The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  With Section.80, the rapper wanted to achieve balance in his music and in life, with art that addressed all facets of the city’s culture while paying homage to the men in his family who were still active in the streets. Kendrick pulled from these experiences—from the hard lessons he learned from his uncles and cousins, to the nurturing he got from his mother and father, who always encouraged him to dream and live life abundantly. “They taught me the world is bigger than Compton and to go out and explore it,” he once told Billboard. “That made me an individual. I actually know who I am, where I come from, and what I got to do to represent and connect people.” Section.80 was partially influenced by a close friend of his who was given a sentence of twenty-five years to life for a violent crime. “He had no guidance and was caught in that negative stigma of our generation that [we] don’t care about anything and don’t listen to anybody,” Kendrick told the publication. “He was so young and his life is almost completely gone, it’s like he missed the whole world. Just the fact that’s gone from him at such a tender age shows me that we have a lot to go as far as listening and being able to critique ourselves as individuals. That’s what Section.80 represents. [It’s] that particular moment [in which] I thought back to the pain I felt when one of my friends was about to be gone for a minute. That’s the creation process going into the studio, thinking about those emotions.”

  With Section.80, Kendrick portrayed his peer group as actual human beings with real concerns. They’re not apathetic and only addicted to themselves and their cell phones. They hurt and they bleed like everyone else. They lament the state of the world, and just because they don’t protest the way their parents did doesn’t make them any less thoughtful. Section.80 was an exercise of duality, a walk through the pleasures of pain and the dark sides of temptation. It was a story about real life and good times, and the uncertainty looming at every corner of the inner city. It was also an album of self-discovery, of Kendrick trying to evade the pitfalls waiting for him. The rapper spoke to this in detail on “Poe Mans Dream (His Vice).” Here he unpacks his own flawed thinking, that he once believed going to jail was cool. That was until he saw the stress and strain that prison had put on his family.

  A story like this doesn’t just apply to Kendrick; it addresses the plight of many young black men who’ve seen their uncles, brothers, and fathers ushered to prison so much that the path seems glamorous. Jail is far from utopia, and some of these men have spent so much of their adult lives in custody that a culture behind bars is all they know. Kendrick tapped into the isolation that his family and friends felt in jail, when all they had were the memories of freedom, a pen, and just a few sheets of paper to write their loved ones back home. With Section.80, you can feel Kendrick become more serious, more reflective, somewhat more isolated. Though the album was tailored specifically to Compton, Kendrick kept the stories open-ended, so those close to his age group in Philadelphia, Houston, New Orleans, and elsewhere could relate to the narrative. This is where he started to move to the forefront of TDE and become its star player, and where his buzz grew so palpable that he could no longer be denied by the public. In fact, 2011 was a big year for Kendrick: that February, he was named to XXL’s eleven-member Freshman Class along with other soon-to-be-big rap stars: Meek Mill, Mac Miller, Big K.R.I.T., Lil B, and YG.

  Then in August, a group of Cali rap icons gave Kendrick the biggest cosign of his career. During a show in his native L.A., they passed him the torch, dubbing him the King of West Coast Rap. It was an emotional moment for Kendrick, so much so that he cried onstage. The moment was greater than anything the rapper could’ve imagined, and more valuable than any accolades given to him by an outsider. “You great at what you do. You ain’t good at what you do, you great at what you do,” Snoop said to Kendrick. “You got the torch, you better run with that muthafucka. You better run with it, nigga, ’cause it’s yours.” Eight months later, it was announced that Kendrick was going on the road once again, this time with Drake as part of his four-month Club Paradise Tour. The intrigue surrounding Kendrick arose, and he became an enigmatic figure in the eyes of the media. They couldn’t quite figure him out or describe his music; it was equally fascinating and strange to the ear. Compton rappers weren’t supposed to rhyme over jazz breaks, but he did. They weren’t supposed to evoke the piss-in-the-hallway, roaches-in-the-cereal, rats-in-the-subway aesthetic of New York’s Wu-Tang Clan, but he did. They weren’t supposed to summon the warmth and gospel-infused essence of the Dungeon Family, but he did. That he could pull from these disparate aesthetics and remain overtly Compton was his greatest feat.

