Somewhere around 2009, Kendrick decided to drop the name K-Dot and start rapping under his first and middle names: Kendrick Lamar. K-Dot was a rapper’s rapper, a lyrical assassin with a penchant for raw, chase-cutting lyrics. “K-Dot—this was me prepping myself as far as the lyrical ability and being able to go in the studio and say you know what, I want to be the best wordsmith. Anybody who gets on this track I just have to annihilate, however that is, whether it’s through rhyme schemes, whether it’s through metaphors, whether it’s just punchlines, or whether it’s wordplay,” Lamar told Complex in 2017. “I didn’t have the actual technique of songwriting then.” Kendrick was the man behind the bravado, still trying to reconcile his insecurities in a world that doesn’t reward vulnerability from black men. K-Dot was a freestyle machine ready to battle anyone at a moment’s notice. Kendrick was all heart, and with mixtapes Hub City Threat and Training Day in his rearview, he finally had room to tell his story. He saw pushback from some who didn’t think he was the guy to take L.A. rap to the next level. “A lot of people in the neighborhood didn’t think his music would hit,” says Matt Jeezy. “But those same people shout him out now when he comes back home. They were like, ‘Man, this shit ain’t gon’ go. He ain’t keeping it gangsta, he ain’t talking about the streets.’ ”
Bloggers weren’t feeling it, either: by the time Kendrick released his third solo mixtape, C4, in early 2009, it was clear that the K-Dot moniker had run its course, and that it was time for Kendrick to actually talk about something worthwhile. Though C4 was marketed as an homage to Lil Wayne’s recently released Tha Carter III album, Kendrick’s project felt redundant, and was a weird creative step, given the buzz he had begun to generate on his own. At this point, he didn’t need to rip a bunch of beats from a star like Wayne; he had the production team in place to start crafting his own artistic vision. The criticism got to Kendrick in a big way; in interviews and on his subsequent project, The Kendrick Lamar EP, he took subtle shots at the naysayers trying to throw dirt on his shine. He was at a crossroads, and he had to look in the mirror to assess who he wanted to be as an artist.
Then it hit him. “I’mma just be me,” Jeezy recalls Kendrick saying. The name change was the rightful next phase of his development, the best way for the Compton lyricist to become a fully realized musician and not just another cool rapper with one foot in the streets. As he once put it, “I think I was put on this Earth just to do music. I think God made me to spread my voice to the world, straight up.” It didn’t take long for Kendrick to sell Tiffith on the name change; in fact, the Top Dawg leader was on board right away. He joked that the name “Kendrick Lamar” sounded like some sort of designer fragrance you’d find at a Macy’s retail store. “Like, that sounds like cologne—we can sell that shit!” Kendrick once told Billboard of his conversation with Tiffith. The name change marked not just a shift for Kendrick but a turning point for TDE overall. The idea was to give the public just a little piece of his backstory while saving the rest for his proper debut album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, which he’d already started preparing three years before its eventual release.
In December 2009, The Kendrick Lamar EP drew listeners into the singular talent who’d grow to become the world’s best rapper. This was the first step toward that lofty acclaim, and was the first time he’d discuss himself and those closest to him in any kind of detail. “It’s like I don’t think y’all fully understand who I am, ya know? / I’m just a good kid from Compton who wanna rap,” he declared on “Wanna Be Heard,” a standout from the EP. “I don’t represent no colors, I represent my little sisters and brothers.” For the first time, people got a true glimpse of the kid who had watched the film House Party on TV and eaten Apple Jacks cereal in his parents’ house. He had sold Sega video games while other family members sold illegal drugs. We heard about his beloved uncle Bobby, who got his life together after fifteen years in prison, only for it to change for the worse following a claim of domestic violence. Then there was the story of Jason Keaton, a West Side Piru who wrote a letter to Kendrick from prison. He was twenty-one and facing some serious time, and through the rapper’s lyrics, we heard the pain of Keaton’s separation from the outside, where his grandmother and brother were getting older, and it was possible he might not see them again: “Said that they tried to give him like a hundred years,” Kendrick raps. “Sleeping in a cell, it’s been thirty weeks / Ain’t received any mail / It’s cold and the hole stinks.”
