The song’s second half, “I’m Dying of Thirst,” gives Kendrick the cathartic release he needed. A riveting gospel-focused cut with haunting choral moans and cascading bass drums, the track is vengeful at first, and represents the moment when fight or flight kicks in. Everything in Kendrick says, Go kill the niggas that killed my friend, but a chance encounter with an elder changes all of that. “I don’t want to say she was religious, but she was a spiritual lady who broke down what life is really about to us,” Kendrick told Complex in 2012:
“I’m Dying of Thirst” represents being in a situation where all this happens throughout the day, but at the end of the day we run into this particular lady and she breaks down the story of God, positivity, life, being free, and being real with yourself. She was letting us know what’s really real. Because you have to leave this earth and speak to somebody of a higher power. That song represents being baptized, the actual water, getting dipped in holy water. It represents when my whole spirit changed, when my life starts—my life that you know right now, that’s when it starts.
The woman is calm, resolute, and a blessing, not at all intimidated by the fury of the young men. She settles their spirit and makes them recite a prayer to wash away their past:
Thank you, Lord Jesus, for saving me with your precious blood In Jesus’ name, Amen
Without that elder, who knows what would’ve happened. Maybe Kendrick and his friends kill the dude who smoked one of their own. Maybe they get away with it or maybe they don’t. Maybe their friends come back and pop more of Kendrick’s friends. Or maybe they pop Kendrick. Then there’s no mixtapes, no tours with Tech N9ne and Drake, no meeting Dre and Snoop, no record deal, no good kid, m.A.A.d city. He’d be just another dead black boy in a city and country that doesn’t care about black life. He’d be another statistic, one more cold body beneath a thin white sheet. More important, Kenny and Paula’s son would be gone. Despite his dad’s loving real talk and his mom’s wide-eyed optimism, it took the voice of a person outside the home to set Kendrick on the right path. The elder was there just when he needed it and saved his life as a result. His parents guided him, but she was the angel that arrived at the very second things could’ve gone horribly wrong.
The next song, “Real,” represents Kendrick’s divine awakening. This is where the rapper understands—with the help of his father—that running the streets didn’t make him cool, that “realness is responsibility, realness is taking care of your… family, realness is God…” If “I’m Dying of Thirst” was Kendrick’s baptism, “Real” is the moment he rose from the water, fully anointed as a new man, much to his mother’s delight. “Tell your story to these black and brown kids in Compton,” Paula implores on his voicemail. “Let ’em know you was just like them, but you still rose from that dark place of violence, becoming a positive person. But when you do make it, give back with your words of encouragement, and that’s the best way to give back to your city… And I love you, Kendrick.” Songs like “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and “Real” fulfill the prophecy of “Jesus Saves,” a one-off tune floating around the internet. On it, Kendrick wondered why his God kept blessing the song’s protagonist, even after he’s cussed out his mother, hit his girlfriend, and fired a handgun. As the song plays, his voice cracks, sobbing through his testimony while a good friend suffers through a string of bad luck.
The good kid album ends with “Compton,” the vaunted Dr. Dre and Kendrick collab. Where the album’s other songs felt tethered to Kendrick’s coming-of-age in 2004, that track seemed to merge all eras of Compton, the teacher and the student. Just Blaze admits that he wasn’t impressed with Kendrick’s music at first; he’d downloaded Section.80 but hadn’t played it before the rapper’s session with Dre, then he’d heard another song—though he can’t remember which one—and wasn’t feeling it. But then Just Blaze heard an advance of good kid, m.A.A.d city in the studio while mixing “Compton” and was hooked. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is different,’ ” the producer recalls. “When I heard the fact that it was a story line that was woven through the album, which is something that had been missing in hip-hop for a while, and then when I heard that mix of more traditional hip-hop sounds with what was considered more contemporary at that time, then you had MC Eiht on the album. All of that together, you could tell this was a kid who was young and on the cutting edge of what the next group of young artists were gonna be. But it was also a kid who understood and respected what came before him. And that’s what made it special to me. Just how he embraced both sides of it, from the production to the song references to the slang and the language. Not too many artists in his age group were doing that in hip-hop at that time, with the skill and the caliber with which he was doing it. I did not expect it to become this new wave of hip-hop only because I wasn’t sure the climate was ready for it. So when it became successful, I was that much more happy for him.”
