – something he still regrets. “Early, early on, I really wanted to be signed,” he recalled. “And that was a mistake, because it pushes you two steps backwards when you have this concept of ‘OK, I've got to make these three [commercial] songs in order to get out into the world and be heard.’”
Lamar added: “So there were two or three years where I wanted to be signed so badly that I'm making these same two or three repetitive demo kinds of records, and I'm hindering my growth.”
Original article by Isha Thorpe at iHeartRadio