These revelations speak to the dichotomy of Kendrick Lamar—the shy kid in a tough environment, surrounded by strong black men who did what they could to survive. He’d been around the vices that had ensnared so many, yet his family—uncles, cousins, and dear friends—had shielded him from those trappings. It was as if they knew who he would be long before he did.
On The Kendrick Lamar EP, the rapper unpacked a childhood steeped in mischief and driven by the will to do right. Where Hub City Threat found Kendrick staking his claim as the world’s top rapper before he had any real credentials, the song “Is It Love”—the opening track of The Kendrick Lamar EP—outlined his wants in specific detail: he wanted the Grammys, the fame and fortune, the proximity to generational wealth. He also wanted to play golf with real estate mogul Donald Trump; that didn’t age well. Back then, Kendrick was driving his mother’s van to the studio with almost no gas in it. Around this time, his father started to wonder where Kendrick’s career was headed, and how long it would take before he’d earn money from it. He was twenty-two years old, and when his dad was the same age, he had had his own place and two cars in the driveway. Meanwhile, Kendrick was still living at home, and his career path was more of a slow burn. It took great patience to watch the young rapper make gradual gains when others seemed to make longer strides. His dad knew his son had a gift that the world needed to hear, and in his own gruff way, Kenny was simply expressing the frustration of having to watch bullshit be celebrated on the tube when Kendrick had what it took to outshine those same rappers.
But Kendrick was playing the long game; he was his own man, and it was clear by listening to the EP that he wouldn’t beg old-school West Coast rappers for fleeting cosigns. That had become an issue in the area, so much so that Ice Cube publicly lambasted the younger guard for trying to jump onto what his generation had established two decades prior. As he saw it, the new guys simply weren’t willing to put in the sweat needed to win on their own. He also didn’t think it was his responsibility to usher them along their journey. “They ain’t on my level,” Cube wrote in a blog post. “They can’t make a name for themselves so they need help from the OGs. I refuse to throw them a life line. It ain’t my job to make nobody famous.”
Though Kendrick’s friend Jay Rock was angered by Ice Cube’s comments, Kendrick eschewed acknowledgments from older MCs like Cube, DJ Quik, Snoop, and the like. “Do I need a cosign from Dre or Jigga?” he asked on the EP track “Celebration.” “They can make me much bigger, but do I need ’em, though? / I just need a flow / The type of shit that make you think you seen Pac ghost.” For the vets to give a thumbs-up would’ve been substantial, but Kendrick knew he wasn’t like those who’d come before. He was a nuanced mosaic of varied influences, pulling into one body the lush humility of southern rap stalwarts like OutKast and Goodie Mob, the lyrical dexterity of Nas and Eminem, and the straight-ahead tough talk of Pusha T and Killer Mike. He also had a golden ear for all kinds of instrumentals—from the off-kilter soul of J Dilla and Madlib to the jazz-based orchestration of the Roots. Kendrick wasn’t classically trained, but he had instinctive musical awareness; he just knew what sounded good, and he knew how to articulate his vision for his art, no matter how weird it seemed to others. Though he didn’t play traditional instruments, he turned his voice—a nasal, almost childlike timbre—into its own instrument, sliding up and down the register like a singer to convey the right emotion. Critics of hip-hop like to chastise rappers because they’re supposedly not musical, that maybe they can’t pluck an upright ba
ss or tell you what key the composition is in. Such thinking isn’t fair; it takes tremendous poise to spin words into vibrant poetry. Kendrick was theatrical in that way; listeners never knew what they’d get from one verse or song to the next.
He didn’t close himself off to disparate art to hold up some make-believe narrative of Compton rappers being drawn only to gangsta shit. And that was why, ultimately, he gained the respect of L.A.’s rap elite, because he had the courage to be himself in a town that didn’t always reward such bravery. Kendrick remained true to the music that he wanted to create; that the rapper stood on his own two feet made him much more intriguing to the artists he admired.
