Standard Explicit Version Now Includes: Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe
[Remix] feat. Jay-Z
The moment that signaled 25-year-old Top Dawg Entertainment
artist Kendrick Lamar's rise from West Coast underground cult
hero to mainstream superstar happened on stage at a hometown
concert in during the summer of 2011. With Dr. Dre looking down
from the balcony seats, Lamar was joined on stage by Snoop Dogg,
Kurupt, and Game. Those West Coast icons, gangster rap
torchbearers for two decades, crowded around Kendrick Lamar and
hugged him and declared him the new king of the West Coast. The
crowd starts chanting, Kendrick! Kendrick! Kendrick! and the way
Lamar reacts begins to explain why his presence in rap, as a
proudly ordinary and honest guy with an extraordinary gift, is so
necessary and so refreshing: Kendrick Lamar gets choked up.
A little more than a year later, Lamar released the album that
silenced listeners who doubted that he deserved to be crowned or
thought he'd have to change to reach mainstream success. 2012's
good kid, m.A.A.d city, Lamar's major label debut album, is a
sprawling masterpiece of technical rapping and structured
storytelling that defies and expands the conventions of his
genre. It's a classic album that feels like a classic movie,
deftly weaving moments from Kendrick's life together to form a
narrative that becomes an empathetic ode to a troubled and
dangerous place. Like a lot of eternal characters from literature
and film and a lot of ordinary kids, Lamar finds himself torn
between the temptation to do wrong and the wisdom to do right.
good kid, m.A.A.d city landed in the tiny overlap between popular
adoration and critical respect, selling more copies in its first
week than any other debut album in 2012 and earning massive nods
from Pitchfork, The New York Times, MTV and hundreds of other
outlets. Lamar raps with hypnotizing precision, in triple time
and in different voices, recalling the moments of dizzying
theatricality of Eminem's The Slim Shady LP and combining them
with the unglamorous grit of Nas' Illmatic.
Long before Kendrick Lamar was redefining the boundaries of rap,
he was a kid growing up in Compton in the 1990s, trying to stay
out of trouble. I'm six years old, seein' my uncles playing with
s, sellin' dope in front of the apartment. My moms and
pops never said nothing, 'cause they were young and living wild,
too, he said in a 2011 interview. The mayhem going on around him
couldn't stop Lamar from getting good grades, but he found school
frustrating: This is always in my head: There was a math question
that I knew the answer to, but I was so ed to say it. Then
this little chick said the answer and it was the right answer, my
answer. That bothers me still to this day, bein' ed of
failure.
Lamar idolized Tupac Shakur growing up, and by 16, he'd recorded
his first mixtape, under the name K. Dot. He'd also signed with
Top Dawg Entertainment, now home to other L.A. up-and-comers like
ScHoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock. Lamar released a series of
mixtapes as K. Dot, receiving cosigns from rappers like Lil Wayne
and Game, before dropping the moniker and going by his birth name
in 2009. I'll always be K. Dot in Compton, he said. Kendrick
Lamar' is more mature and I can talk more about what I want to do
with my life. I want my legacy to be about who I am as a person,
not just as an artist. 2011's Section.80, released independently
through iTunes, moved thousands of copies with no promotion and
established Lamar as an songwriter with something meaningful to
say to his generation, one that hadn't been spoken to with as
much respect and conviction by any other artist. Lamar toured
America behind Section.80, watching thousands of people scream
every one of his words back to him, reveling in a connection with
his fans that runs as deep as his lyrics.