The Kendrick heard toward the end of good kid is the guy we’d see for years, the intensely private guy who took time for himself and eschewed the approval of others. The album chronicled his evolution from a cocky child who was quick to succumb to peer pressure to an independent, self-assured person. This is where he put God in control of his life and art, and where his work became therapeutic for himself and listeners at large. Close your eyes, and the combination of “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and “Real” play like old church records, the feeling of stress relief in harmonic form. In its totality, good kid, m.A.A.d city presented the full spectrum of Compton and its people, not just the negative aspects you’d see on the news. By presenting the good and the bad, the light and the dark, Kendrick triumphed; the world caught on, and it became a massive critical and commercial hit. Rolling Stone praised the rapper for “setting spiritual yearnings and moral dilemmas against a backdrop of gang violence and police brutality.” Pitchfork lauded the album’s “autobiographical intensity.” “Listening to it feels like walking directly into Lamar’s childhood home and, for the next hour, growing up alongside him,” music critic and author Jayson Greene wrote.
Upon its release, good kid hit the Billboard 200 chart at number 2 and sold roughly 241,000 copies in its first week. It marked the second-highest opening for an R&B/hip-hop album that year, with only Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded selling more in its first week of release. Still, good kid, m.A.A.d city went gold by the end of 2012, selling 500,000 units, and platinum a year later, with more than one million units sold. As of September 2019, the record surpassed Eminem’s 2002 record, The Eminem Show, as the longest-running hip-hop album on the Billboard charts. It was fitting that Kendrick shared the same milestone as Eminem; when good kid, m.A.A.d city came out, Em was one of his biggest supporters. “When I first heard Kendrick’s debut on Aftermath, I couldn’t believe it,” he said in 2016. “The fact that it was his first real album and he was able to make it into a story [that] intertwines with the skits like that was genius. That hasn’t really been done that many times, let alone on someone’s first time up. The level of wordplay, the deliveries, the beats—it’s just a masterpiece.”
The album also drew praise from another acclaimed storyteller in hip-hop: Nas. “No disrespect to nobody else in rap music, but Kendrick Lamar,” the rapper told the Associated Press; his 1994 debut album, Illmatic, is considered by some to be the greatest rap record of all time. “I’m really happy about his record. I needed that. His record reaches you. It gives you hope.” In an interview with Vibe, Kendrick revealed that he wanted Nas to rap on “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” but didn’t have time to reach out. “I was so wrapped up in getting the music done, samples cleared and mastered,” Kendrick said. “I didn’t really wanna rush the process. I actually wanted to sit in the studio and vibe with him.” Nas was right: good kid, m.A.A.d city connected because it came from such an authentic place, and it used a wide array of beats, vocal manipulation, and personal history to make it resonate with listeners everywhere. There are strong parallels betwee
n Illmatic and good kid, m.A.A.d city, from the baby pictures that don the front covers to the filmic way the music unfurls. Both rappers wanted you to see the world with their eyes: in Nas’s case, it was the drugs and devastation in New York City’s Queensbridge projects; with Kendrick, it was the trauma beneath Compton’s bright sunshine. Nas and Kendrick wrote incisively about their respective cities, uncovering vast worlds through subtle imagery that puts you in the scene they’re narrating. Illmatic transported us to the subway and the block; good kid put us in the car on the freeway.
