Dre and Eminem found each other when they both needed a lifeline. The year was 1997, and Dre was coming off his biggest commercial failures as a leader, when two albums he helmed in 1996—the Firm’s The Album, and Dr. Dre Presents the Aftermath—both flopped. Dre was at the home of Interscope Records cofounder Jimmy Iovine; in his garage were piles of cassette tapes. Jimmy picked up one particular tape, popped it in, and pressed play. It was Eminem freestyling in a cypher over the kind of West Coast G-funk beat that Dre would’ve created. On the day they met in Dre’s home studio, the producer quickly compiled an instrumental to see what Em could do on the spot. “I hit the drum machine, and maybe two or three seconds went by, and he just went, ‘Hi, my name is! My name is!’ ” Dre recalled on his HBO docuseries, The Defiant Ones. “My Name Is” was a smash hit and the track that introduced Eminem to the world as a wrecking-ball force, the likes of which the world had never seen.
Kendrick had that same potential, and “Ignorance Is Bliss” was the perfect marriage of technical skill and content. It was also another example of Kendrick trying to change the public perception of who he was: a mix of gangsta rap and introspection, he wasn’t just a Compton rapper and he wasn’t just a conscious MC like Common, Yasiin Bey (who, back then, went by the name Mos Def), or Talib Kweli. He was conscious, he was a student of hip-hop culture, and he was gangsta—when he wanted to be. But Kendrick was able to marry these aesthetics without having to adhere to one style in particular, and as a result, he didn’t fit any of the man-made boxes in which critics tried to put him. Instead, he glorified the gangsta aesthetic by acknowledging that Compton natives might not have known why they banged in the streets. In some cases, that was all they’d known; their uncles and fathers had been born into it, and they passed it down to their kids, and so forth.
The video for “Ignorance Is Bliss” portrayed this history; in the one-minute, fifty-two-second clip, Kendrick swigs from a forty-ounce of Olde English 800 malt liquor and pours some on the grave of his dead friend, then he hops in the back of a car driven by TDE mate ScHoolboy Q and they drive up on the person who killed his friend. The video ends with us (the viewer) in the antagonist’s shoes, staring down the barrel of Kendrick’s gun. There’s a sudden pop, then darkness, and we’re left to believe that the good kid has succumbed to the treacherous city, and that he couldn’t survive the minefield that’s entrapped so many young black men before him. Kendrick, much like his uncles and cousins, was forced to make a life-altering decision long before any teenager is capable of doing so.
A song like “Ignorance Is Bliss” helped define Kendrick’s expression. The rapper made a career of taking common themes and looking beyond the veil to assess human behavior: Yes, gangbanging is a culture, but why? Why are black men left without choices in places like Compton and South Side Chicago? Why are we left with only liquor and weed to soothe our angst? How do these dependencies impact communities? Questions like these became the foundation of the Kendrick Lamar era, and by detangling the fabric of Compton and Los Angeles as a whole, he was unraveling assorted aspects of his own being. Kendrick was still a young man (age twenty-three at this point), and while he was forced to grow up quickly, he was getting to know himself in an increasingly public way.
Kendrick’s evolution from The Kendrick Lamar EP to Overly Dedicated was astounding; in just one year, he had grown from a promising lyricist with a decent grasp of songwriting and complex song structures to a full-fledged artiste who could execute circuitous concepts with ease and flair. There was an actual theme to Overly Dedicated, not just a mere collection of songs being thrown into one set. Ali tinkered with different sound frequencies for Kendrick’s voice—warping it, slowing it down, making the rapper sound alien. TDE’s in-house producers—Sounwave, Tae Beast, and Willie B—also stepped up their game: the beats felt dense and spacious, and that gave Kendrick the vast canvas he needed to unpack his views on religion, gun culture, and social and economic disparities, while namechecking Patrón tequila, NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt, and R&B/pop icon Beyoncé. He dug deeper and got even more personal on this project; on “Average Joe,” Kendrick talks about the time someone shot at him during a walk home from Centennial High School. A car pulls up and asks him where he lives. “Westside,” he responds. That’s Piru territory; the guys in the car wore blue hats, a Crip color. Kendrick dropped his backpack and ran to a neighborhood cul-de-sac. Shots rang out, but the rapper wasn’t hit.
