Kendrick Lamar isn’t afraid to talk about his feminine side.
In an interview between himself and SZA for Harper’s Bazaar, the “Not Like Us” rapper was asked the following question by his former TDE label mate: “Do you consider yourself in touch with your feminine side?”
“I have to balance both. At first, all I knew was the masculinity, and I always kept that wall up because of my pops,” he said.
“But the more I delve deeper into my music and the more expressive I get with myself … that is the feminine energy right there. That’s not the bravado that I grew up seeing all the time. This is who I am, the soft-spoken me, and I have to own it.”
“This is where my superpower lies. Because if my job is to communicate, I need to be able to communicate with everyone,” he continued. “I need to be able to sit in front of SZA and talk to you in a way where you feel comfortable, in a way where it feels authentic from me to you, you to me, and I can’t do that with a wall up. I can’t do that with my full masculinity.”
To hear Kendrick offer such a candid response on a topic that others may not take as seriously isn’t too surprising.
The rapper is both vulnerable in and outside of his music, having previously discussed how he came around to giving therapy a try.
“You live and you experience the shit that you go through and you deal with it right then and there — or you don’t never deal with it. We learn to hold all our shit in,” he said in a 2022 featurette centered around a trip he took to Ghana. “S**t, I’m gonna keep it 100 with you: that wasn’t my forte, when people mentioned it to me. I’m still stuck how my pops think: the f**k you need therapy for? To challenge myself to go to therapy — shit, that’s like a whole new step in a whole new generation. It’s growth.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Kendrick also talked about “Not Like Us” and what it means to him.
“‘Not Like Us’ is the energy of who I am, the type of man I represent. 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.”
“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,” he continued. “If I’m thinking of ‘Not Like Us,’ I’m thinking of me and whoever identifies with that.”
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