Kendrick Lamar accepted a Grammy on Sunday night with shoutouts to various neighborhoods around Los Angeles — and a bit farther east.
In accepting Record of the Year for his song “Not Like Us,” Lamar said: “We’re gonna dedicate this one to the city. Compton, Watts. Long Beach, Inglewood. Hollywood, out to the Valley. Pacoima. IE, San Bernardino. All that.”
All that indeed.
Reader Allen Callaci texted to alert me. The Lamar moment ended up all over Inland Empire-focused social media. On the Inland Wire Instagram page, one user wrote: “I literally screamed when he said the Dino.”
On Reddit’s Inland Empire page, the user who posted about Lamar’s speech wrote: “This is exciting for me as an Upland resident with a lot of LA friends that make fun of where I live lol.”
Other comments: “IE represent,” “that rare IE nod” and “Damn. We officially made it.”
Nice to see us get national recognition in a positive way, and also to be included as just another part of Greater L.A. rather than as some distant backwater.
And consider the source. Lamar, who already had 17 Grammys, collected five more on Sunday, and he’s so respected that he’s the first musician outside of the classical or jazz fields to win a Pulitzer Prize. We’ll take that kind of endorsement.
That said, “Not Like Us” is what’s called a diss track, part of a squabble with another rapper — yawn. But congratulations to Lamar anyway. His song is hardly the first piece of popular entertainment whose appeal is lost on me.
Lamar actually does have a connection to the IE, by the way. In 2014, as The Press-Enterprise reported at the time, he bought a four-bedroom house with a pool for his parents and siblings in Eastvale. In 2021, he sold it after — ah, well — moving them to Calabasas.
Upshot: Maybe Kendrick Lamar is “not like us” exactly, but he’s close enough. And since L.A. is a perpetual anti-IE diss track, we can always use someone like him in our corner.
IE on local TV

“Inland Empire Alive” is a monthly talk show, produced since 1989, that airs on the public affairs channel for Spectrum, Frontier and AT&T cable customers in San Bernardino and environs.
The latest episode has Helen Tran, the San Bernardino mayor; Brandi Collato, CEO of YMCA of the East Valley (and the first woman to lead the organization in its 137-year history); Tim Evans, who founded a nonprofit, the Unforgettables Foundation, that helps grieving families defray the cost of a child’s funeral; and a certain friendly neighborhood newspaper columnist.
Sadly, we didn’t all sit on a big sofa together, yukking it up. Our segments were taped separately in December, one after the other.
The pecking order was amusing: Tran, who arrived last, was interviewed first. Then came the nonprofit leaders. Yours truly, who arrived first, and was on deadline, was interviewed last.
Still, it was an honor, etc., etc. And this order did let me eavesdrop on everyone’s interview. I was particularly interested in the mayor’s.
“I knew I was walking into a city with a lot of challenges,” Tran told the host. “There’s never a dull moment in San Bernardino. I get home at the end of the day and think: ‘Wow, that happened.’”
Ha! That’s what most of us marvel after watching a City Council meeting. At another point, Tran said more earnestly: “I hope to leave the city much better than when I started.”
A fine goal, but two years into her term, I’m not convinced things aren’t worse. Better step it up, Mayor.
“Inland Empire Alive” is a good show, though. It’s professionally done and has an able host in David Brady, a former print journalist and an Upland resident. This episode will air at various times over the next month, I’m told, and you can find the individual segments, as well as past ones, on Inland Empire Media Group’s YouTube channel.
My segment provided 12 of my proverbial 15 minutes of fame, interrupted by a commercial.
Me, online
Meanwhile, my Nov. 12 talk at the Redlands Forum, in the high-gloss surroundings of the Esri Auditorium, was, as with all their talks, professionally filmed. Mine is now edited and can be seen online at https://mediaspace.esri.com/media/1_dmik5vxh.
It’s a rare thing to have one of my speaking engagements documented for posterity, and by multiple cameras to boot. You can be the judge of how it went. I will say only, with respect, that the Forum folks seem to have made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear (or a horse’s ass).
State of the highlands
“One project in particular is near and dear to my heart,” Riverside Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson said during her State of the City address last Thursday at the Convention Center, stepping aside to let the Fire Department’s kilt-wearin’ Pipes and Drum Band wail. The closed captioning on the video screen showed, in brackets, two musical notes. The notes — indicating to the hearing impaired that we were listening to music — vanished, purely by coincidence I’m sure, just as the bagpiper took over.
David Allen mulls Kintyre Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on X.