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To God and the spirits: Ida Hart, Raymond Hart, Eric Hart, Loumanda Moore, and Troy Perryman.
To Landover and Prince George’s County, Maryland.
To Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and the countless souls we’ve lost to state-sanctioned violence against Black people.
1
How “You Got Robbed”
There are musicians, and then there’s Kendrick Lamar Duckworth. A welterweight, and just five feet, five inches tall, he looks more like a Baptist youth minister than the greatest rapper of his generation. But he is the greatest rapper, and he worked damn hard to make it so. Kendrick wasn’t some sort of prodigy; he didn’t descend from his bassinet with a microphone and a composition book. Instead, he simply found something he loved and stuck with it. Through creative writing, he could say things on paper that he couldn’t say out loud. He was shy, an only child until the age of seven. He grew up in Compton, California, in the early to mid-1990s, not even a decade after the city’s police brutality and gang culture were immortalized by the rap group N.W.A in 1988. Young black and brown children had to navigate that land before they could fully comprehend street politics. They had to learn the differences between the Piru and Crips gangs on the fly, in a city where wrong decisions could mean the difference between life and death. Kendrick spent time alone, cultivating his art in hopes of becoming great. For a naturally quiet being like Kendrick, writing poetry gave him the space to reveal his innermost thoughts without judgment from others. Prowess came in silence.
Kendrick ascended to the top of the music industry by being himself and staying true to what drove him artistically. He’s been called esoteric and downright weird, but really he’s just an old soul with a profound reverence for hip-hop, R&B, and funk—black music—and he moves throughout life with Compton in his mind and heart. Maybe that’s why he’s so beloved, because he stresses the importance of home no matter where he goes.
Yet at the beginning of the 2010s, Kendrick was just another upstart lyricist trying to find his place in music. In July 2011, Kendrick released his first official album, the kaleidoscopic Section.80, to an unknowing public just a month before hip-hop megastars Jay-Z and Kanye West dropped their long-awaited joint record, Watch the Throne, to widespread acclaim. Where that album unpacked the pleasures of hedonism and the glory of black decadence, Kendrick’s record was something different. It had everything: brassy jazz, mid-tempo soul, and headbanging street anthems. In it, one could hear Kendrick’s love of J Dilla—the experimental hip-hop producer from Detroit, whose mix of hard drums and unique sampling techniques made him an icon in alternative rap—as well as Pusha T, the resilient Virginia Beach rapper whose explicit lyrics cut straight to the heart. Kendrick was the cerebral introvert with theatrical flair, the quiet kid who patiently absorbed the fullness of his environment and spun what he saw into heartfelt streams of pain, struggle, and perseverance. Section.80 was deemed an achievement in an era of hip-hop in which lyricists could build sizable followings online without having to come up through local open mic circuits. And while it wasn’t Kendrick’s first project (he had released five mixtapes before then—2004’s Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year, 2005’s Training Day, 2007’s No Sleep Til NYC with rapper Jay Rock, 2009’s C4, and 2010’s Overly Dedicated), Section.80 put the music industry on notice: they’d never seen a creative flair like Kendrick’s, and there was no doubt now he was here to stay.
Section.80’s acclaim set the stage for Kendrick’s next achievement, 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, an instant classic that catapulted him to heights for which he wasn’t fully prepared. Powered by the singles “Backseat Freestyle,” “Swimming Pools (Drank),” and “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” Kendrick’s second studio album proved a massive hit, and almost overnight he went from enigmatic upstart to full-fledged superstar. Just two years later, in 2014, Kendrick was supposed to enjoy a grand coronation, at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, but destiny had a different timeline.
The twenty-six-year-old had pushed his way to the Staples Center, having dropped a steady stream of music that garnered universal acclaim and brightened his star to its most brilliant point. With guest appearances from hip-hop superstar Drake, and gangsta-rap-pioneer-turned-headphone-mogul Dr. Dre, good kid, m.A.A.d city debuted at number two on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and sold more than 240,000 copies in its first week out. Kendrick had been dubbed L.A.’s next great lyricist, another in a decades-long list of local rappers gone big. But Kendrick wasn’t Dre. He wasn’t Ice-T, Ice Cube, or Snoop Dogg. Those men had been synonymous with gangsta rap, a reality-based strain of hip-hop that documented L.A.’s turbulent gang culture and systemic racism in searing detail. On good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick presented himself as the conflicted soul with one foot on solid ground and the other in the streets. He’d survived the stress of L.A. gang culture to finally arrive at music’s biggest night in downtown L.A.—some fourteen miles from his childhood home at West 137th Street.
There’d been a palpable buzz leading up to this point, yet Kendrick didn’t seem fazed by the moment. Despite all the pageantry that usually comes with the Grammys, there was a remarkable sense of calm on his face. It was like he’d been there before, like he belonged in this environment.
