Artists like Ice-T and N.W.A documented the city in which Kendrick grew up, and the music would have a profound impact on him and L.A. as a whole. In 1995, at the age of eight, Kendrick went with his father to the Compton Swap Meet and saw rappers Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre—the latter also a member of N.W.A—filming the video for “California Love,” the lead single from Tupac’s 1996 double album, All Eyez on Me. That was the first time Kendrick saw Dre in person and the last time he’d see Pac alive (he died in September 1996 of gunshot wounds after an altercation in Las Vegas, Nevada). Though Kendrick didn’t start writing rhymes straightaway, he didn’t forget the moment. Maybe it was the sense of community that swayed him: Tupac and Dre were superstars, yet there they were in a shiny black Bentley, offering a lasting experience to everyday people. It showed Kendrick that local love was stronger than global fame, and no matter how big he got, in whatever profession he chose, it didn’t mean anything if he couldn’t celebrate his victory at home.
Twenty years later, Kendrick walked in Pac’s and Dre’s footsteps, returning to the place where his interest in pursuing rap began. In the 2015 video for “King Kunta,” the third single from To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick danced on the roof of the swap meet as a throng of Compton residents bounced cheerfully underneath. It was a full circle moment for a young man who’d spent his life buying CDs, cassette tapes, and Nike sneakers there.
Kendrick was quite playful when he wanted to be. As a young boy, he’d sometimes peel off his shirt and sneak out of his room into his parents’ house parties. He’d dance in the middle of the room to the nostalgic soul and gangsta rap they played. Other times, he and his cousins pedaled their Big Wheels inside and got in trouble. He acted older than his age, so much so that relatives nicknamed him “Man Man.”
His family was on and off welfare, but they didn’t let their circumstances keep them from putting food on the table and gifts under the tree on Christmas Day. At times they were impoverished and ran out of food, but those were the moments when family meant the most: Kendrick, Paula, and Kenny loved one another, and that sustained them. They wouldn’t have been as close without those moments. In 1992, when Kendrick was just four years old, he witnessed the smoke billowing from the streets of L.A. following the massive riot that ensued after the acquittal of four police officers who assaulted an unarmed black motorist named Rodney King. As Kendrick told Rolling Stone, he and his father were riding down Bullis Road in Compton where he saw people “just running.… We stop, and my pops goes into the Auto-Zone and comes out rolling four tires. I know he didn’t buy them.… Then we get to the house, and him and my uncles are like, ‘We fixing to get this, we fixing to get that. We fixing to get all this shit!’ I’m thinking they’re robbing.… Then, as time progresses, I’m watching the news, hearing about Rodney King and all this. I said to my mom, ‘So the police beat up a black man, and now everybody’s mad? OK. I get it now.’ ” That was Kendrick’s first brush with the racism that would fuel songs like “Alright” and “The Blacker the Berry,” and his first step toward understanding his own identity and racial disparity in the United States.
Kendrick’s childhood runs parallel to the heightened tensions in L.A., and on his seventh birthday, retired football star O. J. Simpson—who had spent the past twenty years becoming a global media darling—transfixed the city by cruising through it, from the San Diego Freeway all the way to his house in Brentwood, with a gun pressed to his head. He was wanted for murder, and as his trial unfolded over the next year, L.A. would be strongly divided along racial lines. O. J. was acquitted of the crime, and that was seen as payback for the Rodney King verdict and the decades of brutality and discrimination at the hands of the city’s police and justice departments.
The city of L.A. has a long history with such events: In August 1965, a riot escalated in Watts after a traffic stop turned into a massive scuffle between angry residents and white police officers. More than 14,000 California National Guard troops were brought into South L.A. to stabilize the area; in the end, 34 people died, roughly 1,000 were injured, and 4,000 were arrested. In 1991, almost two weeks after the videotaped beating of Rodney King became public, a black teenager named Latasha Harlins was shot in the back of the head by a Korean-American woman in a Vermont Vista liquor store. The woman, Soon Ja Du, had accused Harlins of trying to steal orange juice, a claim that the teenager had vehemently denied before the two tussled at the counter. Du fired the kill shot as Harlins walked away. Though a jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter and recommended the maximum sentence of sixteen years, the judge did not accept the jury’s sentencing and instead gave Du five years of probation, four hundred hours of community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. The punishment was considered much too light for an offense of that magnitude, and it reinforced the bitter reality that black life simply wasn’t valued in the United States. The incident escalated tensions between blacks and Korean-Americans in South Central; many of the businesses targeted during the 1992 riot were Korean-owned.