Still, the pangs of his father lingered, and eventually the self-doubt spilled into a song called “Determined,” the closing track from his 2009 EP. Here, Kendrick recalls a simpler time, when he and his girlfriend were splitting a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, looking forward to the days when his name would be mentioned alongside the greats. In those days, Drake was the guy; through his popular single “Best I Ever Had,” the Canadian rapper and Lil Wayne affiliate was quickly becoming the “it” guy in hip-hop. And though Kendrick’s partner was listening to Drake’s music back then, she knew it was only a matter of time before Kendrick’s reign kicked in. “You know you the best, boy, you gotta keep doing it,” Kendrick remembered her saying. “But don’t forget when you do, just keep you in it.”
That plea stuck with Kendrick, and even after he started racking up awards and became a transcendent figure in music and pop culture, he never let fame get to his head. “He’s the same person. Nothing has changed,” the experimental producer Flying Lotus said in 2019. “He [don’t] be coming in no designer shit. This motherfucker came through to the crib a few months ago with the hoodie and some shorts on. Socks and slides on. He’s just the same cat. It didn’t feel any different.” Matt Jeezy concurs: When he worked in a homeless shelter near Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, Kendrick would come through—at the height of his popularity—without any cameras or an entourage in tow. “He took care of some of the kids I worked with down there,” he recalls. “Even the first time he called, I was crazy busy dealing with some traumatic stuff at the center and Kendrick insisted on coming down to help.”
Though The Kendrick Lamar EP was a breakthrough, the public still wasn’t paying attention. Surely he’d amassed some fans on the road, but Kendrick was still unknown to much of the press and to listeners at large. His name was being whispered on blogs and in underground rap circles, not shouted out loud like Drake’s, Wayne’s, and Kanye’s. But in lieu of critical acclaim, the EP reset the palate of those who may have written him off after C4 and set an emphatic tone for what his career would be going forward. It was the first to display Kendrick as the deep critical thinker, and offered a glimpse into the family dynamic that made up his character. For the first time, Kendrick dropped the veneer of simply being a good rapper and let us into the personal torment that drove his hunger to be the best. Here was where he first let listeners into the depression and nagging self-doubt that haunted him well into his prosperity. But Kendrick never let it define him; instead, he used it as fuel to propel moments of unvarnished truth. This was his narrative, his history, and whether or not he succeeded, Kendrick vowed in 2009 to go out his way and no one else’s. Little did he know, there was a life-altering phone call just around the corner.
* * *
Imagine you’re out with a friend and the phone rings. It can be anybody—your girlfriend, your boy talking trash about sports, or your mom wondering when you’re coming back with the van. Instead, it’s a number you don’t recognize, and the voice on the other end claims to be a member of Dr. Dre’s team. The Dr. Dre. The pioneer. The dude who was partly responsible for the hip-hop you danced to shirtless in your living room as a kid. The dude who you saw with your hero, Tupac Shakur, at the Compton Swap Meet all those years ago. That guy. Now take Dre out of the equation; how would you feel if the ayatollah of your profession reached out just because he thought you were dope? That was what happened to Kendrick in 2010 during a stop in Los Angeles for the Independent Grind Tour. He was still Jay Rock’s hype man, and as he remembers, the call came while he and TDE engineer Ali were eating at Chili’s. Kendrick didn’t think it was real, so he and Ali laughed it off and hung up the phone. “We got a call like, ‘Yo, Dr. Dre likes your music.’ And we were like, ‘Yo, who the fuck is this on the phone?’ ” Kendrick once told Howard Stern on SiriusXM. “Another call came in from somebody else. Then another call came in from somebody else like, ‘Yo, they trying to reach out and figure out who you with.’ ”
It’s a good thing Dre’s people were consistent; they eventually convinced Kendrick they were legit, and the rapper was in the studio with the producer the following week, laying down vocals for Dre’s long-simmering Detox. Everything Kendrick had done in his short rap career had led to this one moment. Kendrick walked into Dre’s studio, still beaming from the opportunity to work with his idol. Once in there, Dre—a hulking presence at six feet, one inch tall and two-hundred-something pounds—introduced himself to Kendrick, then quickly pressed play on a beat that Dre had received from the noted producer Just Blaze. It was for a song called “Compton,” which would appear near the end of Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city. “We had the overall concept and it already had verses and everything on it, it was all done,” Just Blaze says of the song. “This was right when Dre became aware of Kendrick and was like, ‘Well, bring him down to the studio.’ So he had brought Kendrick in to add onto whatever he felt. ‘Compton’ was one of the things that he gravitated toward, it was one of the stronger songs that we had in that batch, so Kendrick wound up jumping on it.” “I remember that shit sounded so loud,” the rapper said to Vice. “Compton” wasn’t just a crowning achievement for Kendrick, it was an achievement for hip-hop as well: Dre wasn’t really rapping that much at the time, so for him to jump on the microphone, the vibe truly had to be something special.