Privately, though, Kendrick wondered if listeners would understand his debut album. “I’d be lying to you to say I knew good kid, m.A.A.d city would be as successful as it has been,” the rapper wrote in a XXL cover story in 2015:
In the beginning I was very doubtful. Once I was done, the jitters hit me so fast. I was so confident in making it, because I was like, “This is it, man. Nobody heard this story and if you heard it, you heard it in bits and pieces but I’m finna put it to you in a whole album—from Compton, from the hood, from the streets—it’s a whole other perspective and light, I’ma go back and do the skits just like how Biggie and Dre and Snoop and ’Pac did it. And I’ma tell my story.” Then I wrapped up with it and said, “Man, what’s on the radio right now? I don’t think they doin’ skits and things like that.” I don’t know if the people are gonna understand what I’m talkin’ about on this album because it’s almost like a puzzle pieced together, and albums ain’t been created like this in a long time.
The rapper was nervous until he got a call from producer Pharrell Williams that shifted his perspective. “He said he had a copy of the album and it’s amazing,” Kendrick wrote. “That call was right on time because that was when I was feeling super insecure about it. Pharrell said, ‘Never feel that way again. When that little negative man come behind your head, always follow your first heart, and that was your first heart, to put the album out like this.’… He said, ‘Watch what’s gonna happen.’ ”
Suddenly, Kendrick was famous. Fans trekked to his childhood home to take pictures of his mom’s van, so much so that she had to hide the vehicle. Go to Google Maps and type “Good Kid M.A.A.D City House”; pictures of the home pop up like some sort of Graceland for rap fans. The album became source material for an English composition class at Georgia Regents University, where Professor Adam Diehl used it as a gateway to study authors Gwendolyn Brooks, James Joyce, and James Baldwin. “With Kendrick’s album,” Diehl told USA Today, “you’ve got gang violence, you’ve got child-family development in the inner city, you’ve got drug use and the war on drugs… a lot of the things that are hot-button issues for today are just inherent in the world of Compton, California.” The professor didn’t just stop there: his course on good kid, m.A.A.d city led to themed classes involving Kendrick’s work for the next five years. In 2016, he taught a class on leadership based on To Pimp a Butterfly; in 2017, he taught a class about emotions centered on Kendrick’s DAMN. “Everything synthesized around the concept of good kid, m.A.A.d city,” Diehl tells me. “I used it as a way to look at the things that happen to kids. It’s a rap album that sinks into literature. He’s a master storyteller, and it’s such an engaging album to play through.”
Whether you were a teenager in Compton or a young adult from Landover, Maryland, good kid forced you to think about your own upbringing, of hot summer days riding shotgun in your friend’s car, going nowhere in particular. The album felt like basketball at the park on rusty goals with chains dangling from the rim, the spiritual richness of your grandma’s old hymnals, the humidity so thick you can almost see it. It evoked barbershop convos, the feel of shabby concrete beneath your fresh Nike sneakers, and the taste of fried chicken wings fresh out of the grease. It was a record for the hood, for black and brown kids with big dreams and little resources, who loved their environment but knew they couldn’t thrive there. It was about the unconditional love between Kendrick and his friends, Kendrick and his neighborhood, Kendrick and his parents, and how—ultimately—he’d have to leave the city but it would never leave him. It celebrated home and all the angels who didn’t know they were angels, the ones who shielded Kendrick from harm, although they didn’t have the same cover. Time has been kind to good kid, m.A.A.d city; it’s now considered one of the best albums of the 2010s, and one of the best hip-hop albums of all time.
