That same year, a twenty-year-old Carson native who rapped under the name Ab-Soul made his way to the famed studio. Two years prior, he’d inked a deal with a small local label called StreetBeat Entertainment that hadn’t borne fruit. As soon as that deal expired, Ab went to TDE at the behest of Sounwave, who knew the rapper through his cousin. In a 2012 interview with Complex, Ab remembered why he was so drawn to TDE: “They weren’t coming at me talking no paperwork.… We were really just trying to build as a team and try to create a new sound.” And if Ab thought he was the best rapper alive when he joined TDE, he soon discovered that wasn’t the case at all. Ab met Jay Rock and Kendrick his second time at the studio, where he saw the TDE members working on music for their joint mixtape, No Sleep Til NYC. “I hopped right in and we’ve been a team since then.”
Derek Ali, of Gardena, was an All-American football player in high school who used to disassemble his computers just to see how they worked. The seventeen-year-old learned of Tiffith’s collective from Dave Free, whom he saw passing out Jay Rock CDs at his high school. Ali told Free that he wanted to get into the music business; Free invited Ali to Tiffith’s studio to learn more. He never left. Back then, though, Ali didn’t have the skills to engineer; he knew only how to record his friends’ raps for custom ringtones, not steer the sound of a full-on hip-hop album. Plus, Ali needed to make personal changes. He’d recently been kicked out of his grandmother’s house and needed to be part of something real. “I was doing bad,” Ali recalls. “I’m seventeen, wet behind the ears, still stumbling over my left foot.” But working with Tiffith, Sounwave, Free, Jay Rock, and Kendrick gave him confidence. It also straightened him up; nonsense wasn’t tolerated in TDE’s vicinity. “You don’t want to bring no shit to [Tiffith]’s house,” Ali asserts. “There’s the respect that we have for him because of the opportunity he was giving us. All [of] us ran away from the streets to find somewhere else to kind of call home, and he had that for us. If it wasn’t for Top, we wouldn’t have a house to connect. It was a real collective thing that really happened that kind of catapulted all of us into our respective careers.”
Ali had a friend before his TDE days named Quincy Hanley who spit raps under the name ScHoolboy Q. He was a member of the 52 Hoover Crips who gangbanged from the age of twelve until a few months before his debut album, Setbacks, was released. Q wrote his first rap verse at the age of sixteen but didn’t get serious about the craft until five years later. Around 2006, Ali had Q come through TDE’s studio. “I walked in and the beat was playing. Ali told them that I rap,” he recalled in a Complex interview. “Punch told me to jump on the beat. It was a record that Jay Rock and Ab-Soul were writing to, so then I wrote [to] it. Punch liked it and he told me to come back through. I kept coming back, kept getting better, and eventually they signed me to TDE.”
With his core in place, Tiffith had the makings of a dynasty, and though they had to endure some hardship, that was the truest way for them to grow as men and for TDE to become stronger as a unit. This was boot camp, and domination was the ultimate goal. They convened in the small studio and worked nonstop to fine-tune their music. There was even a list of serious—yet hilarious—rules on the wall outside the studio:
If you ain’t one of the homies don’t be Instagramming you creepy muthafucka. I don’t wanna look on yo twitter and find a creepy ass pic of me or one of the homies, matter of fact, No Twitter or Instagram in the studio! Act like you been around a bunch of rich niggaz from the bottom before!
If the homies just met you and decide to clown your bitch azz, sit there and deal with it. It’s part of the creative juices.
Don’t touch, ask, or reach for Q’s weed, unless he thinks you cool enuff to pass it to you. We only smoke stersonals around here, boy.
Shut up and look ugly for the homies.
Remember these rules and you might get a meal out the food budget!
As you can see, the TDE squad wasn’t always so poker-faced; they liked to play pranks on each other and ridicule strangers who tried to impede their creative space. Kendrick had a great sense of humor, though you had to be close to him to know it. Like any introvert, the musician wasn’t going to show his personality to just anybody. No, you had to be in the circle to watch him re-create old MySpace photos by superimposing himself in the shots. And years later, when Twitter became the world’s top social media platform, Punch implored Kendrick to flex his humor there—to no avail. By 2013, Tiffith would bring two other top talents to TDE: a Tennessee-born rapper named Isaiah Rashad, and a New Jersey–raised singer named Solána Rowe, who went by the name SZA. Soon enough, TDE would be the most revered crew in music.
Tiffith’s mentality came from his own coming-of-age during the height of gang activity in L.A., when many of his friends were dying or going to prison for long amounts of time. But he envisioned something different for the TDE roster. “I had the money to do whatever I wanted, but they
