The father of XXXTentacion, Dwayne Onfroy, has praised Kendrick Lamar for supporting his son when the late rapper released his debut album.
Back in 2017, the controversial rapper – whose real name was Jahseh Onfroy – dropped ’17’ and Lamar promoted the record on X/Twitter. He told his fans to “listen to this album if you feel anything” and said the LP was full of “raw thoughts”.
In a recent Instagram post, Dwayne shared his thanks to the ‘Alright’ star by saying: “Special big up and shout out goes to Kendrick Lamar. Powerful king.”
He continued: “I just want to say, first of all, thank you for giving my son a platform when he was an unknown artist.
“You gave him a shoutout when his album was released. You stepped up to the plate for him when a lot of people stood back and Spotify had him under pressure and weren’t attempting to play his songs.”
Dwayne concluded: “Really king. I’ve always respected you for that. California was my home, still love Cali’. Kendrick Lamar, salute. Salute. Salute. A real yout. Much, much respect, brudda.”
The pivotal SoundCloud star’s dad was alluding to when Lamar stood up for X and other stars when Spotify introduced the Hate Content & Hateful Conduct Policy in 2018.
Per the guidelines, the streaming app planned to remove the ‘Look At Me’ musician’s music from their editorial and algorithmic playlists due to him being charged with aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment and witness-tampering.
The company went back on the move after Lamar’s team reached out to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and head of artist relations Troy Carter, and threatened to remove his music from their platform.
“I reached out to Troy over there, we had a conversation and I expressed how I felt about it, about censorship, how you can’t do artists that way,” Top Dawg Entertainment boss Anthony Tiffith told Billboard. “I don’t think it’s right for artists to be censored, especially in our culture. How did they just pick those [artists] out?
“How come they didn’t pick out any others from any other genres or any other different cultures? There [are] so many other artists that have different things going on, and they could’ve picked anybody. But it seems to me that they’re constantly picking on hip-hop culture.”
The video comes after Lamar seemingly won his recent feud with Drake – one of XXXTentacion’s public enemies. X was shot dead in June 2018 in an armed robbery, and some fans thought the Canadian had something to do with it after the late rapper wrote on his Instagram story that if he were to be killed, the 6God had something to do with it.
This led to Drake being called to testify for a deposition in connection to the now-resolved XXXTentacion murder trial.
Last April, three men – Michael Boatwright (28), Dedrick Williams (26), and Trayvon Newsome (24) – were sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of first-degree murder and armed robbery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In other news, Kendrick Lamar has finally dropped the music video for his record-breaking Number One ‘Not Like Us’.
The post XXXTentacion’s father thanks Kendrick Lamar for supporting his son appeared first on NME.
