N.E.R.D. & Kendrick Lamar Tackle Police Shootings On 'Don't Don't Do It'

N.E.R.D. was so moved by the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, the 43-year-old African-American man who was fatally shot by Brentley Vinson, an African-American city police officer, that the hip-hop collective decided to write a song about it and it comes in the form of "Don't Don't Do It," which features Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean

Off their forthcoming No_One Ever Really Dies LP, the four-minute track starts smooth and quite melodic, with Pharrell singing, "It makes no difference in this life/ Up and ups just fine/ Gonna up and up this life/ Til' we go down on our luck." After that intro, the tempo picks up and the lyrics level up the speed. "They wanna see your hands, tell you hold up your arms/ Don't do it, don't don't do it," Skateboard P chants over funky production. If the title sounds familiar, it's because it was directly inspired by the video footage from Scott's wife during the incident, where she continuously shouts, "Don’t do it."

"I was watching the news last year and in Raleigh, North Carolina, it was a gentleman by the name of Keith Scott that was waiting in his minivan for his child to get off the school bus and the authorities were on the hunt looking for somebody that didn’t look anything like him," Pharrell said at 2017 ComplexCon

"He did not fit the description nor was his vehicle in question, but they came upon him and his wife was watching, so she pulled out here camera phone and she was taping the thing as it was going down and she’s trying to tell her husband who has a traumatic brain injury, TBI. She's saying, 'Keith!' but the officers telling him basically to raise his hands or whatever and he has his medicine in his hands, and she’s saying, 'Don't do it, don’t don't do it.'"

No_One Ever Really Dies drops on December 15.

Photo: Getty Images


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