In later interviews, he’d brush off the incident as yet another by-product of living in Compton, where safety isn’t a luxury people have and violence can pop off at any time. Something as simple as walking home from school could lead to gunshot wounds. “You’re going to get into situations, you can’t escape that,” Kendrick once said. “You can either take action or fall back. In most cases, I have to take action because that’s just how it goes when you’re put in a situation where you have to defend yourself. I think a lot of kids can relate to that story on ‘Average Joe’ because it’s real. A lot of these motherfuckers are good kids. The influence is making them fucked up.”
Elsewhere, the song “P&P 1.5” was the best example of Kendrick’s artistic growth from one project to the next: the initial version—called “Pussy and Patrón” on The Kendrick Lamar EP—was a straightforward ode to sex and liquor over a repurposed beat created by the Roots for their 2006 album, Game Theory. On Overly Dedicated, the song becomes a shape-shifting epic with a full breakdown, modulated vocal shifts influenced by southern rap, and a changing rhythm midsong. The instrumental drops out and skips in certain parts, a subtle effect by Ali that accentuates the ferocity of Kendrick’s battle to reconcile his grandmother’s death and his uncle’s murder at Louis Burgers. Kendrick played the song for Tech N9ne on tour, and that was when the Kansas City lyricist knew just how dope the young man was. The track precedes a song like “Swimming Pools (Drank)” from Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city as a sprawling sermon about the joy and pain of worldly vices. On “P&P 1.5,” the rapper dives head-on into the thrill; in a world made increasingly tougher for black men to survive, pleasures like “pussy and Patrón” can combat the stress of just being alive and black in Los Angeles. On “Swimming Pools,” Kendrick toes the line between that same struggle and ecstasy; the same liquor that brought joy can cause tremendous pain, and given his family history of alcoholism, Kendrick peers at the bottle askance, fully aware of the havoc soaked within its forty ounces.
Overly Dedicated was easily Kendrick’s best project to that point, and the one that finally got the attention of larger press outlets and bigger groups of fans. Unlike the EP and the previous work before it, Overly Dedicated exhibited a level of complexity and freedom that, from the outside looking in, seemed to have been brewing for a lifetime. It was the little things that made Overly Dedicated what it was and further demonstrated just who Kendrick was as a person: he didn’t care about arbitrary rules that claimed an EP needed to be a short set of songs, or that an interlude couldn’t be a quick rhyme just because. “They said seven tracks, I said fifteen / Called it an EP, they said I’m trippin’,” he rapped on “The Heart Pt. 2.” Kendrick wanted to change the norm of what rap music could be. After years of tapping on the glass ceiling, TDE finally created a crack, and years later, Sounwave and Ali would admit that Overly Dedicated was the first TDE album to wake people up to what they were doing at the House of Pain in Carson. It was the first project of Kendrick’s to make the Billboard charts, where it peaked at number 72 on its Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.
