Kendrick Lamar has thanked Dave Free for stopping him from “going crazy” in the studio, saying he suffered from Pinky and the Brain syndrome and that Dave keeps him in check.
K. Dot and Nigerian singer Tems sat down for a conversation about music and creativity for Interview Magazine on Tuesday (August 29), and the latter asked the former who has helped keep him sane during some of his deep-dive studio sessions.
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“I’m the kind of person that if you leave me in the studio by myself for like two days, I turn into one of those mad scientists in a cartoon,” Tems said, to which Kendrick agreed.
“I’m the same way. I call it the Pinky and the Brain syndrome,” the Compton rapper replied. “You need at least one or two people that you really trust to be like, ‘You know what? You’re going crazy.'”
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When asked who that person was for him, Kendrick quickly noted his manager and pgLang partner Dave Free, as well as his longtime producer Sounwave.
“I can relate to that, because my boy, Dave [Free] — my partner, actually — he started as one of my managers, but he was a creative also,” he continued. “Along with my producer Sounwave, I kind of lean on him to know if I’m going the right way.”
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Dave and Kung Fu Kenny have been thick as thieves for years, and music aside recently announced that their pgLang collective would be producing a live-action comedy film alongside South Park co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker for Paramount Pictures.
Written by Vernon Chatman, the movie is set to “depict the past and present coming to a head when a young Black man, who is interning as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum, discovers that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his.
Elsewhere in his sit-down with Interview, Kendrick said early on in his career that he used to “study” 50 Cent’s music and interviews, and that he once dropped a “jewel” that has stuck with him to this day.
“Now, I’ve always studied 50 Cent’s music and watched his interviews, and someone asked if he was a conscious artist,” K. Dot recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah, I’m a conscious artist because I have a conscience.
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“That shit blew me away. It gave me a different perspective — 50 drops a lot of jewels that give me perspective, but that one right there gave me a sense of, okay, a lot of artists live and know how to project duality.”
He added: “That’s the true gift, because that’s what life is about in its wholeness. When I seen that I said: ‘I can relate to that,’ and what you’re saying is confirmation that that’s still alive. It’s really dope to hear another artist say it. Lets us know we not crazy.”
