Imagine you’re out with a friend and the phone rings. It can be anybody—your girlfriend, your boy talking trash about sports, or your mom wondering when you’re coming back with the van. Instead, it’s a number you don’t recognize, and the voice on the other end claims to be a member of Dr. Dre’s team. The Dr. Dre. The pioneer. The dude who was partly responsible for the hip-hop you danced to shirtless in your living room as a kid. The dude who you saw with your hero, Tupac Shakur, at the Compton Swap Meet all those years ago. That guy. Now take Dre out of the equation; how would you feel if the ayatollah of your profession reached out just because he thought you were dope? That was what happened to Kendrick in 2010 during a stop in Los Angeles for the Independent Grind Tour. He was still Jay Rock’s hype man, and as he remembers, the call came while he and TDE engineer Ali were eating at Chili’s. Kendrick didn’t think it was real, so he and Ali laughed it off and hung up the phone. “We got a call like, ‘Yo, Dr. Dre likes your music.’ And we were like, ‘Yo, who the fuck is this on the phone?’ ” Kendrick once told Howard Stern on SiriusXM. “Another call came in from somebody else. Then another call came in from somebody else like, ‘Yo, they trying to reach out and figure out who you with.’ ”
It’s a good thing Dre’s people were consistent; they eventually convinced Kendrick they were legit, and the rapper was in the studio with the producer the following week, laying down vocals for Dre’s long-simmering Detox. Everything Kendrick had done in his short rap career had led to this one moment. Kendrick walked into Dre’s studio, still beaming from the opportunity to work with his idol. Once in there, Dre—a hulking presence at six feet, one inch tall and two-hundred-something pounds—introduced himself to Kendrick, then quickly pressed play on a beat that Dre had received from the noted producer Just Blaze. It was for a song called “Compton,” which would appear near the end of Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city. “We had the overall concept and it already had verses and everything on it, it was all done,” Just Blaze says of the song. “This was right when Dre became aware of Kendrick and was like, ‘Well, bring him down to the studio.’ So he had brought Kendrick in to add onto whatever he felt. ‘Compton’ was one of the things that he gravitated toward, it was one of the stronger songs that we had in that batch, so Kendrick wound up jumping on it.” “I remember that shit sounded so loud,” the rapper said to Vice. “Compton” wasn’t just a crowning achievement for Kendrick, it was an achievement for hip-hop as well: Dre wasn’t really rapping that much at the time, so for him to jump on the microphone, the vibe truly had to be something special.
Once in the studio with Dre, Kendrick was so overwhelmed by Dre’s presence that he nearly missed his chance to shine. “It came to a point where I had to really snap out of fan mode and become a professional after we were introduced,” he told BBC Radio. “Then he said, ‘Okay, now write to this, write a full song to this.’ Right after I said, ‘Man, Dr. Dre, you’re the greatest,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, man, you’re good too, you could be something, all right now write to this beat.’ ”
Dre and Kendrick worked nonstop for almost two weeks on songs for Detox, and Dre—who’d never been one to cosign much—saw greatness in Kendrick right away. The young rapper flashed back to the moment when he had seen Dre and Pac from his father’s shoulders in Compton. The producer remembered all the children who were out there, and the duo reminisced on the destiny that brought them both to the studio together. It was wild that, out of all the people at the video shoot for “California Love” that day, Kendrick was the one to ascend.
In Dre, the young rapper saw a reflection of himself—the upstanding dude in a precarious situation who was able to escape through music. But while Dre had already ascended, Kendrick was just getting started on his path to prominence. From the producer, he’d take in great gems, like how to stay low-key in the limelight when strangers wanted to know your whereabouts. Dre and Kendrick weren’t just collaborators, they grew close enough to be family. “It was more like a uncle-nephew kind of vibe,” Kendrick said in a Complex interview. “When we sit in the studio, we talk about these different streets that we both lived on and experiences he had that I can relate to being two generations younger.” Dr. Dre’s studio sessions have become the stuff of legend in rap music, with everyone from Kendrick to 50 Cent to Eminem singing the Doc’s praises once their work together is done. They all proclaim Dre the perfectionist, whose studio sessions can go seventy-plus hours if the vibe is right. He’s also a stickler when it comes to words, nitpicking the inflection of the rappers he works with hundreds of times and recording hundreds of takes. It’s a grueling test of will for the privilege of having the Kingmaker’s stamp on your music. He’s been called a coach, much like basketball’s Phil Jackson, the rapper Mez once told the webzine Pitchfork—the most decorated club leader in NBA history. Dre had this way of bringing the best out of everyone with whom he worked. And though the producer didn’t write his own lyrics, he knew how to instruct rappers in his studio to inflect his voice in the rhymes they wrote for him. Chemistry is the word that arises when discussing Dre. As Eminem once said, “I don’t have
