Flying Lotus Says Kendrick Lamar Doesn’t Get Enough Credit For Being A Producer

Flying Lotus recently sat down with Billboard to promote his upcoming album, Flamagra, which drops this Friday, May 24. During the interview, the LA-based producer and DJ spoke about his previous collaborations with Kendrick Lamar and explained why the TDE rapper doesn’t get enough credit for being a producer.

“He knows exactly what he wants in his music. Every time a beat drops, or every time you add a noise, any extra thing about the sequence, it’s the most hands-on thing I’ve seen outside of producers,” FlyLo said about Kendrick. “And even more-so than a lot of producers, because a lot of producers are beatmakers, really. He’ll take your beat and turn it into his album stuff. Even if it’s like stitching things together, he’s real clever with stuff like that, but no one really thinks of him that way.”

Back in 2012, Kendrick described his hands-on approach to his projects in an interview with Complex. “I don’t just go out there and just find a bunch of instrumentals and rap over them,” Kendrick explained. “I have a specific sound in my head I want to convey. I really sit down with producers, I come up with ideas, and give them ideas. Truthfully, I should get some co-production on these tracks.”

FlyLo and Kendrick have collaborated on multiple tracks over the past several years. They first linked up on “Never Catch Me” from FlyLo’s 2014’s album, You’re Dead!, before Kendrick recruited FlyLo to produce “Wesley’s Theory,” the opening cut from To Pimp a Butterfly. In 2017, both artists worked on Thundercat’s “Walk on By,” which is co-produced by FlyLo and features a verse from Kendrick.

Elsewhere in the interview, FlyLo spoke about meeting Dr. Dre and confirmed the existence of the Compton legend’s long-fabled Detox project. “When I came to the studio, he played me Detox. He was like, ‘You fuck with it or what?!’ I was like, ‘Yeah!’ He was just super hyped on it,” FlyLo remembered. “The version I heard is the sequel to Compton. It makes sense after Compton… I like it better than Compton.”

Dre first announced Detox in 2002 as a hip-hop musical. Described as Dre’s final project, it went through numerous pushbacks and delays over the next decade as Dre became more involved in producing for other artists. Although Dre actually released two official singles from the album—2010’s “Kush” and 2011’s “I Need a Doctor”—he wound up scrapping it in favor of Compton, a companion album to the N.W.A biopic, Straight Outta Compton.

It’s unclear whether the version of Detox heard by FlyLo will ever be released. In 2015, Dre explained to Rolling Stone why he scrapped Detox. “I had between 20 and 40 songs for Detox, and I just couldn’t feel it. Usually I can hear the sequence of an album as I’m going, but I wasn’t able to do that,” he said. “I wasn’t feeling it in my gut. So I really thought I was done being an artist.”

Although Flamagra doesn’t feature Kendrick or Dre, it still boasts an impressive guest list. Anderson .Paak, Denzel Curry, George Clinton, Solange, Thundercat, and Tierra Whack all make appearances on the album.

Read the full interview at Billboard, and catch up on all the lyrics to Flying Lotus' “Never Catch Me” featuring Kendrick Lamar and Kendrick Lamar’s “Wesley’s Theory” on Genius now.