Lamar and Swift have been vocal in their support of each
other — and they also genuinely dig each other's tunes
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Last night, Taylor Swift took to Instagram to celebrate her record album
sales the best way she knew how: by jamming out to Kendrick Lamar:
Tay’s love for Kendrick, of course, is no secret. In a
Septemberinterview with Rolling
Stone, she said his “Backseat Freestyle” (which is the song she’s
lip-synching above) is her “go-to” jam to help her “immediately go from feeling
victimized to feeling awesome.” She proudly declared that she knew every word
to the three-and-a-half-minute track.
Then there was the time Taylor rather enthusiastically rocked outto
Kendrick’s performance at the Grammys while the rest of the crowd sat demurely
in their seats. Who would have expected T-Swift to be such a big K.Dot fan?
(K.Dot was Kendrick Lamar’s former rap name, in case you were unaware. We’re
assuming Tay-Tay already knew that.)
Here’s the thing, though: the love is not unrequited. It’s
reciprocal and it’s real (real,
real, really really real). Yup — Kendrick feels the love too.
After Taylor’s shout-out in Rolling Stone,
Kendrick had nothing but gratitude and praise for the country-pop singer. “I
appreciate Taylor Swift for supporting not only my music but just the hip-hop
culture,” he said in an
interview with the Associated Press. “There’s really no gap. It’s
music and it feels good.” He added that her comments helped show that hip-hop
is something that canand should be enjoyed by
everybody. “Some people always try to lock it down and categorize it for one
particular listener,” he said. “But it moves all, even people from other
genres.”
And in a recent
interview with The Fader, Kendrick once again
confirmed that he respects Taylor as a fellow musician — and, again, as someone
who appreciates and enjoys music that’s wildly different from her own.
“Shout out to Taylor Swift,” he said. “You can’t put great
music in different genres. I enjoy great music outside of my own music all the
time, so I definitely can see where she’s coming from when she says that she
listens to the record, and it’s a great thing for her to acknowledge that and
put that good energy out into the world like that.”
But then, things got even better. When the conversation
turned to Taylor’s recent hit “Shake It Off,” Kendrick proved that he doesn’t
just respect her as a musician — he also genuinely enjoys her work. “I love
that song,” he said, before launching into an impromptu sing-along:
“Yeah, I ain’t playin'” he said after. “I say what I mean, I
mean what I say.”
Soon, a Dallas radio station asked Kendrick to freestyle
over the “Shake It Off” beat, since he’s clearly such a big fan of the tune —
and of course, he totally goes for it. “K.Dot, you know that he’s hot” he
spits. “I can do rhythm, hip-hop, I can do pop.”
We can only hope the Kendrick/Taylor love continues to grow
into something big and concrete (yet still, of course, platonic) enough for
Taylor to one day write a song about it — a song that Kendrick would then
cover.
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