On July 31, 2012, Kendrick released “Swimming Pools (Drank)” as the first official single from good kid, m.A.A.d city, and his life changed forever. On the surface, “Swimming Pools” seemed to celebrate the joy and eventual crash of excessive drinking, with its unforgettable hook that crowds love to recite. “Pour up (Drank!), head shot (Drank!),” the chorus goes. When performed at open-air festivals like Pitchfork’s, and after several hours of guzzling beer and eating street food, “Swimming Pools” hits like a party song, with its deep, vaporous bass line and sledgehammering drum loop. Dig into the lyrics and you hear Kendrick wrestling with his family’s history of alcoholism, and how their struggles led to his own complicated relationship with the drug. “Now I done grew up ’round some people livin’ their life in bottles,” he raps. “Granddaddy had the golden flask / Backstroke every day in Chicago.” When he was younger, Kendrick wanted to fit in with the popular kids, so he drank solely for that reason.
The song also addresses the peer pressure associated with drinking, that if you’re out with friends, you’re expected to get drunk. If you don’t, you’re somehow considered soft and clowned for “babysittin’ only two or three shots.” This speaks to the genius of Kendrick Lamar: on this song and others, the rapper knew how to weave serious themes through pop-infused beats, educating listeners without preaching to them. He wrote illusively and buried the message, thus making it connect with passive and active listeners. “Swimming Pools” was a dark song teeming with Kendrick’s personal torment, but because he talked to you and not at you, the rapper was able to relate on a human level. Many of us have some sort of connection to alcoholism, so the lyrics hit home in a way that simply wasn’t on Top 40 radio at that time. It was just different, much like Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” in 2004; with its backing choir and marching drums, that song was gospel masquerading as hip-hop. (In 2019, Kanye leaned heavily into that aesthetic; his ninth studio album, Jesus Is King, was essentially a Christian rap record.)
“I wanted to do something that felt good, but had a meaning behind it at the same time,” Kendrick once told Complex regarding “Swimming Pools.” “I wanted to do something that’s universal to everybody but still true to myself. What better way to make something universal than to speak about drinking? I’m coming from a household where you had to make a decision—you were either a casual drinker or you were a drunk. That’s what that record is really about, me experiencing that as a kid and making my own decisions.”
People never address alcoholism in mainstream music, said producer T-Minus, who compiled the beat for “Swimming Pools.” “A lot of people, when they first hear it, they think it’s just about drinking and the positive effects of getting drunk,” he told Complex. “But this record talks about the negative effects as well. Which is really dope because not a lot of people want to touch on all the other things.” Because Kendrick went against the grain, and because he was a real person talking about real topics, and because he appreciated the spotlight (yet wasn’t seduced by it), “Swimming Pools”—and his music overall—gave us energy. It peaked at number 17 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, making it Kendrick’s first big hit. Almost overnight, he’d broken away from underground rap.
From there, it was full speed toward the October release of good kid, m.A.A.d city, now one of the most anticipated albums of 2012. Though the rapper played it cool during the press run, there was a lot riding on good kid for him and TDE as a whole. The memory of Jay Rock’s failed Warner deal was still fresh in their minds. Coupled with the critical success of Section.80, along with the Dre and Gaga cosigns, Kendrick’s major-label debut had to be a home run. There were too many eyes on him; no way this could flop. “We’ve done a lot, but we haven’t sold any records,” Tiffith said at the time. “This is our real first release. This is going to set the tone for TDE.”
Kendrick’s interviews leading up to the album release only heightened anticipation: after listening to the record, he declared, we were going to know why he didn’t drink too much or smoke at all, and why he held his family and friends so closely. He only gave us a little bit in these interviews, and in some instances, he’d start to unpack the album’s concept before stopping himself. He’d been planning this album since his days of dropping mixtapes and he didn’t want to give too much away. He wanted us all to be surprised, to see his hometown in all its nuanced splendor. The good kid album was Kendrick’s crowning achievement; now it was time to unleash it on the world.