At the time of its release in September 2010, Kendrick was still on the road with Tech N9ne and Strange Music as part of the Independent Grind Tour. But he was no longer just a hype man; while he was still down to support Jay Rock, his musical brother, Kendrick was quickly gaining steam and becoming his own entity. Yet there wasn’t anything about Overly Dedicated that screamed “greatest rapper of his peer group.” It was a building block, and looking back at the project years later, it doesn’t compare w
ith the cinematic good kid, m.A.A.d city, the seismic force of To Pimp a Butterfly, or the dark, claustrophobic tone of DAMN., and is often forgotten when debating Kendrick’s best recordings. That’s not a diss to the rapper or Overly Dedicated; rather, it’s a testament to Kendrick’s unconventional brilliance, and how—just two years after the mixtape’s release—the songs on it felt obsolete. His collaborators willingly called him a genius whose old-school ways of creating meant he’d come to your house unannounced with a rhythm in his head and clear-cut ideas for albums that weren’t even next in line to be released. Kendrick was always thinking two steps ahead, and even in 2010, he was already thinking about 2012 and beyond, strategizing on what his music would sound like, long before he’d put pen to paper. “He’s the most hands-on person I’ve ever, ever dealt with,” Sounwave once told Red Bull Music Academy. “I can be in the bathroom, on the toilet or something, and he’d just knock, ‘Yo, I got this melody. Can you do this for me real fast?’ ”
Indeed, you couldn’t rest around Kendrick; he was an ambitious creator. So it’s no surprise that he eventually became the best, because while other rappers might’ve held Overly Dedicated as their landmark project, Kendrick and TDE weren’t resting until they released the very best record possible. It’s a fool’s errand, really: Kendrick was a perfectionist, and people like him don’t always fare well in creative arts. Even Dr. Dre fell victim to such perfectionism; after years of tinkering with Detox, adding and subtracting verses, deleting drafts and fine-tuning new ideas, the album still hadn’t come out as of this writing. Kendrick’s drive ran close to Dre’s; he’d record two or three albums’ worth of material just to release one LP, and the unreleased work would sit somewhere on a hard drive. The jazz pianist Robert Glasper, who contributed to Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly, laments having what he thought was an incredible Kendrick verse for one of his Black Radio LPs, only for the rapper to deny its usage because it wasn’t up to his incredibly high standard. Kendrick had the type of sensitivity that could ruin him if he didn’t protect himself. To be black in America is to feel like whatever you do is never good enough. And he was a deep thinker, creatively attuned to personal and cultural struggles. He wanted to absorb those problems and address it through his art. In doing that, it was easy to lose himself in the process if he didn’t take time to replenish his energy.
A project the magnitude of Overly Dedicated should’ve landed with more force than it did, but it entered a crowded space in which rap heavyweights like Nicki Minaj, Kanye, Drake, and T.I. were taking up all the creative real estate, and there wasn’t much room for underground rap to break into the mainstream. Kendrick’s project was released just two months before Kanye’s earth-shattering fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was dropped into a universe that craved new music from the eccentric rapper/producer who’d disappeared from the public eye to craft that thick, sprawling opus. Kanye dominated the news cycle for the better part of three months leading up to the record’s release—from the Twitter account he launched in July, to his return to the MTV Video Music Awards, where, just a year earlier, he had hopped onstage and interrupted Taylor Swift’s victory speech to proclaim Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” as “one of the greatest music videos of all time.” The listening public not only craved new music from Kanye, but relished his antics as well. He was the villain they loved to hate, and though they complained about his public rants and mic-snatching decorum, the fans still sought his creative acumen and stadium-sized rap anthems.
With the public’s eyes and ears trained on Kanye, Kendrick—and, well, a lot of rappers—flew under the radar, perhaps unfairly. Mixtapes are often denounced for sounding rough, or even unfinished, but Kendrick’s Overly Dedicated had a level of polish not often heard from up-and-coming musicians. That he wanted to make it available for free spoke to his humility. In his mind, he hadn’t done enough yet to warrant any sort of profit, but the TDE brain trust—namely Top Dawg and Punch—felt he, engineer Ali, the in-house producers, and the mixtape’s features had finally done enough legwork to generate income from the record. At last, it was time to level up to new ways of living, to get paid for all the grunt work, the sacrifice, the moments alone with just a little bit of money and the dreams of giving the world something it didn’t know it needed at the time. The general consensus was that Overly Dedicated was good, but there was still something missing from it. Kendrick was close—very close—but he needed to keep pushing toward his full potential. He needed a signature project of fresh ideas, devoid of rehashed songs from previous projects. For his next act, Kendrick would have to dig even deeper to summon undeniable work. It had to be even better than Overly Dedicated, light-years beyond The Kendrick Lamar EP, and a far cry from anything before that. For his next feat, Kendrick blacked out in ways that truly surprised rap fans.