  Pitchfork, the popular music site known for its tastemaking album reviews, gave Section.80 a positive score of 8 out of 10. In his assessment, critic Tom Breihan called Kendrick “a weird kid” and “an introverted loner type,” but noted that the album stood “as a powerful document of a… promising young guy figuring out his voice.” Over at XXL, critic Adam Fleischer trumpeted the rapper’s humility and artistic flair, highlighting the fact that he could examine money, history, and religion—all at the same time—with “passion, focus, and sincerity.” Still, Kendrick wasn’t buying into the media hype; everyday people were feeling it, and that meant more. “When I go out to do these shows, these kids actually believe in what I talk about because they understand the look it’s been getting from people I looked up to,” Kendrick once said. “I love the acknowledgment as far as the music and the stamps [of approval], but at the end of the day, those stamps gonna carry no weight unless I put the work ethic behind it.… I wanna make the best music in today’s world, period. Once I do that, I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something.”

  In a year of notable hip-hop releases from the likes of Jay-Z and Kanye (Watch the Throne), Drake (Take Care), and fellow upcoming rapper J. Cole (Cole World: The Sideline Story), Section.80 stood apart. If good kid, m.A.A.d city presented Kendrick as a fully formed human with very visible blemishes, Section.80 was paint strewn on the canvas—his visage and ideas still broadly taking shape. It was a masterpiece in its own way, the record on which he started to embrace his genius before he started taking himself so seriously. “We look at Section.80 and how different that was compared to everything in that time,” TDE engineer Derek Ali has said. “It just showed me—if you just be yourself and stay true and loyal to yourself, then there’s nothing you can’t do, and there’s nowhere you can’t go.”

  4

  A Star Is Born

  By early 2012, Kendrick was a budding star rubbing elbows with the hottest rappers in the industry. In mid-February, he and another promising lyricist, Harlem’s A$AP Rocky, hit the road with Drake as part of his Club Paradise Tour. Kendrick got the opportunity after he spoke with Drake in person following his first show ever in Toronto. “He called me up and we had a few drinks and he always said he was appreciative of my music,” Kendrick reportedly said. “I’ve always been a fan of his music. We just been chopping it up since.” Drake handpicked Kendrick to open for him on the road: “There’s a lot of artists out there who could have been out there on tour with him, for him to sit there and respect my music. We have the same mutual respect.” This was before the 2013 “Control” verse, and years before they greeted each other with passive-aggressive tension, begrudging smiles, and forced pleasantries backstage.

  Across thirty-eight dates and in cities like Austin, Oklahoma City, San Diego, and London, Kendrick performed to bigger crowds in bigger arenas, this time as a solo act and not as someone else’s hype man. He was taking Section.80 to fans who somewhat knew his work, but because he was an opening act, he was performing monumental tracks like “HiiiPoWeR,” “Hol’ Up,” and “Blow My High (Members Only)” to somewhat uninterested fans who were there to see the headliner, or even A$AP, before him. A$AP was riding the wave of an incredibly popular mixtape called LIVE. LOVE. A$AP, a tough-minded street record that introduced the rapper as a weed-smoking disciple of UGK and DJ Screw. He wasn’t as lyrical as Kendrick, but because the majorit
y of rap fans didn’t prioritize complex wordplay like the previous generation, A$AP’s star shone brighter than Kendrick’s at that time. Still, these were the biggest crowds that Kendrick had ever seen, but with a limited budget and only a few minutes to make an impression, some of the early shows felt a bit rough. On the first gig of the tour, at the BankUnited Center in Coral Gables, Florida, Kendrick and Ali didn’t have much: just a white folding table, an Apple MacBook, and a TDE banner draped across the front monitors. That setup could work at a tiny hole-in-the-wall club with hundreds of people crammed into it, not in a midsized basketball arena with thousands of seats. But the rapper had toured arenas of similar size, with Tech N9ne and the Strange Music crew as part of the Independent Grind Tour. And being a disciple of Top Dawg Tiffith and TDE’s “Hustle Like You Broke” mentality helped as well. He knew there was no way to convert every single concertgoer into a Kendrick-loving follower, but if he could get a few of them, that could go a long way toward building a sizable fan base. “I know it’s fifteen thousand people out there, I’m used to two thousand,” Kendrick once told Fuse TV. “I’m finna work. I’m finna get at least a hundred of these folks to understand what Kendrick Lamar was.” Slowly, he was building momentum toward his first masterpiece, gathering fans in dribs and drabs.

  The first taste of good kid, m.A.A.d city came in February 2012 with the release of the song “Cartoon & Cereal,” a methodical cut that, in hindsight, is essential to understanding Kendrick’s creative aesthetic for the years to follow. Through modulated vocals and complex imagery, the rapper walks through family history—not just his, but those of his peers who grew up around gang culture. He speaks of male mentorship, of fathers and sons being connected physically and emotionally, and how little boys ultimately want to be like the grown men in their homes. But what happens when the role model is knee-deep in the streets, or locked up in jail? Here, the man is literally holding the gun as the woman gives birth to the little boy. Inadvertently, the armed man is the first image the boy sees, which informs his childhood perspective. “You told me, ‘Don’t be like me, just finish watching cartoons,’ ” Kendrick raps. It was supposed to be a single for good kid, though after it leaked to the internet, Kendrick and TDE decided to leave it off the album; as such, it has become a cult favorite for fans.

