That year, Kendrick put out a second mixtape titled Training Day under the name K-Dot, and by then he had more real-life experiences to draw from. The bars didn’t feel so contrived, and his personality began to emerge. He came into his own inside Tiffith’s studio, which became a proving ground for Kendrick and Jay Rock to sharpen their skills, and a safe haven to escape what was happening outside. In 2005 alone, some seventy-two people were killed in Compton, which marked the highest death toll in the city in ten years. One resident was reportedly bludgeoned to death in his home, and a woman—who was eight months pregnant—was gunned down. And those were some of the milder incidents. The sheriff’s department’s gang officials reported 282 shootings and attempted murders in Compton through much of the year, which led many to believe that city and county leaders were oblivious to what was happening in Compton. Despite the very public spotlight that N.W.A cast on Compton’s societal ills, there was a notion that the government simply didn’t care about black and brown lives within the town limits. Young black men were dying or going to jail at an alarming rate, and if Kendrick and Jay could just make it to Tiffith’s place, they could harness the uncertainty of life in Watts and Compton into beautiful art that could impact generations for years to come. For Kendrick, that harkened back to the teachings of Mr. Inge: Put your pain into the poetry; transfer that stress to the page.
Kendrick had time to funnel his angst inside a hub that was completely free to use, and that gave him and Jay Rock the proper space to conceptualize different ideas. Unlike other studio heads who charged exorbitant amounts for the use of their facilities, Tiffith didn’t rush his creators to beat a clock before some other dude came through. The music had time to gestate, and in turn, it came out better. In these quiet moments, Tiffith was building a genuine rapport with his artists. It felt more like family than a business relationship. It was there that Top Dawg sowed the seeds of an empire through tough love, fairness, and unwavering respect.
Around the same time, Tiffith opened his studio to another rising prospect: producer Mark Spears, a recent graduate of Compton High School, who made beats under the name Sounwave. He was brought into the fold by Punch Henderson, who’d been a friend of his family for years. Punch used to play basketball with Sounwave’s older brother in the backyard, and one day during a break in the action, he heard the then-thirteen-year-old making beats in his room using Sony PlayStation’s MTV Music Generator. “He was like, ‘Yo, you make beats? My cousin [is] Top Dawg, you know,’ ” Spears recalled during a lecture with Red Bull Music Academy in 2019. “I didn’t know who [Top] was at the time.” Spears went to Tiffith’s studio and played him a few instrumentals, some of which were “trash,” by the producer’s own admission. “[He] was like, ‘This ain’t it, but since Punch is cosigning you, I’m gonna give you a chance. Take these a capellas, see what you [can] do.’ I took that as a challenge. I took my time, and the next day I brought it back to him, and he was like, ‘Yo, this is better than the original. I’ll mess with you.’ That was about 2005, and I’ve just been rocking ever since.”
Sounwave met Kendrick the year prior during a talent showcase at a studio in Gardena, California. The producer was asked to cue up one of his beats; he played a remake of an old soul track by a group named Aalon. Kendrick was so taken by the beat that he walked into the recording booth and started rapping for two minutes straight—a freestyle mixed with rhymes he’d already written. “He was the hungriest person I’d seen in my whole life,” Sounwave once told Rolling Stone. “I had to stop the beat and ask him his name.” “K-Dot,” the young rapper retorted. A year later, Sounwave was at Tiffith’s studio when he saw a familiar face; there was Kendrick sitting on the couch, waiting to audition for the collective. The two had been looking for each other since that fateful encounter at the Gardena space. And while Kendrick deserves credit for seizing the moment, he also has Sounwave to thank for staying in Tiffith’s ear: “I looked at [him] and said, ‘I met this kid a year ago, you definitely can’t let this dude go, it’s fate right here. We have to keep him, do whatever you have to do to sign him.’ ”
Tiffith’s studio soon became a sanctuary to other young guys looking to jump-start their careers. In 2006, a guy named Terrace Martin started coming to the studio. He was a prodigious talent who had learned how to play jazz from the great Reggie Andrews at Locke High School, and had been making beats on his own. By the time he started working with TDE in 2006 (though he wasn’t signed there), Martin was a producer and multi-instrumentalist in jazz, soul, and hip-hop. He remembers walking through the gate at Tiffith’s house, then to the back room, where he’d hear Jay Rock and Kendrick rapping in the studio booth. “It was a fun, everyday creative collective,” Martin recalls. “It was also work. It’s the ultimate test of humility, because the ultimate ego is the music.” He also remembers the
