Kendrick Lamar is presently sitting on approximately "97,000 gigs" of beats.
That's the informed estimate of Top Dawg Entertainment's Tae Beast, who relayed the 97-terabyte revelation during a recent Red Bull Music Academy discussion.
"If you make something, and somebody [in TDE] hear it, it's a wrap," Beast said, as spotted by Genius Thursday. "Kendrick's like the beat hoarder, too. He has 97,000 gigs of beats from everybody. [If] it get to Kendrick's hands, it probably ain't never gonna leave."
Of course, Pulitzer Kenny isn't just hoarding beats for the hell of it. The accumulation of beats is a result of Lamar's highly selective creative process, as fellow Red Bull panel guests MixedByAli and Sounwave explained.
"[Lamar] could hear some shit right now, and be like, 'You know, I go something,'" MixedByAli said of the recent Oscar nominee's process. "And go back to his emails from like 2010 and pull [up the beat] like, 'Okay, I found it.'"
There are whisperings of a possible new Lamar album this year. Those whisperings, as reported back in December, include a purported screenshot of a quickly deleted Instagram Story update from distributor Polydor Records about a new Lamar album in 2019. In a Los Angeles Timesstory that same month, however, Lamar said that sessions specifically intended for a new album hadn't yet taken place.
Since dropping his practically universally beloved Damn. album back in 2017, Lamar has curated the Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated Black Panther album and popped up for a surprise Anderson .Paak collab. Something new in 2019 certainly doesn't seem out of the question.