Released October 22, 2012, good kid, m.A.A.d city wasn’t just a dope album; it was an exquisite masterpiece that far exceeded everyone’s already grand expectations. It didn’t sound like a West Coast rap record, at least not completely; songs like “Sherane a.k.a. Master Splinter’s Daughter,” “The Art of Peer Pressure,” “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” and “Real” had the lush openness of a Southern rap cut, and Kendrick sounded a lot like André 3000. He had the same breathless, conversational flow as the OutKast rapper and peppered his rhymes with the same rich symbolism. In fact, Kendrick played the album track “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” for André before the album came out, since TDE’s Punch Henderson wanted him on the song, but André, who was shooting the Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side at the time, wasn’t in the headspace for it.
Nonetheless, good kid, m.A.A.d city was a cinematic marvel that unfolded like a Quentin Tarantino movie: subtitled A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar, the listener is dropped into a cliff-hanger right away, on the opening song, “Sherane a.k.a. Master Splinter’s Daughter,” then the album slowly unpacks the details leading to the protagonist’s dilemma. It was a beguiling puzzle in which scenes are out of order but the story still flows. Above all, it was incredibly visual; on “Backseat Freestyle,” you could almost see Kendrick rhyming in the backseat of a friend’s car at the behest of his crew. Set in 2004, he was still K-Dot, and the song—the third single from good kid, m.A.A.d city—was an unbridled lyrical assault akin to his early mixtapes. The album moved methodically with great subtlety and care, not wasting any audio, delving into the fun and trouble that young black kids in Compton can get into. The cover art is also essential to the narrative: the album’s deluxe version—with six bonus tracks, including the “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” remix with Jay-Z and “Now or Never” with Mary J. Blige—consists of an old Polaroid photo of his mom’s van parked in front of their house. The regular twelve-track version is covered by an equally nostalgic pic of young Kendrick sitting on his uncle’s lap at a white table. His grandfather is to his left and another uncle is to his far right. It perfectly depicts the dichotomy that characterized Kendrick’s life and music: his eyes are innocent, not knowing that the uncle who’s holding him throws up a gang sign underneath his tiny arm. On the table is Kendrick’s milk bottle near a forty-ounce bottle of beer. “That photo, it says so much about my life and about how I was raised in Compton and the things I’ve seen,” Kendrick said in 2012.
The album began with a song about “Sherane,” a girl Kendrick met at a house party and with whom he wanted to have sex. She lived “down the street from Dominguez High /… borderline Compton or Paramount.” According to the song, her mother was a crack addict and her family had a history of gangbanging. The story begins with seventeen-year-old Kendrick driving down Rosecrans Avenue in his mother’s Caravan, with a fifth of Grey Goose vodka in the trunk and barely enough gas to get to his destination. He finally gets there, when he sees two dudes in black hoodies looking to start trouble. This could be a setup, or maybe Kendrick was simply in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time. Just as he sees them, his phone rings: It’s his mother, Paula, wondering where the hell Kendrick went with her van. “You told me you was gon’ be back in fifteen minutes!” Paula exclaims, her voice racked with frustration. “I gotta go to the county buildin’, man / These kids ready to eat! / I’m ready to eat, shiit.” Kendrick’s father, Kenny, doesn’t care about any of that; he only wants to know what his son did with his damn dominoes: “This the sec
ond time I asked you to bring my fuckin’ dominoes / Keep losin’ my goddamn dominoes, we gon’ have to go in the backyard, and squab, homie!” This exchange, right near the end of the song, quickly shifts the mood, bringing levity to a tense scene. As his parents leave a comedic voicemail, we don’t know if Kendrick made it past the guys, or if they were even worried about him in the first place. And after all that, did he even link with Sherane?
