Kendrick Lamar worried fame would "hurt" his family.
Kendrick Lamar
The 'Pray for Me' hitmaker made sure to navigate his success "wisely" as he didn't want to hurt his relatives by blowing all his money on pointless things.
He told the August issue of Vanity Fair magazine: "We've got to get to the root of never having these things. I look back to when I was 16 years old and thought, What would I do with a million dollars? I'm gonna buy this, I'm gonna buy that ... Then I thought that me doing that is actually hurting people I'm responsible for. I'm the first in my family to have this kind of success, so I took it upon myself to wisely navigate this success, because I wanted them to be successful, too."
Meanwhile, Kendrick thinks hip-hop culture determines "what's cool and what's not cool".
He previously shared: "Hip-hop has always been the ultimate genre. Yeah. Even when these numbers wasn't out. Even when the stats wasn't out we always moved the needle. We always ... we were the culture. You can debate me on this all day you want. We say what's cool and what's not cool. We say what we like.
"My mom told me, I couldn't believe when she told me this. She said 1987, the year I was born, [people were saying] hip-hop was going to last six months to a year ... that tripped me out. And now you fast forward and you see Jay-Z up there, you know? Songwriters' Hall of Fame. This is us. This is who I am. He's from the projects. You dig what I'm saying?"
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