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No one saw Section.80 coming, and those who claim otherwise might be revising their own history. Kendrick released his first official album in the heat of the U.S. summer, on July 2, 2011, right as his demographic was more preoccupied with eating grilled meat and drinking cold beer along the coastline. By the time Kendrick started recording Section.80, the TDE team had gotten bigger, and more producers were brought in to cultivate a sound. For Kendrick, that sound meant—well—everything: jazz loops, atmospheric R&B, and spellbinding drums. The atmosphere was more competitive, as each composer wanted to create the most-talked-about song on the record. Of course the competition was friendly; as Terrace Martin says, it was all for the greater good of Section.80 and TDE as a whole. “We just wanted to make sure Kendrick had the best music possible, because he was younger than us, but he was our leader in that aspect,” Martin recalls. “We wanted to make sure he had the best art to get his shit off properly so the world could hear it. It was his time.” Indeed, there was a team-first mentality at TDE: if you were working on an album, everyone in the collective would concentrate solely on your project to make sure it was high quality. “It was Kendrick’s time, so everyone was focused on Kendrick. If it’s your time, you’re the leader of that time. We believe that’s how great records are done.”
To those who weren’t in TDE or close to the camp, everyone seemed to have the same question upon Section.80’s release: Who is this kid?! Of course, if you’d seen him perform or listened to the previous music, you knew he had potential. But very few people saw this—this being the flawless double-time flow of “Rigamortus,” this being the raw, “ready for war” aggression of “Ronald Reagan Era (His Evils).” Kendrick wrote the songs for Section.80 in the spring of 2011, just four months before the album came out, and just a few months after the end of the Independent Grind Tour with Tech N9ne, Jay Rock, and Strange Music. Once off the road, Kendrick retreated to the places where he felt most comfortable: to the House of Pain in Carson, and to the kitchen and couch of his parents’ house in Compton. These places, far away from the bedlam of rowdy tour buses and crowded venues, represented home for Kendrick, where he could regain some peace of mind. It’s hard to write when external forces tug at you, pressuring you to conform to them. Though he wrote on the road when he could, he found it tough to concentrate; he needed solitude to fully connect with his intentions, and to conceptualize what he wanted Section.80 to be.
So he went home to where it all started, back to the dungeon, back to familiar settings. It was his way to reset, to remind himself that, despite the shows and the fan support, there was still plenty of work to be done, and that—as a creator—you’re only as good as your last project. Much like The Kendrick Lamar EP and Overly Dedicated, Section.80 was equally about Kendrick and those closest to him. But where his previous two projects were more about his own peaks and valleys, Section.80 widened the scope to discuss his generation as a whole—the kids born in the mid- to late 1980s who were around when crack cocaine flooded the streets, but were too young to understand what was happening to their friends, families, and neighbors. The song “A.D.H.D” speaks t
o this: here, Kendrick dissects the natural connection that he and his peer group have to drugs and dependency as a whole. It’s not just age-old addictions like marijuana and liquor; his peers are now addicted to cough syrup, pills, and video game consoles. Compare that with the song “No Makeup (Her Vice),” where Kendrick questions why a woman he knows hides her natural beauty beneath layers of cosmetics. “Damn girl, why so much?” he asks. “You ’bout to blow your cover when you cover up / Don’t you know your imperfections is a wonderful blessing?” We learn later in the song that she’s a victim of domestic violence, and the makeup is covering black eyes.
Then there’s “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain),” on which the rapper tells the story of a young woman fighting against societal ills: Keisha was molested as a child and later works as a prostitute. After a short life of fighting crooked cops and overzealous johns, she was found dead—raped and stabbed. Section.80 is where Kendrick became a masterful storyteller who could elicit joy, deliberation, and sorrow in equal measure, and where he merged his two very distinct personas—the aggressive K-Dot and the introspective Kendrick Lamar—with the best results to that point. On a song like “Ronald Reagan Era,” Kendrick summoned K-Dot to a certain extent, leaning upon the unfiltered aggression of his old persona to salute city gangs as one united front. To him, colors didn’t matter; this was him declaring once and for all that Compton was one city. Crips, Eses, and Pirus, it didn’t matter, he said they all had his back. The same went for “Fuck Your Ethnicity,” Section.80’s opening track. This time, he flips the notion of color, broadening it from gang culture to race, lumping all ethnicities into one group. Everyone was the same; when he looked into the crowd from the stage, he saw black, white, Asian, and Hispanic faces all in one place. The song also finds him trying to embrace God, a theme that would define his career. In this moment, it was as if he were rushing to find Him before the sins of his past caught up.
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