Then there’s “The Art of Peer Pressure,” which delves into the home invasion that almost got him arrested. Here we see Kendrick and his friends rolling down the street, “four deep in a white Toyota / A quarter tank of gas, one pistol and orange soda.” They’re speeding down the 405 at two thirty in the afternoon playing a CD by rapper Young Jeezy. Later, when the sun begins to set, they get to the house they’d been plotting to rob for a couple of months. Kendrick goes through the back window looking for anything—a Nintendo video game system, DVDs, and plasma-screen televisions. Then they dash out of the neighborhood as cops give chase—or so they thought:
We made a right, then made a left, then made a right
Then made a left, we was just circlin’ life…
But they made a right, then made a left
Then made a right, then another right
One lucky night with the homies
This was also the first time that Kendrick ever smoked weed. “Usually I’m drug-free,” he declared, “but, shit, I’m with the homies.” We learn four tracks later, on “m.A.A.d city,” that the blunt was laced with cocaine, which explains why he didn’t do drugs as an adult: “Imagine if your first blunt had you foamin’ at the mouth.”
The album featured Jay Rock, Drake, Anna Wise, Mary J. Blige, and Dr. Dre, but the guest star on “m.A.A.d city” was easily the most surprising. As the beat flips from a dark, menacing stomp to a bright, headbanging trunk rattler, a Compton OG named MC Eiht announced his arrival in the most MC Eiht way possible. “Wake yo’ punk ass up!” the veteran rapper implored. “It ain’t nuthin’ but a Compton thang / G-yeah.” MC Eiht was considered a legend in Los Angeles and West Coast hip-hop overall. The rapper was perhaps best known for his 1993 song “Streiht Up Menace,” which told the semi-imagined tale of a young black man growing up in Compton, whose father was killed and whose mother struggled to put food on the table. Ultimately, the character—loosely based on the protagonist in the film Menace II Society, which Eiht also starred in—joins a gang and dies while protecting his block. Eiht, with his trademark baseball cap and long braids, was known for these sorts of voyeuristic rhymes that warn listeners against bloodthirsty cops and gun-toting gangbangers. In Eiht’s world, Compton was a dark place where death and jail sentences awaited young black men at every turn. He’d been pretty quiet until he resurfaced on Kendrick’s album, showing up on “m.A.A.d city” to “teach you some lessons of the street” while letting the good kid know that the bullshit he had endured in Compton had been going on since the 1980s. On the song, MC Eiht sounded like his old self: chill, no-nonsense, brotherly but not preachy. Kendrick grew up listening to hip-hop like this, so to have a legend like Eiht on his major-label debut was a big accomplishment.
“Some people of mine knew Kendrick. They contacted me and said that he wanted to do a song with me. I said, ‘Cool,’ and told them to slide him my number,” Eiht tells me. “He hit me like two weeks later.” From there, Eiht and Kendrick met at the studio, where the younger rapper laid out the concept of “m.A.A.d city.” Kendrick wanted to pay homage to the old days of Compton and the golden age of gangsta rap: “We sat down, he played me the song and let me hear the hook. I came up with my verse and everything went like clockwork. He could’ve gotten anybody from Compton to be on the song, but because of the type of music I had put out, which always referenced Compton and the streets, that was the type of flavor he wanted on it. He was trying to bring an authentic cat who used to do rap back in the days, who came from that era. It was basically a studio conversation and him telling me that he wanted me to do what I was known for.”
Kendrick wasn’t like some other rappers with whom Eiht had collaborated. He was about the work and that was it. “He’s a real laid-back kid, humble, wasn’t too demanding for somebody who was making his first major project,” Eiht says. “Usually, cats don’t really have a direction of what they wanna do. They just have me come in the studio and be like, ‘Hey, Eiht, bust a verse.’ And usually I ask dudes, ‘What’s the concept? What’s the direction?’ and they say, ‘Hey, just do what you do.’ He had the time to sit down with me and explain, so that shows the great respect he has for the craft of hip-hop. He’s not one of them guys with fifty million people in the studio with drank and smoke and all that type of shit. Everything was basically just work. Some people need the props or whatever, the ambience of the stereotypical hip-hop scene, but true artists bypass a lot of that. When you’re somebody like Kendrick, who’s really articulate about what you want to produce and put out to the people, you have to be serious-minded.”