5
The Fight for Black Life
Even as Kendrick thrived, race relations continued to erode in the United States. On February 26, 2012, a seventeen-year-old boy named Trayvon Martin was in Sanford, Florida, visiting family, not thinking this trip would be his last. He’d traveled there with his father, Tracy, to stay with Tracy’s fiancée, Brandy Green, in the townhome she rented in the gated Retreat at Twin Lakes community. Once there, Trayvon figured he’d walk down the street, pick up some Skittles and a can of AriZona brand juice from the 7-Eleven, then head back without any problems. But being black in the United States means you have to move differently; you don’t have the freedom to just be. You can’t wear bad days on your face. You have to look nonthreatening and make others feel comfortable, not realizing that your brown skin will never be fully accepted in a country built on white supremacy. Such supremacy is the foundation of America, right there with hate crimes, apple pie, and mass shootings. This creates someone like George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch coordinator, and gives him the power to trek a gated community with a handgun and the perceived right to kill. White supremacy also creates the perception that Trayvon—a tall, scrawny kid from Miami Gardens—is somehow a threat simply because he’s black. White supremacy breeds the idea that blacks are monolithic, that because a young kid wears a dark hooded sweatshirt, he’s up to no good and doesn’t belong in certain neighborhoods. Then he’s not allowed to ask why he’s being followed; he was supposed to ingest the harassment and move on like it didn’t happen. In a land that proclaims freedom for all, it doesn’t extend those same liberties to black people. None of this is new, but on that night in 2012, the centuries-old racism that blacks endure came to a head in a very public way.
Around 7:00 p.m., Zimmerman called the Sanford Police Department to report a so-called “suspicious person” in the gated community. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something,” Zimmerman claimed in the 911 call. “It’s raining and he’s just walking around looking about.… These assholes, they always get away.” Zimmerman can be heard saying “fucking coons” (a racial slur against black people) in relation to Trayvon, who’s running away from his pursuit. The police told Zimmerman not to follow Trayvon, but he did anyway. According to reports, Trayvon was on the phone with his girlfriend as Zimmerman followed him in a car, openly wondering why he was being followed in the first place. An altercation ensued, and—according to Zimmerman—as he reached into his pocket for his cell phone, Trayvon threw a punch and knocked him to the ground. Trayvon got on top of Zimmerman and kept punching. That’s when Zimmerman pulled a gun from his holster and fired a shot, which struck Trayvon in the chest. He was pronounced dead at 7:30 p.m. Trayvon was unarmed; he perished with just twenty-two dollars, a cell phone, a bag of candy, and some juice.
Trayvon’s father didn’t find out until the next morning that his son had been murdered. He was out having dinner with his fiancée and figured that Trayvon had simply gone to a movie and turned off his phone. But Tracy’s greatest fear was realized when a police cruiser, an unmarked sedan, and a chaplain pulled up to the house, and he was greeted by a detective asking him to describe what clothes his son had worn the night before. Eventually, the detective came back with a photo of Trayvon at the scene, “his eyes rolled back, a tear on his cheek, saliva coming from his mouth,” according to a Reuters report.
Zimmerman claimed self-defense in the killing. The police department, citing Florida’s “stand your ground” law, accepted Zimmerman’s claim and let him go without evidence to disprove his story. This left Tracy and Trayvon’s mother, S
ybrina Fulton, to wonder if justice would be served for their son. Or would he be just another black boy cut down before his prime, mourned in hashtags and candlelit vigils while his killer walked freely? In a world of fifteen-second social media clips, celebrity gossip news, and cat videos, would we care enough to mourn? Would we stop to lament this injustice, or were we that desensitized to black trauma?
It took the national media almost two weeks to care about Trayvon at all. Aside from a couple of segments on Orlando news and limited coverage in the Orlando Sentinel newspaper, Trayvon’s death was just a blip on the radar. If it weren’t for the persistence of Tracy and Sybrina, coupled with the hiring of a high-powered publicist and attorney, this story wouldn’t have gotten any traction at all. Trayvon’s parents launched a petition on Change.org to force Sanford police to arrest Zimmerman and for state prosecutors to fully investigate their son’s death. “Trayvon was our hero,” they wrote in the petition. “At the age of 9, [he] pulled his father from a burning kitchen, saving his life. He loved sports and horseback riding. At only 17 he had a bright future ahead of him with dreams of attending college and becoming an aviation mechanic. Now that’s all gone.” The Trayvon news coverage was a slow burn—from local, to regional, then national—due in part to the petition and online activism, with prominent civil rights leaders taking to outlets like Twitter and Facebook to denounce the teen’s death. In most instances, they linked to the petition, which created a groundswell of support for the family’s cause, and forced the national media to cover the story.
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