Kendrick Lamar Talks Vision for ‘Big Steppers’ Tour: The “Initial Idea” Was “Hood Beethoven”
Speaking to ‘The New York Times Magazine’ in a new interview.
Kendrick Lamar spoke about being inactive on social media, his relationship with friend and collaborator Dave Free and his vision for the Big Steppers tour in a new interview with The New York Times Magazine.
The rapper hasn’t kept up much of a social media presence over the years, telling the magazine that “my social media, most of the time, is completely off.”
He went on to link the concept to one’s own ego, saying that “the moment that you start getting lost in your ego, that’s when you start going down.”
Lamar also shared a bit about his relationship with Dave Free, the co-founder of pgLang. A friend from childhood, Free was working as a computer technician when used his connections to put the emerging rapper in front of the head of Top Dawg Records. After Lamar signed to the label, Free followed suit as an in-house producer before ultimately leaving in 2020 to work on pgLang.
Later in the interview, Lamar spoke about the ongoing tour for his fifth studio album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. It’s not only Lamar’s first solo tour since DAMN., but a long one at that, seeing the rapper perform 84 live shows between June 2022 and August 2023.
The critically-acclaimed Big Steppers tour has been lauded as Lamar’s best live tour to date with a well thought out convergence of art, music and choreography.
“Hood Beethoven — that was the initial idea,” Lamar said of the tour, which manipulated light and shadows, featured a marionette and interspersed songs with voiceovers from Helen Mirren. Many critics described the artistic show and stage production as performance art.
“Now incorporate that with dance and art, and you get this contextualized, theatrical type of performance,” Lamar continued. “That’s what it built into. Then you put it all in the platform, all on the deck. It feels like a theatrical hip-hop show, and not the corny [expletive].”
In other music news, Joseph ‘Jo Mersa’ Marley, the grandson of Bob Marley, has passed away at 31.
