Kendrick Lamar has been compared to Prince.
Kendrick Lamar
The 'Purple Rain' hitmaker passed away last week at the age of 57 and his longtime friend and collaborator George Clinton says the last time he was as excited by an artist as he is about Kendrick, was Prince in the Seventies.
He explained to Billboard: "I was about him the same way I'm about Kendrick Lamar now. You could see it coming. You could see he was Sly [Stone] for the new generation. This is so hard to process on my brain right now. That was just so left-field. I was not ready for anything like that. It's just hard to speak of, man."
George also called Prince "the epitome of a rock star" and praised him for the quality of his work, despite his prolific output.
He said: "When you come to the concept of a rock star, he is that. He's the epitome of that. As an artist, I think it's becoming more clear to everybody now just how much volume of work and stuff he's done, all the stuff and how fast he was doing stuff and all the stuff that I know has never come out.
"To me he kept the songs that he made very commercial and pop. Some might even say bubblegum but not really bubblegum, because he was too clever of a writer. But they were hits, so many hits, that it seemed like he was just churning out bubblegum. But they weren't. Those are stories and those are pieces of work that are gonna be around."
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