  The next month, it was announced that the rapper had signed a joint venture deal with Interscope Records and Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment imprint to release good kid, m.A.A.d city, his major-label debut album. Kendrick signed the deal not only because of Dre, though that was surely a big reason, but because Interscope had a reputation for putting out albums in the truest sense. “It was about who understood the vision, and Dre and [Interscope CEO] Jimmy Iovine understood,” Kendrick once said. “They were just banking off talent, like Eminem. They understand how the growth of an independent company, like Aftermath, can develop into something that becomes its own Interscope, and that’s what we’re doing with Top Dawg Entertainment. We want to develop artists and put out solid albums like Eminem did with The Marshall Mathers LP and 50 Cent did with Get Rich or Die Tryin’—they’re records that stood the test of time. They understood that.”

  But having a deal didn’t mean he was going to submit to pressure from record executives; Kendrick still had a unique vision for his music, and good kid, m.A.A.d city was going to fulfill it. He wanted to carry out Snoop’s directive as the next great savior of West Coast hip-hop, and to make believers out of those who claimed that L.A. rap had fallen off. Kendrick didn’t think the city had lost a thing, but compared with the earth-shattering force of his creative forefathers, Southern California hip-hop needed a new voice to carry it back to prominence: “If I’m the shining light that can branch that off then so be it, I’mma do just that.” By the summer of 2012, there was a legitimate buzz surrounding Kendrick, but he still hadn’t broken out on his own; on the Club Paradise Tour, he was just the opening act; now it was time to command stages by himself. That July, just three months after his gig concluded on Drake’s tour, Kendrick was in Chicago, some fifteen minutes up I-90W from where his parents lived before they picked up stakes and moved to Compton in 1984. It was a full-circle moment: His folks had to leave to escape street life and make a better way for themselves. Now their firstborn son was in their home city, on the verge of becoming a star.

  Kendrick was booked to play the annual Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago’s Union Park, where prominent rock artists like Modest Mouse and the National, and rap acts like Public Enemy and De La Soul once graced its stages. Kendrick was part of Pitchfork’s most rap-friendly lineup ever to that point, where even his TDE partner ScHoolboy Q—who’d released a really good LP, Habits & Contradictions, in January—had a slot to perform. Up-and-coming rappers Big K.R.I.T., Danny Brown, and experimental producer Flying Lotus were also on the bill that year. Kendrick was easily the weekend’s star, even if his name wasn’t the biggest on the flyer. Chris Kaskie, the then-president of Pitchfork Media, says he knew he wanted to book Kendrick to play the fest the year prior—in 2011—but the lineup was already locked in by the time Section.80 was released. Kaskie says Pitchfork paid Kendrick five thousand dollars to play its Blue Stage in 2012. “There probably wasn’t a day from spring 2012 to the fest I didn’t worry about him getting too big and move away from [it],” Kaskie says. Ryan Schreiber, the founder and CEO of Pitchfork, remembers the Pitchfork crowd being especially excited to see Kendrick. There was an eight-month period from when the company booked the rapper to play the festival to when he actually set foot on the stage, so the buzz only heightened. “I remember watching people flood from other stages mid-set over to this tiny blue stage,” Schreiber says. “And seeing these massive throngs of people stretching out, way past the food stands and everything else. For us to see Kendrick having that kind of pull that early on was pretty impressive.”

  Somewhat inexplicably, he’d made a fan out of Lady Gaga, who by 2012 had become a mega pop star with the type of box office fame we hadn’t seen since Madonna in the mid-1980s. From the outside, the friendship felt odd: she was an eccentric personality who had worn a meat dress to the MTV Video Music Awards just two years prior. Kendrick was introverted, didn’t like drama, and was more content living in his own head. Nonetheless, Gaga came to the festival in a mini motorcade, and pulled up to the rear of the Blue Stage, where he was performing. There were rumors that she might even perform with him. Gaga’s appearance was a big deal for Kendrick and the festival itself: Pitchfork was known for attracting niche artists with sizable cult followings, not ones with Gaga’s gravitational pull. “We didn’t have any notice of her showing up and being sidestage until a half hour beforehand,” Schreiber recalls. “She just rolled up and there she was.”