When Kendrick was five, he saw a teenage drug dealer gunned down in front of his apartment building. “A guy was out there serving his narcotics and somebody rolled up with a shotgun and blew his chest out,” Kendrick once told NPR. “It [did] something to me right then and there. It let me know that this is not only something that I’m looking at, but it’s something that maybe I have to get used to.” Then, at the age of eight, Kendrick was walking home from Ronald E. McNair Elementary School, past the Tam’s Burgers on Rosecrans Avenue, when he saw a man get shot and killed in the drive-thru as he ordered his food. As a child, Kendrick toed a fine line between morality and street shit. Too many wrong moves, and Kendrick—the same guy whose music has traveled the globe several times over—would not have made it out of his hometown. Although one could say in retrospect that Kendrick’s ascension was ordained, he also needed some luck, a ton of goodwill, and a lot of support from family and friends to pull through.
Kendrick needed a friend like Matt Jeezy, whom he met in the third or fourth grade as a fellow student at McNair Elementary. They lived in the same neighborhood and played basketball with other young kids. Eventually, some of those same friends would kill each other due to their respective gang affiliations. But Matt and Kendrick weren’t thinking red or blue; they simply wanted to have fun playing games they both loved. They weren’t gangsters at all, just naturally affable children who knew everyone around the way. “Me and Kendrick used to get picked on because we weren’t big bad gangstas,” Jeezy recalls. “We hung out with them, we associated ourselves with them, but they knew we weren’t gangbanging or anything like that. The girls would pick on us, the fellas would pick on us, but that was part of the territory of living in Compton and growing up around gang culture.” In places like Compton (and most inner cities, for that matter), civil rights leaders don’t live beyond the pages of old history books. They’re contained to paper and speeches on YouTube, making it tough to see the impact they made all those years ago. We see the names Malcolm and Martin scribbled on chalkboards, but most black children don’t grow up knowing them. Matt and Kendrick knew the people in their community; they saw them every day, and gang culture was the most visible sign of power in the neighborhood. It was a different kind of influence, equally based in fear and admiration. Gangbangers had unwavering respect, and to make it in Compton was to somehow navigate the culture without being entranced by it. Kendrick’s parents did their best to protect him from the streets, even as his father earned money by those means. That kept him pure, but he needed another outlet to express his innermost convictions.
Kendrick was first introduced to creative writing as a seventh grader at Vanguard Learning Center, where he met Regis Inge, an English teacher who brought poetry into the curriculum. Tensions were especially high in the school: a gang war had broken out between blacks and Latinos in a county jail, and those ill feelings made their way to the streets of Compton, then to the Unified School District. The friction seemed to in
tensify overnight; one day, the students were cordial with one another, then they weren’t interacting at all. Inge introduced poetry as a way to de-escalate the intensity. As he saw it, if the kids wrote their frustration, they wouldn’t need to express it through physical violence. They were dealing with heavy issues at home, not just gang tension. Some of them were food insecure or had problems with self-esteem. Others trekked to school just minutes after law enforcement stampeded their homes and arrested family members. “Poetry was a way for them to write their emotions down so they wouldn’t come to school so angry,” Inge recalls. “They’d be ready to fight at 7:30 in the morning.”
