Kendrick Lamar Jammed With Prince Two Years Ago, and Now We Have the Electrifying Video
If there’s any comfort to be had from Prince’s untimely death two weeks ago, you’ll find it in the outpouring of new videos of Prince performances that have been popping up online ever since. One such clip comes to us via Facebook fan group the Prince Museum, who released this rare, electrifying footage of Kendrick Lamar performing live with His Royal Badness at Paisley Park in 2014.
In the video, Lamar leads the private performance with a verse of his own before Prince sings “What’s My Name” off his 1998 album Crystal Ball. According to Lamar, he and Prince subsequently logged some studio time together for his Grammy-winning album To Pimp a Butterfly, but their collaboration didn’t make the final cut due to time constraints. Though we can only imagine how a song like “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” might have sounded with Prince’s signature style on the hook, at least the new clip of them onstage together gives us a taste of what a future Lamar-Prince partnership could have been.