Mike WiLL Made-It shares five fun facts about Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA” and his album “DAMN.” Keep watching to see what they are!
Category
🎵
MusicTranscript
00:00Ayo, it's Mike Will Made It and these are 5 things you don't know about DNA.
00:10Number one, I wrote that song, okay? I'm playing with you.
00:15Y'all didn't know I made that in Swae Lee's backyard. They had this little shed. I don't
00:18know what that shed was for, you know what I'm saying? Because it was real small,
00:22but we used to have like a little setup in there. When I made that beat, I was just thinking like,
00:25man, this would be like a big performance record. Like Beyoncé or like somebody big could do this,
00:31whoever do arenas or stadiums. I never sent it to them. I only sent it to Kendrick. He ended up
00:36hearing the beat and liking the beat. Another thing you probably didn't know that me and Kendrick
00:40were already cool for seven years, but we just never had a song. We never landed a song. Probably
00:45gave him a thousand beats before. I gave him beats for Good Kid, Mad City, to Temple Butterfly,
00:50and then Dam is like, he ended up calling me and told me like, yo, I've been going in.
00:55Send me like a little snippet video. I'm like, damn bro, I'm about to be in LA in like a week.
01:00Like I'm gonna pull up on you. Like call me when you get there. So I came to the studio and then
01:04he let me hear Humble. He let me hear DNA. He let me hear XXX. I couldn't even wrap my mind around
01:09what I was hearing because at the time it was so new and so fresh. So DNA, the second half
01:14were the beats, which is, he rapped that all the way fully acapella.
01:24The original beat cut off and then he was just rapping like, you know what I'm saying? He was
01:27like, yo, on this part right here, I just want you to go crazy with the 808s and some shit that'll
01:32go crazy in the arenas or whatever. At this point, the beat is already going and I got this acapella
01:37going on top of it and it's just looping. And I was waiting on my boy Plus to get to the studio.
01:41Plus was gonna bring me some tree too, you know what I'm saying? For my head, you know what I'm
01:44saying? So I could just levitate. And it was crazy how I had went past the Rick James sample. He was
01:50saying, give me some ganja. And I was like, give me some ganja. Give me some ganja. And I was just
01:54playing. I was like, hey, but it's slick hard though. Cause it's like the bars that you spitting
01:59could be the ganja, like, you know what I'm saying? And then I was just like, give me, give me, give
02:03me, give me, give me some ganja.
02:06And DNA was going to be the single for Damn at first. And Kendrick was going to give me
02:15Humble for Ransom too. Well, I tried to talk him into keeping Humble for his album and then he hit
02:20Top and was like, yo, I'm going to give Mike Humble for my album. And then Top heard it and
02:24Top was like, no, like this is the single. And he was like, for real, Mike saying the same thing.
02:28DNA ended up being Billboard number two while Humble was Billboard number one.
02:32So, man, we feel like we did our shit with that one, man.