Still, the poetry lesson wasn’t an easy sell for the neighborhood boys, who assumed the balladry was all about fluttering hearts and red roses. They weren’t comfortable expressing feelings of love, so Inge connected poetry with hip-hop, and let the students know that it isn’t always so cloying, that their favorite rappers were simply talking about their lives by putting poetry to music. The kids had a breakthrough: black, brown, red, and blue no longer mattered in the classroom; they started seeing each other as humans and not just rivals. “It broke the color lines down,” Inge says. “Hearing poetry from a person of another race helped the students realize that they aren’t so different.” These weren’t just poetry lessons, they taught students how to survive the turbulence. The class had a profound impact on Kendrick, who, in middle school, was still incredibly shy with a noticeable stutter that arose when he got excited. Though that made public speaking difficult at first, he eventually got over it by talking to people more often.
Kendrick was a solid student who earned good grades and put his all into creative writing. Finally, he had an avenue to unpack his feelings—and Mr. Inge would play a major role in his intellectual growth. Kendrick had to work hard to perfect his craft, and Inge didn’t take it easy on him. When Kendrick submitted his work in school, Inge would often send it back with visible prompts for the budding poet to dig deeper. Basic language wouldn’t cut it; the young man needed to strengthen his lexicon before his prose could truly shine. “I would always circle something and say, ‘Kendrick, change this, move this right here,’ ” Inge says.
Not one to be defeated by hard work, Kendrick took it as motivation to improve. He didn’t just want to get by, he wanted to be the best, and that meant tapping into a level of focus he hadn’t before. It meant pouring everything into his creative being and doing what he could to protect it. If he forgot to do his poetry assignment at home, he’d get to school early and do it there. Kendrick became obsessed with the written word, scribbling rap lyrics on notebook paper instead of finishing assignments for other classes. The lyrics were profane—all “ ‘eff you’ and ‘d-i-c-k,’ ” his mother reportedly said—but that was Kendrick mining the seedy aspects of his upbringing to arrive at something more positive. “He was rapping about things he wasn’t supposed to rap about,” Jeezy says. “He was rapping about what he knew at the time—and that was drugs, gangbanging, and the streets. As we got older and started maturing, I saw him take the craft more seriously.”
Kendrick started writing poems about the changes he went through as an adolescent beginning to understand the social dynamics of his neighborhood. His understanding of the world grew exponentially as he began to study other cultures and compare their experiences with his own to strengthen his art. Kendrick stopped writing to make others feel comfortable; instead, he chose to elevate his thinking and make people catch up to him.
By the time Kendrick got to high school, his career path was set. He was going to be a rapper, and nothing could make him veer off the course. One day in particular, Matt Jeezy and Kendrick were walking home from Centennial High School when the budding MC just couldn’t stop rapping. He started coming up with rhymes off the top of his head, and he didn’t stop until four or five blocks later, when he and Jeezy were close to their respective homes. “It was about twenty minutes’ worth of rapping,” Jeezy recalls. At that moment, his friend knew that Kendrick had what it took to be a star. All he needed to do was stay away from the pitfalls of street life. “I was like, ‘Damn, Kendrick bro, if you just stay out of jail and stay alive, you’re gonna make it.’ The words that literally came out of my mouth were ‘Don’t go to jail. Don’t die.’ ” Sadly, prison and death beset many of their friends.
And it wasn’t like Kendrick didn’t grapple with his own challenges: At age sixteen, he started running with the wrong crowd—partying and drinking alcohol. It was really just kid shit, the same thing teenagers had done for generations. But given Kendrick’s neighborhood and family history, his behavior foreshadowed a possible life of crime and gang affiliation. Kenny wasn’t having it; he’d come too far to watch his son fall victim to the same habits. “My father said, ‘I don’t want you to be like me,’ ” Kendrick told Spin in 2012. “He said, ‘Things I have done, mistakes I’ve made, I never want you to make those mistakes. You can wind up out on the corner.’ He knew by the company I [kept] what I was gettin’ into. Out of respect, I really just gathered myself together.” Kendrick adored his father and his loving, no-nonsense attitude. The two bonded over a love of Tupac and gangsta rap. Kenny let him experience triumph and tragedy and was there with real talk when Kendrick lost his way. He playfully coined his dad’s advice as “intelligent ignorance.” Many of his friends didn’t have active fathers at home, but Kenny and Kendrick shared a close bond full of hard lessons and growing pains. He’d caution teenage Kendrick against going with his friends to burglarize houses in the neighborhood, and would be there with a swift “I told you so” when police accosted them before the crime unfolded. At times, Kenny tried to steer Kendrick’s friends away from doing wrong. But because Kenny wasn’t an actual father to those kids, the advice simply wouldn’t stick, and some of them wound up in jail as a result. Of course, Kenny wasn’t impeccable—he was a flawed human like the rest of us—but he had a good heart and truly wanted to do right by people.
