Kendrick Lamar barely spoke to Kanye West on Yeezus tour

​The article - written by Lizzy Goodman - quotes the president of Lamar’s label Top Dawg Entertainment as adverse to the idea from the very beginning.

“Believe it or not, we were actually trying not to do the tour,” Terrence “Punch” Henderson told the magazine. “We wanted Kendrick to be recording that whole time.” Lamar’s team were eventually won over when West - who “wasn’t taking no for an answer” - hired a tour bus for Kendrick with studio equipment built-in.

Goodman - who shadowed Lamar on the stint for three weeks - also says that she hardly saw Kanye and Kendrick communicate during the tour.

“I had been shadowing Lamar on tour with West off and on for almost three weeks before I saw the two rappers in the same room… Lamar was heading to the stage at Houston’s Toyota Center. As he walked down the hallway, a black van pulled up, and West got out with Kim Kardashian. As the two men greeted each other, their respective posses fell back — except for Lamar’s videographer and his counterpart in West’s camp, both of whom acted as if this was the moment they’d been waiting for all tour. They traced a tight circle around the men, lenses open to capture every word of a conversation that lasted less than 30 seconds. The two rappers embraced, then Lamar paused, allowing West to proceed down the hallway first, before continuing to the stage to play his set,” she writes.

“It’s tempting to imagine that tour partnerships between an established star and an up-and-comer result in lots of communal bonding… But a mentor-mentee relationship wasn’t what was expected or desired, and it certainly was not what was happening.”

[via Pitchfork]