Once in the studio with Dre, Kendrick was so overwhelmed by Dre’s presence that he nearly missed his chance to shine. “It came to a point where I had to really snap out of fan mode and become a professional after we were introduced,” he told BBC Radio. “Then he said, ‘Okay, now write to this, write a full song to this.’ Right after I said, ‘Man, Dr. Dre, you’re the greatest,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, man, you’re good too, you could be something, all right now write to this beat.’ ”
Dre and Kendrick worked nonstop for almost two weeks on songs for Detox, and Dre—who’d never been one to cosign much—saw greatness in Kendrick right away. The young rapper flashed back to the moment when he had seen Dre and Pac from his father’s shoulders in Compton. The producer remembered all the children who were out there, and the duo reminisced on the destiny that brought them both to the studio together. It was wild that, out of all the people at the video shoot for “California Love” that day, Kendrick was the one to ascend.
In Dre, the young rapper saw a reflection of himself—the upstanding dude in a precarious situation who was able to escape through music. But while Dre had already ascended, Kendrick was just getting started on his path to prominence. From the producer, he’d take in great gems, like how to stay low-key in the limelight when strangers wanted to know your whereabouts. Dre and Kendrick weren’t just collaborators, they grew close enough to be family. “It was more like a uncle-nephew kind of vibe,” Kendrick said in a Complex interview. “When we sit in the studio, we talk about these different streets that we both lived on and experiences he had that I can relate to being two generations younger.” Dr. Dre’s studio sessions have become the stuff of legend in rap music, with everyone from Kendrick to 50 Cent to Eminem singing the Doc’s praises once their work together is done. They all proclaim Dre the perfectionist, whose studio sessions can go seventy-plus hours if the vibe is right. He’s also a stickler when it comes to words, nitpicking the inflection of the rappers he works with hundreds of times and recording h
undreds of takes. It’s a grueling test of will for the privilege of having the Kingmaker’s stamp on your music. He’s been called a coach, much like basketball’s Phil Jackson, the rapper Mez once told the webzine Pitchfork—the most decorated club leader in NBA history. Dre had this way of bringing the best out of everyone with whom he worked. And though the producer didn’t write his own lyrics, he knew how to instruct rappers in his studio to inflect his voice in the rhymes they wrote for him. Chemistry is the word that arises when discussing Dre. As Eminem once said, “I don’t have chemistry like that with anyone else as far as producers go—not even close.”
Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, put Dre onto Kendrick’s music. “I was in Detroit and he was like, ‘You gotta hear this kid from Compton,’ ” Dre once told Kurt “Big Boy” Alexander on his radio show, Big Boy’s Neighborhood. “So I went online, and the thing that really turned me on in the beginning was the way he spoke during an interview. It wasn’t even the music at first. It was just the way he spoke, and the way he showed his passion for music. It was something in that. Then I got into the music and really realized how talented he was.” Once online, Dre found a video that Kendrick did for his song “Ignorance Is Bliss,” one of several great tracks from the rapper’s 2010 mixtape, Overly Dedicated.
Some of hip-hop’s all-time greatest MCs have a “Dre discovered me” story. In 1992, the producer found Snoop through a song he’d recorded that year called “A Gangsta’z Life.” Collaborator Warren G played the song for Dre, who showed immediate interest in the Long Beach rapper. “It was a rock, it wasn’t shined up yet,” Snoop once said of the song during a conversation with Kendrick. “He sees something in you, and by you being around him and being with him, he just gon’ tighten your shit up.”
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