Having supporters like Matt Jeezy and Mr. Inge helped Kendrick. They saw a light in the young man and helped him nurture it, even if it took the young poet a little while to fully embrace his truth. “Thinking back to when we were walking home from Centennial that one day,” Jeezy wistfully recalls. “Look at him now, man. Look at him now.”
* * *
In hip-hop, it’s common for rappers to brag about themselves. It’s not enough for them to simply say they’re the best; by the end of the verse, you should know they can walk on water and turn it into wine. Or you have to be the toughest dude ever: Mess around if you want, you can catch a bullet, too. So Kendrick’s earliest rhymes aren’t surprising; he was imitating what he’d heard others do since the dawn of hip-hop culture, some thousands of miles away in the Bronx, long before he was born. On YouTube, there’s a video clip of teenage Kendrick, cross earrings in each lobe, spitting aggressive rhymes while his friends stand directly behind him. He’s in the middle of a cypher, and on certain punch lines, he looks away and smirks, as if he knows he’s the best. He tugs the hood of his sweatshirt, letting it rest sluggishly on the crown of his razor-sharp waves. He studies the lens, gaping at it with the confidence of a seasoned veteran. This was exercise for Kendrick, who, at this stage of his career, wanted to come off as a street guy. “Creep into ya house, you hear footsteps slowly as I tippy-toe,” he asserted through squinted eyes and gapped teeth. “I’m wise like my pops but I’m young, muthafuckas / I’m the one, muthafuckas / Plus around hustlers, you want it? They can serve you like a butler.” The claim sends his friends into a frenzy, so much so that Kendrick can’t even finish his verse. Their reaction proves that he is very much the people’s champion, and that those closest to him truly have his back. He was born to the streets, so his rhymes feel authentic. In those days, maybe he would run up in your house.
Still, there was something missing from Kendrick’s flow—and that was Kendrick himself. He rapped under the name K-Dot, his fire-spitting alter ego. K-Dot wasn’t about upli
fting communities; he wanted to decimate everything in sight. The young man had all the technical prowess, the complex sentence structures, and the natural cadence, but he didn’t sound free. He was playing a character, and the fastest way to get noticed was to sound like the higher-profile rappers who dominated hip-hop. He wasn’t playing the long game yet. He hadn’t realized that the truest path to immortality was to be his fully authentic self. Good, honest music has this way of reaching the right ears; it finds people exactly when they need to hear it. Though Kendrick would come to understand this years later, back then he seemed eager to ascend to the top before he had a full grasp of what it took to remain there.
To understand Kendrick’s approach, you have to understand hip-hop’s period of transition at this time. The year was 2003, and acts like 50 Cent, OutKast, and the Diplomats loomed large in the music industry. Hip-hop was a global business, and rappers with the biggest pull were tapped to sell everything from malt liquor to high-end clothing. “Cool” was in fashion, and no one was cooler than Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, a poised, slick-talking MC who went from selling crack cocaine in East Trenton, New Jersey, to becoming the most popular mainstream rapper in the world. Jay-Z wasn’t only a rapper; he was a paragon of business, lyricism, and swagger. “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man,” he once claimed on Kanye West’s song “Diamonds from Sierra Leone (Remix).” He was a king who’d spent the past five years on the throne, and through albums like Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life, Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter, and The Blueprint, Jay-Z cornered the market on all things hip-hop culture. He gave fans everything: moody street songs, antagonistic battle raps aimed at other lyricists, and polished pop-leaning tunes made for summertime consumption. He lived atop the Billboard charts, and for a while, it seemed as if his reign would last forever. No one could defeat Jay; the only way he could lose the crown was if he gave it up himself.
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