“I do believe in love and war, and I believe they both need to exist,” he says in a new interview with the “Kill Bill” artist.
Kendrick Lamar didn’t hold anything back in his vicious rap battle with Drake earlier this year, but he claims to not be an angry person at heart. In his first profile since the year-defining feud, K. Dot covered the Harper’s Bazaar 2024 November Voices Issue on Monday (Oct. 21), which had him in conversation with his former Top Dawg Entertainment teammate SZA.
“I don’t believe I’m an angry person,” Lamar declared. “But I do believe in love and war, and I believe they both need to exist. And my awareness of that allows me to react to things but not identify with them as who I am. Just allowing them to exist and allowing them to flow through me. That’s what I believe.”
While “Not Like Us” proved decisive in his feud with Drake, Kendrick defined what the phrase means to him culturally, and it’s much bigger than anything OVO-related.
“Not like us? Not like us is the energy of who I am, the type of man I represent,” he said. “Now, if you identify with the man that I represent . This man has morals, he has values, he believes in something, he stands on something. He’s not pandering.”
Lamar continued: “He’s a man who can recognize his mistakes and not be afraid to share the mistakes and can dig deep down into fear-based ideologies or experiences to be able to express them without feeling like he’s less of a man. If I’m thinking of ‘Not Like Us,’ I’m thinking of me and whoever identifies with that.”
“Not Like Us,” the scathing Drake diss mixed with Mustard’s Cali bounce, became the longest running No. 1 on the Hot Rap Songs chart earlier this month when it helmed a 21st week atop the chart to trot past Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.”
The “Not Like Us” train doesn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon, and the diss track could make its presence felt at the 2025 Grammy Awards when nominations are unveiled in November.
See Kendrick’s cover of Harper’s Bazaar below:
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