That’s just what happened in early 2003, when Jay-Z announced that his eighth studio record, The Black Album, would be his last. Retirement was on the horizon and, in Jay’s own words, he was headed to a life of golfing and drinking cappuccinos away from the rat race of the music industry. This wasn’t just any retirement; this was like basketball icon Michael Jordan quitting in his prime, or football legend Jim Brown leaving with a lot left in the tank. It became too easy for Jay-Z to win and he was bored with it all. Rap music was too formulaic; everyone’s albums sounded alike, and the singles they released largely fit the same format. It was all too clean—sterile, even. We couldn’t hear the grit of old soul samples, the pop and hiss of worn vinyl beneath searing social commentary. But rappers weren’t as hungry; hip-hop was a force in the mainstream and it was time to celebrate through the music.
In the early nineties, groups like the Wu-Tang Clan and Mobb Deep made rap dark, but even they couldn’t navigate the genre’s changing tide, and by the late nineties and early aughts, they struggled to stay relevant and saw their popularity diminish. So while Jay lamented the state of hip-hop, he helped usher its demise: he and Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs made rap sound lustrous, and there wasn’t as much soul in the music. In the 1980s, back when rap was a nascent genre, the music had been rooted to the ongoing challenges in poor communities and addressed the hardships of growing up broke and beating the odds to make it out alive. Rap music was born of struggle, tethered to the flames of burning buildings in its native New York City. It was the sound of blackness, in all its unfiltered joy, pain, and celebration. It conversed with those trapped inside cramped apartments with big dreams. Rap was everything, and to young black people who didn’t have a voice, it was a way to emote without fear. Hip-hop was counterculture, much like psychedelic rock was in the mid- to late sixties, and punk in the late seventies. Over the next thirty years, rap would slowly replace rock as the expression of disgruntled youth in the United States, even as critics tried to forecast its demise.
Jay’s retirement leveled the playing field for everyone else, and Kendrick—the baby-faced rookie that he was—wanted Jay’s spot. If Kendrick’s ambition wasn’t clear in his bars, with all the cocky bravado they exuded, he said it directly on his first mixtape, Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year (Youngest Head Nigga in Charge). He demanded the attention. He needed it. He even ripped a few beats from Jay’s discography for his own debut project as a way to make an immediate splash. “Jay left, now gimme the crown / Fuck later, I’m takin’ it now,” Kendrick declared on “Hovi Baby,” over an instrumental that Jay had used for his own album The Blueprint 2: The Gift & the Curse.
Hub City Threat was an introduction in the truest sense, a teaser on which the burgeoning MC simply wanted to brag about his ability to put words together. On the tape, credited as Kendrick’s DJ, was a guy named Dave Free, whose voice surfaced occasionally to plod alongside the protagonist. Like Kendrick, Free wanted to succeed in the music industry. He met Kendrick in the tenth grade after his friend Antonio told him about the upstart lyricist. “He was telling me he had a friend who went to Centennial that was the craziest,” Free once said. “I was intrigued. I told him, ‘Bring him through.’ ” Free had a makeshift studio in his house, where he first heard Kendrick rap. “Everybody back then was talking about drugs,” Free told Google Play in a 2012 documentary about good kid, m.A.A.d city. “But he had this one line—‘I ship keys like a piano,’ or something like that, and I just thought that was the most amazing line for somebody his age.” That was the line that made Free want to work with Kendrick.
From there, the two bonded over rap music and a love of Martin, a cult-favorite TV sitcom starring comedian Martin Lawrence, and were fascinated with how he created superior black art with limited means. Eventually, Free and Kendrick put that same energy into their visual work as a creative duo. They’d call themselves the Little Homies, and instead of spending tons of money on their videos (at least not at first), they went heavy on vast landscapes and profound imagery that had a much deeper impact on the black community. But back in 2003, they were eager to succeed in music—perhaps too eager by Kendrick’s own concession—and recorded Hub City Threat as a way to escape the dangers of life in Compton. Even at a young age, Kendrick had the technical prowess of Jay-Z and the work ethic of a man with nothing to lose. He’d spent countless hours with his craft—studying, thinking, and becoming one with it.
In Carson, California—some nine miles from Compton—was a guy named Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith. He was from Nickerson Gardens, an infamous housing project in Watts known for its wall of names that honored the building’s dead residents. Tiffith was an intimidating presence, a tall and stoic dude who’d spent his early days as a hustler. Yet by 1997, he was beginning to grow tired of the lifestyle and
