Kendrick Lamar Goes Dark For ‘Divergent’ Track

It looks like Kendrick Lamar is slowly taking over the hip hop scene. He’s already been hailed as an enormous talent who rivals industry folk like Kanye West and Jay Z, and since his Grammy performance, he’s been filtering into the mainstream audience by making television appearances and touring popular festivals.

Now it looks like Kendrick has found his way into a very big medium for music these days — film. The Divergent soundtrack will hit the shelves of stores and e-stores tomorrow, and surprisingly, Kendrick Lamar makes an appearance on a solid and gritty track.

Lamar, known as K-dot to some of his fans, paired up withTame Impala for a pretty genius track featured on the Divergent soundtrack. The track called “Backwards” is said to be a new spin of Tame Impala’s single “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” off of their 2012 album Lonerism.

Complete with a smooth jam, with truthful grit only Kendrick can bring to the track, the rapper spits rhymes over the mellow chorus, which sounds similar to something Lorde or Lana Del Rey would feature on a track.

“No rules/ now feel the energy we go through/ I told you/ Put my fists like I’m supposed to/ I showed you.”

For Lamar, this is another unlikely collaboration. Prior to this Divergent collaboration, the California native joined the rock band Imagine Dragons at the Grammys to perform a rousing version of their song “Radioactive” which led the rapper to join the band on the Saturday Night Live stage.

According to music supervisor Randall Poster, he spoke with MTV to share how the collaboration between Kendrick and Tame Impala came about. For the song, the whole point was to merge the different sounds as a representative element for the film Divergent.

“I think that one of the challenges for a movie like this is that it’s set in the future and so you sort of have to figure out, ‘OK, what might music in the future sound like? The film is actually set not in a perfected future, but actually kind of in a future world that is deteriorating. And so we wanted to create a musical element that had reflected on current music sounds, but also felt kind of time-forward and had a certain futuristic element.”

In addition to this collaboration, Kendrick Lamar is set to release a new album in September. The will be his sophomore studio album aside from his mix tapes.

[Image credit: swaggernewyork.com]