Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, put Dre onto Kendrick’s music. “I was in Detroit and he was like, ‘You gotta hear this kid from Compton,’ ” Dre once told Kurt “Big Boy” Alexander on his radio show, Big Boy’s Neighborhood. “So I went online, and the thing that really turned me on in the beginning was the way he spoke during an interview. It wasn’t even the music at first. It was just the way he spoke, and the way he showed his passion for music. It was something in that. Then I got into the music and really realized how talented he was.” Once online, Dre found a video that Kendrick did for his song “Ignorance Is Bliss,” one of several great tracks from the rapper’s 2010 mixtape, Overly Dedicated.
Some of hip-hop’s all-time greatest MCs have a “Dre discovered me” story. In 1992, the producer found Snoop through a song he’d recorded that year called “A Gangsta’z Life.” Collaborator Warren G played the song for Dre, who showed immediate interest in the Long Beach rapper. “It was a rock, it wasn’t shined up yet,” Snoop once said of the song during a conversation with Kendrick. “He sees something in you, and by you being around him and being with him, he just gon’ tighten your shit up.”
Dre and Eminem found each other when they both needed a lifeline. The year was 1997, and Dre was coming off his biggest commercial failures as a leader, when two albums he helmed in 1996—the Firm’s The Album, and Dr. Dre Presents the Aftermath—both flopped. Dre was at the home of Interscope Records cofounder Jimmy Iovine; in his garage were piles of cassette tapes. Jimmy picked up one particular tape, popped it in, and pressed play. It was Eminem freestyling in a cypher over the kind of West Coast G-funk beat that Dre would’ve created. On the day they met in Dre’s home studio, the producer quickly compiled an instrumental to see what Em could do on the spot. “I hit the drum machine, and maybe two or three seconds went by, and he just went, ‘Hi, my name is! My name is!’ ” Dre recalled on his HBO docuseries, The Defiant Ones. “My Name Is” was a smash hit and the track that introduced Eminem to the world as a wrecking-ball force, the likes of which the world had never seen.
Kendrick had that same potential, and “Ignorance Is Bliss” was the perfect marriage of technical skill and content. It was also another example of Kendrick trying to change the public perception of who he was: a mix of gangsta rap and introspection, he wasn’t just a Compton rapper and he wasn’t just a conscious MC like Common, Yasiin Bey (who, back then, went by the name Mos Def), or Talib Kweli. He was conscious, he was a student of hip-hop culture, and he was gangsta—when he wanted to be. But Kendrick was able to marry these aesthetics without having to adhere to one style in particular, and as a result, he didn’t fit any of the man-made boxes in which critics tried to put him. Instead, he glorified the gangsta aesthetic by acknowledging that Compton natives might not have known why they banged in the streets. In some cases, that was all they’d known; their uncles and fathers had been born into it, and they passed it down to their kids, and so forth.
The video for “Ignorance Is Bliss” portrayed this history; in the one-minute, fifty-two-second clip, Kendrick swigs from a forty-ounce of Olde English 800 malt liquor and pours some on the grave of his dead friend, then he hops in the back of a car driven by TDE mate ScHoolboy Q and they drive up on the person who killed his friend. The video ends with us (the viewer) in the antagonist’s shoes, staring down the barrel of Kendrick’s gun. There’s a sudden pop, then darkness, and we’re left to believe that the good kid has succumbed to the treacherous city, and that he couldn’t survive the minefield that’s entrapped so many young black men before him. Kendrick, much like his uncles and cousins, was forced to make a life-altering decision long before any teenager is capable of doing so.
A song like “Ignorance Is Bliss” helped define Kendrick’s expression. The rapper made a career of taking common themes and looking beyond the veil to assess human behavior: Yes, gangbanging is a culture, but why? Why are black men left without choices in places like Compton and South Side Chicago? Why are we left with only liquor and weed to soothe our angst? How do these dependencies impact communities? Questions like these became the foundation of the Kendrick Lamar era, and by detangling the fabric of Compton and Los Angeles as a whole, he was unraveling assorted aspects of his own being. Kendrick was still a young man (age twenty-three at this point), and while he was forced to grow up quickly, he was getting to know himself in an increasingly public way.
Kendrick’s evolution from The Kendrick Lamar EP to Overly Dedicated was astounding; in just one year, he had grown from a promising lyricist with a decent grasp of songwriting and complex song structures to a full-fledged artiste who could execute circuitous concepts with ease and flair. There was an actual theme to Overly Dedicated, not just a mere collection of songs being thrown into one set. Ali tinkered with different sound frequencies for Kendrick’s voice—warping it, slowing it down, making the rapper sound alien. TDE’s in-house producers—Sounwave, Tae Beast, and Willie B—also stepped up their game: the beats felt dense and spacious, and that gave Kendrick the vast canvas he needed to unpack his views on religion, gun culture, and social and economic disparities, while namechecking Patrón tequila, NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt, and R&B/pop icon Beyoncé. He dug deeper and got even more personal on this project; on “Average Joe,”
