How Mike WiLL Made-It And Kendrick Lamar Created The Year's Most Urgent Music

"Timing is everything."

That's how Kendrick Lamar summed up the serendipity of a seemingly left-field collaboration with super producer Mike WiLL Made-It that was actually years in the making. "You know what's crazy about me and Mike, we've been in the studio for a long time but we never made records," he told Beats 1's Zane Lowe in his first interview since the release of his immaculate DAMN LP. "We always said to each other, one day we gon' make them records."

Following the bitches brew of avant-funk/jazz that propelled Lamar's last proper album, 2015's To Pimp a Butterfly, to the forefront of pop consciousness, the last thing fans expected from the Compton MC was a pairing with the man largely responsible for trap's mainstream takeover. Yet their alliance resulted in the album's lead singles "HUMBLE." and "DNA." — two of the more urgent songs in Lamar's discography, if not the recent history of recorded rap — and "XXX." — a psalm of American-bred anarchy that features Bono sounding nothing like U2's predictably anthemic rock songs.

Their sonic union is no anomaly by Mike WiLL's standards. This is the same Atlanta-bred producer, after all, who rejuvenated Disney princess Miley Cyrus' career with an album full of ratchet before laying the foundation for Beyoncé's femme-powered "Formation." His contributions to Lamar's are equally definitive. On "DNA.," he matches the ferocity of Lamar's flow — — with an 808