Kendrick Lamar no longer has a reason to be “Humble” when it comes to his YouTube play count: the clip for the rapper’s 2017 smash hit has cracked a billion views.
The video, directed by Dave Meyers, Kendrick and Dave Free (with the latter two credited as “the little homies”), stands at 1,000,355,582 views as of this writing.
During the 2017 VMAs, HipHopDX talked to Meyers about his experience co-directing the clip.
“Kendrick’s sort of humble, so Dave [Free] provides insight on certain details I might not know,” Meyers said. “So the three of us as a team sort of work really well in filling in the blanks in areas where we all are masters of. Kendrick obviously being the meaning of his music and the power of it, Dave on a visual level. I get along with him real well.”
“Humble” provided Lamar with his second number one hit, and the first where he was the primary artist — his previous chart-topper was with Taylor Swift.
“Humble” debuted at #2 and was at that point the highest-charting rap song since 2010 when Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie” hit the same slot.
That came on the same day as DAMN. topped the Billboard 200 chart, giving Kenny a third straight #1 album. It opened with 603,000 equivalent album units for the highest debut of 2017 up to that point.
Check out the “Humble” video below.
Kendrick had another big moment this past week when the L.A. Dodgers featured his “Not Like Us” in a new video.
On Friday (October 4), the Los Angeles Dodgers posted a video to their YouTube page to celebrate the team’s postseason, which began on Saturday (October 5) with a game against the San Diego Padres.
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The video, narrated by actor Anthony Anderson, prominently uses — and is titled after — Kendrick’s Drake-bashing banger.
“Not Like Us” has had other recent accolades as well — most notably, being named the third-best song of the decade by Pitchfork.
On Monday (September 30), Pitchfork released a list of their picks of the 100 best tracks from of the ’20s so far, which they described as “the greatest songs that moved culture, coined genres, and are still stuck in our heads.”
At No. 3 sits K.dot’s Mustard-produced banger, though other rappers are littered throughout the list including Lil Yachty with “Poland” at No. 100, Ice Spice with “Munch” at No. 41 and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion‘s “WAP” at No. 22.