  Rappers with bigger names and bigger budgets couldn’t land a Gaga cosign, so for Kendrick—a nascent MC who was anti-industry—to garner that level of interest meant he really had something worth hearing. That he didn’t care about the fame likely attracted Gaga to his music. “She’s a regular person,” Kendrick told Pitchfork. “We became friends off of the genuine love for the music. She just hit my phone one day and said that she had a respect for the hip-hop that I was doing, that it wasn’t like anything she heard on the radio. Then chemistry collided from there.”

  The energy was hectic backstage at the festival. Pitchfork staffers had to somehow sneak in one of the biggest pop stars in the world without disrupting Kendrick’s set. “By the time the show happened, you could see her sidestage jamming out to each song, but very clearly not planning to come out,” Kaskie recalls. “After some talks with [my business partner] Mike Reed and some folks on their team, it sounded like Gaga saw his set as ‘his moment’ and didn’t want to take the spotlight off of him. I thought that was fucking awesome of her, because it definitely would’ve made the show all the more frenzied.” There was something electric about Kendrick, something engaging yet somewhat foreign. No one could figure him out or make sense of the connections he
made in such a short time. And because the rapper didn’t divulge a lot when he spoke made him even more mysterious, and thus, more intriguing. Two questions followed Kendrick as he rose up the ranks: Of all the budding lyricists in the world, how did he get Dr. Dre’s cosign? And just how the hell did he get Gaga’s attention?!

  In the whirlwind that his life quickly became, the rapper struggled to reconcile his ascendance. Yet to those closest to him, the love wasn’t surprising at all. He was a genuine dude who had worked incredibly hard in silence to finally reach this point. People like Kendrick don’t stop to smell the flowers or revel in the love that they’ve rightfully earned; they’re obsessed with getting better. Good work is the foundation of success, and even if Dave Free, Sounwave, “Top Dawg” Tiffith, Dre, or Gaga hadn’t seen greatness in Kendrick, he was destined to win anyway. He had his head on straight; he wasn’t going to cheat the process. “He put in his ten thousand hours to be an ascendant master at his craft. He’s incredibly disciplined,” says vocalist Anna Wise, one-half (or one-third, depending on who was in the group) of Sonnymoon, an alt-soul and bedroom pop outfit of which Kendrick became a fan after watching clips on YouTube. Kendrick reached out to Wise because he liked the different characters she portrayed in her music. Within the course of a song, she could flip her falsetto from sultry to cartoonish. The two sang on “Cartoon & Cereal” and became frequent collaborators.

  The genesis of Kendrick’s legend can be traced to that stage, in Union Park, on a sweltering ninety-two-degree day on Chicago’s North Side, where fans chanted his name with a vigor that they hadn’t before. Somewhere along the way, Kendrick became a household name; they knew these songs and yelled the rapper’s bars back to him when his DJ, Ali, cut the instrumental for their voices to shine through. Section.80 tracks like “HiiiPoWeR,” “Hol’ Up,” and “Fuck Your Ethnicity” had suddenly become cult favorites. “I remember watching him just cut loose,” Schreiber recalls. Fans—and, yes, even Lady Gaga—saw Kendrick sweat through a forty-five-minute set and become a leading man in real time. In the summer of 2014, Kendrick returned to Union Park and the Pitchfork Music Festival, this time as one of its three headliners. This time the money was much better (roughly three hundred thousand dollars) and the stakes were much higher. Plus, Kendrick was earning serious clout. “We wanted him to feel not just that he was here to headline, but we were also about his people and community,” Kaskie says. “We booked ScHoolboy and SZA not to appease, but to also celebrate what we know to be a powerful thing growing on the West Coast.” Indeed, there was a renaissance of sorts happening in West Coast rap, due in part to Kendrick and TDE. Around 2010, a collective of L.A.-based rappers captivated pop culture with shocking antics and hardcore rhymes. They called themselves Odd Future, and they were led by the garish Tyler, the Creator—a fire-breathing producer and MC who once bit into a cockroach in a music video. Also in the group were rapper Earl Sweatshirt and singer Frank Ocean, two superstars-in-waiting who would become respective cornerstones in underground rap and R&B. Sweatshirt birthed a movement of heavy-eyed, conversational rap that paired weed-induced flows with obscure soul-sampling loops. In 2012, Ocean released channel ORANGE, his spectacular major-label debut album, and was quickly dubbed an R&B savior. Then there was YG, a Compton-born gangsta rapper whose work with producer and fellow L.A. native DJ Mustard was a glossy alternative to Kendrick’s heady approach.