For good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick tapped deeply into a tumultuous past that he’d moved beyond. And where other musicians might only present the best of themselves, he told his entire truth, imploring kids in Compton to dream beyond the city. On “m.A.A.d city,” we learn that he had a real job for only a month; he was a security guard, but got fired after he staged a robbery there three weeks into the gig. Sure, he was a burgeoning star with a record deal and big affirmations, but Kendrick was still part of the community and felt the same pain that they did. On “Money Trees,” he remembered leaner times, of putting hot sauce on cheap ramen noodles, and rapping in cyphers even when cash wasn’t in the picture. He honored his uncle Tony, who saw big things for his nephew’s career but was shot twice in the head at a local Louis Burgers before his prediction came true: “He said one day I’ll be on tour, ya bish… / A Louis belt will never ease that pain.” We learn near the end of “Poetic Justice,” a sultry R&B-focused cut that samples pop icon Janet Jackson’s song “Any Time, Any Place”—and is named after a film in which she and Tupac starred—that Kendrick was jumped before he ever got a chance to link with Sherane. “I’mma tell you where I’m from,” declared one of the men who interrogated Kendrick in his mom’s van. “You gon’ tell me where you from, okay? / Or where your grandma stay, where yo’ mama stay, or where yo’ daddy stay.” In most cities throughout the U.S., these kinds of questions will never come up; but in Compton, where claiming the wrong neighborhood will get you beat up or killed, they’re incredibly common. The attack on Kendrick led to a shootout and the subsequent death of one of his friends.
The incident and its aftermath is laid out masterfully on “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” good kid’s centerpiece and one of Kendrick’s most powerful songs ever. On this two-part, twelve-minute epic, the rapper unpacks the anger of watching one of his friends die in front of him, and how a chance run-in with an older woman changed his life forever. The first verse is easily the most sobering: he rhymes from the perspective of a friend named Dave, whose brother was killed and Kendrick was there to see it. The friend was in the streets, still trying to find a passion that could take him away from that life. But he was in too far at that point, and just couldn’t change his ways. If Dave died, he wanted Kendrick to memorialize him and his brother in a song. Sure enough, Kendrick’s friend was shot and killed before good kid, m.A.A.d city dropped. The second verse revisits “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain)” from 2011’s Section.80, where Kendrick details the story of a prostitute who was raped and killed by a john; it was a tragic tale that Keisha’s younger sister didn’t want to be told. “I met her sister and she went at me about her sister Keisha,” Kendrick once told MTV News, “basically saying she didn’t want [me] to put her business out there and if your album do come out, don’t mention me, don’t sing about me.” Going against the demands of Keisha’s sister, Kendrick rapped the second verse from her vantage point, his voice defiant, then fading away. On the third verse, Kendrick raps from his own perspe
ctive as he tries to comprehend his own demise and what that could mean in the afterlife. At that point, he still hadn’t found the God he sought, but with death chasing him so steadily, he put his burdens in the hands of Jesus Christ, dousing himself in figurative holy water before it was too late. In this moment, Kendrick was physically and spiritually drained; he’d been running down his dreams so fervently that he truly needed rest. He let those emotions build up, taking each murder, every jailed friend and relative, and putting it all on his back. He was determined to carry the load and somehow make it better for everyone. But that cuts both ways: With Kendrick looking out for so many people, how could he possibly look out for himself? The third verse is prayerful and carried by Kendrick’s inferiority complex. “Am I worth it?” he asks. “Did I put enough work in?”
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