Big Sean and Kendrick Lamar have somewhat of an intense history.
Though they’ve worked together on a few occasions, their healthy competition came to a grinding halt in 2015, when Sean dropped his “Me, Myself, and I” freestyle in 2015, with purported subliminals pointed at Kendrick. Sean later denied this, saying that the lyrics were actually directed at the “people.”
In a new interview on Joe Budden’s series Pull Up, Sean addresses the contentious situation between him and Kendrick around the 1 minute and 30 seconds mark.
“One of the people that, especially after Nipsey [Hussle] died was important for me to connect with was Kendrick,” Sean said. “Me and Kendrick got a history...a relationship as peers. When this whole Big Sean, Kendrick beef was going on, it was something I wish I would have spoken up [on].”
The Detroit native then explained that he thinks it started with “Me, Myself, and I.” After that, he dropped the track “No More Interviews” in 2016 and “went crazy.”
“So then I remember going online and seeing like, ‘Oh, is he talking about Kendrick?’ ‘Cause I’m talking about people who rap fast. … I wasn’t beefing with nobody. I’m just rapping n***a. It wasn’t like a specific person or else I would’ve said his name.”
Sean shared how he didn’t give any energy to the beef and tried his best to ignore it. But when Kendrick dropped “The Heart Part 4” prior to the release of Damn in 2017, everyone thought he was talking about Sean. So Sean called TDE CEO Top to ask about the song, to which Top said, “It ain’t about you at all.”
Still, the perception of a beef between the two rappers kept growing. “Every verse I do, people be like, ‘Oh is this a response? Is this a response?’ And I’m like, ‘Damn I can’t even show no aggression, people think it’s a damn response.’ It got to a point where somehow it was just a weird tension between me and him even though it was already said it wasn’t no beef. People made it that way.”
Sean continued, “Fast forward, I let this shit go. He let that shit go—he never talked about it. And I never talked about it and I should’ve said something, bro. I should’ve just came out and been like, ‘Naw, that ain’t it.’ … But I didn’t. I was working on this song with Nip and then Nip passed. I have a show for J. Cole's festival. I’m sitting next to Punch from TDE. He like, ‘Bro, wassup—you ever holler at Kendrick?’ I damn near [had] put it on the back burner in my brain. I’m like, ‘Damn, no I never did. And he’s like, ‘Man, you should definitely holler at him.’ Got his number and we communicated. The respect is mutual. It was literally nothing.”
In the interview, Sean discusses mental health, communication, relationships, and the toll that the music business takes on artists.
