The Butterfly Effect

weren’t going to appreciate shit if I just handed it off to them,” Tiffith once told Billboard. “So they were rushing to McDonald’s to look at what’s on the dollar menu, or going to get a River Boat special from Louisiana Fried Chicken. But I was showing them family life because my family lives in this house, too.” The rappers survived on greasy poultry, biscuits, and coleslaw, but if they wanted to reach the promised land, they needed to revel in the pain. They had to embrace it to truly value the awards that arrived later. Just like other musical empires—the Beatles, Motown, Dr. Dre—the guys locked themselves in and developed their own distinctive sound, which had never been just one genre. Sure, it was rooted in rap, but TDE never wanted to be boxed in as artists or as black men. “We gave you all of these elements,” Sounwave says. “So to this day, [Kendrick] can do whatever the hell he wants to do. It’s strategic moves like that, and just the brotherhood of us being in that small little room forever.” This was long before TDE had to be great, before fans of black music, then the world, paid attention to the squad’s every move. In the House of Pain was the hope of better days and the promise of a brighter future—not just for Kendrick, but for everyone at TDE.

3

The Birth of Kendrick Lamar

In 2007, Jay Rock was the first from TDE to sign with a label when he inked a deal with Asylum Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. The label had a handful of respected rappers at the time, including the Atlanta-based Gucci Mane and OJ da Juiceman. Southern hip-hop had taken off, and Jay Rock, a West Coast gangsta rapper through and through, didn’t fit the profile of what label executives wanted at the time. Enter Richie Abbott, an executive at the Warner Group who’d spent years putting out music from his native Los Angeles; he wanted to push Jay Rock as the next big star to emerge from Southern California. The Watts MC was beginning to work with other noted rappers while putting out his own well-received mixtapes. Abbott remembers Jay, Tiffith, Punch, Kendrick, Q, and Ab-Soul working from his office three days out of the week, essentially making his office their own, turning it into a hub for TDE business. Kendrick rarely spoke in the office, only smiling occasionally when he played his music for Abbott. “He loved to get my reaction to it,” the executive recalls.

In 2008, Jay dropped his first commercial single, the autobiographical “All My Life (In the Ghetto),” which featured rapper Lil Wayne at the height of his power. The track was receiving radio airplay and TV time, and Jay Rock was poised to be TDE’s first breakout star. According to some close to Jay, it became clear that Warner had no interest in pushing him: XXL, the tastemaking hip-hop magazine, put him on the cover of its 2010 “Freshmen” issue and dubbed him an artist to be reckoned with, but Warner didn’t even pay for him to fly to New York for the shoot. Then the money for Jay’s promo was halted and apparently reallocated to OJ da Juiceman. “Top was pissed,” Abbott recalls. “This was their chance, this was their time. They flew OJ out to the shoot, but they wouldn’t fly Jay Rock. That’s when I was like, ‘Okay, this shit is over.’ ” Jay Rock’s momentum halted, and so did plans to release his debut album, Follow Me Home, which was supposed to be his breakthrough. Disheartened, Abbott started making moves behind the scenes to get himself and Jay Rock away from the Warner Group.

Abbott had started working with a record label out of Kansas City, Missouri, called Strange Music, which was cofounded by a hardcore rapper named Tech N9ne. Tech was a ball of fire, an affable man who took no prisoners onstage and proved several times that he was one of the baddest MCs on the planet. Abbott took Jay Rock’s music to him, and while aesthetically it didn’t seem like a good fit, signing with Strange Music made the most sense back then. The Strange Music fan base was largely comprised of white kids who liked hard rock, a demographic to which Jay Rock hadn’t connected before. But Tech’s fans were rabid and they loved deeply. Says Abbott, “It wasn’t his core audience, but anything you bring onstage, they’ll go nuts for it unless it’s shit.” By the fall of 2010, Jay Rock found himself in front of thousands of Tech N9ne’s fans, opening for the cult favorite during Strange Music’s nationwide Independent Grind Tour, gracing the same stages with label rappers Krizz Kaliko, Kutt Calhoun, and Big Scoob, and Oakland stalwart E-40.

During a tour stop in Reno, Nevada, Jay Rock’s cousin and hype man, MJ, walked off the tour bus after a show to call his lady. A group of guys, who hadn’t even attended the concert, saw MJ wearing a red shirt—the same color the Bloods wore—and decided to cause trouble with the performer. Shots rang out and MJ was hit. Days later, Tech and MJ were on the phone celebrating the fact that he hadn’t died that night, and that they’d have to celebrate when he rejoined the tour from the hospital. But MJ never left the building; he died from a blood clot. “It was a bad day, a really bad day,” Tech N9ne recalls. Not only had Jay Rock lost his cousin, but he had lost his hype man for the tour.

But Jay had a solution. “He said, ‘I got someone else who could help me. He’s usually onstage with me,’ ” Tech remembers Jay Rock saying. “That’s the day I met Kendrick.” He took over as Jay Rock’s hype man, pumping up the crowd during Jay’s set and occasionally performing his own music. The time on the road taught Jay