It’s no surprise then that Kendrick became Kendrick. Greatness is achieved in moments like these, behind the curtain when no one is looking. It’s not enough to simply desire such brilliance; you have to be consumed with it, letting it permeate the core of your very being. It’s the old 10,000-hour rule that author Malcolm Gladwell once wrote about, that you master your craft by practicing it over and over again, and true expertise arrives once you reach 10,000 hours of application. Basketball legend Kobe Bryant was well known for this line of thinking; if you’re putting up 500 jump shots in a day, he’s shooting 1,000. And while you’re relaxing, he’s on the court—just him and a basketball, practicing his fadeaway, his postgame, and his layups near the rim. For him, basketball was everything, and being good wasn’t enough. Kendrick took the same approach with learning the music industry, achieving greatness through tireless dedication to his career. He knew he had something that could change the world, but talent without hard work couldn’t get him to the top. Somewhere alone, away from the noise, Kendrick was planting the seeds of a career. “He was Kobe shooting in the gym,” Abbott says.
Before the Independent Grind Tour, Kendrick didn’t even know how to dress for the stage: he’d come out wearing knitted, hooded sweatshirts, frayed jean shorts, and Crocs sandals. “Real hippie,” Tech N9ne remembers. But those days up and down the road taught Kendrick a lot about discipline and how to operate with quiet, intentional force. The guys at Strange Music operated like the military: go over your set time by a minute and your pay is docked. The Tech crew ran a tight ship, and ten years after the Grind Tour, TDE operated in similar fashion—silent and steadfast, almost machinelike, with the strictest attention to detail and perfection as the ultimate goal. Where other rappers dropped new music at a furious clip, TDE artists stressed quality over quantity, eschewing the speed at which others released their work. The internet was insatiable; anything more than two months old was considered yesterday’s news. So there was something quite noble about TDE’s nonchalant pace in an industry that craved new material right away. Silence of any sort is deafening, and because the collective didn’t say much—or anything, really—between album releases, TDE built a level of intrigue that became its own kind of marketing. Their releases became events; with each new album came a wave of hysteria that ended with massive sales and shiny gold trophies.
Still, it was tough for TDE; the sting of the failed Jay Rock deal lingered and they were unclear where to steer next. Jay had been the first with even the slightest glimmer of shine, and through his opportunity, Kendrick had gotten an early taste of the business alongside men who’d eventually become his brothers. These were the guys with whom he had come into the game, and they were all learning on the fly. That suited Kendrick just fine; he’d always prided himself on loyalty and working hard behind the scenes. He’d sleep on floors, rewrite hundreds of rhymes, and stay in the studio until 4:00 a.m. on a school night if that was what it took. It also helped that Tiffith, Jay Rock, and Sounwave were genuine people who wanted only the best for the unit. A win for one of them was a win for all of them, yet in the early days, it was tough to see the road ahead. The Jay Rock experiment hadn’t worked as well as intended, forcing TDE to head back to the lab and keep working. There wasn’t as much interest in Jay Rock’s Follow Me Home by the time it was released in 2011. “People don’t understand, we did a lot of trial and error with Jay Rock,” Sounwave recalls. “He was the first person out of TDE, so a lot of our mistakes happened, unfortunately, on [him].” Jay didn’t regret those days, though. As he saw it, he was building up a name for himself and TDE, kicking down doors for Kendrick and company to walk through.
Somewhere around 2009, Kendrick decided to drop the name K-Dot and start rapping under his first and middle names: Kendrick Lamar. K-Dot was a rapper’s rapper, a lyrical assassin with a penchant for raw, chase-cutting lyrics. “K-Dot—this was me prepping myself as far as the lyrical ability and being able to go in the studio and say you know what, I want to be the best wordsmith. Anybody who gets on this track I just have to annihilate, however that is, whether it’s through rhyme schemes, whether it’s through metaphors, whether it’s just punchlines, or whether it’s wordplay,” Lamar told Complex in 2017. “I didn’t have the actual technique of songwriting then.” Kendrick was the man behind the bravado, still trying to reconcile his insecurities in a world that doesn’t reward vulnerability from black men. K-Dot was a freestyle machine ready to battle anyone at a moment’s notice. Kendrick was all heart, and with mixtapes Hub City Threat and Training Day in his rearview, he finally had room to tell his story. He saw pushback from some
