In later interviews, he’d brush off the incident as yet another by-product of living in Compton, where safety isn’t a luxury people have and violence can pop off at any time. Something as simple as walking home from school could lead to gunshot wounds. “You’re going to get into situations, you can’t escape that,” Kendrick once said. “You can either take action or fall back. In most cases, I have to take action because that’s just how it goes when you’re put in a situation where you have to defend yourself. I think a lot of kids can relate to that story on ‘Average Joe’ because it’s real. A lot of these motherfuckers are good kids. The influence is making them fucked up.”
Elsewhere, the song “P&P 1.5” was the best example of Kendrick’s artistic growth from one project to the next: the initial version—called “Pussy and Patrón” on The Kendrick Lamar EP—was a straightforward ode to sex and liquor over a repurposed beat created by the Roots for their 2006 album, Game Theory. On Overly Dedicated, the song becomes a shape-shifting epic with a full breakdown, modulated vocal shifts influenced by southern rap, and a changing rhythm midsong. The instrumental drops out and skips in certain parts, a subtle effect by Ali that accentuates the ferocity of Kendrick’s battle to reconcile his grandmother’s death and his uncle’s murder at Louis Burgers. Kendrick played the song for Tech N9ne on tour, and that was when the Kansas City lyricist knew just how dope the young man was. The track precedes a song like “Swimming Pools (Drank)” from Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city as a sprawling sermon about the joy and pain of worldly vices. On “P&P 1.5,” the rapper dives head-on into the thrill; in a world made increasingly tougher for black men to survive, pleasures like “pussy and Patrón” can combat the stress of just being alive and black in Los Angeles. On “Swimming Pools,” Kendrick toes the line between that same struggle and ecstasy; the same liquor that brought joy can cause tremendous pain, and given his family history of alcoholism, Kendrick peers at the bottle askance, fully aware of the havoc soaked within its forty ounces.
Overly Dedicated was easily Kendrick’s best project to that point, and the one that finally got the attention of larger press outlets and bigger groups of fans. Unlike the EP and the previous work before it, Overly Dedicated exhibited a level of complexity and freedom that, from the outside looking in, seemed to have been brewing for a lifetime. It was the little things that made Overly Dedicated what it was and further demonstrated just who Kendrick was as a person: he didn’t care about arbitrary rules that claimed an EP needed to be a short set of songs, or that an interlude couldn’t be a quick rhyme just because. “They said seven tracks, I said fifteen / Called it an EP, they said I’m trippin’,” he rapped on “The Heart Pt. 2.” Kendrick wanted to change the norm of what rap music could be. After years of tapping on the glass ceiling, TDE finally created a crack, and years later, Sounwave and Ali would admit that Overly Dedicated was the first TDE album to wake people up to what they were doing at the House of Pain in Carson. It was the first project of Kendrick’s to make the Billboard charts, where it peaked at number 72 on its Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.
At the time of its release in September 2010, Kendrick was still on the road with Tech N9ne and Strange Music as part of the Independent Grind Tour. But he was no longer just a hype man; while he was still down to support Jay Rock, his musical brother, Kendrick was quickly gaining steam and becoming his own entity. Yet there wasn’t anything about Overly Dedicated that screamed “greatest rapper of his peer group.” It was a building block, and looking back at the project years later, it doesn’t compare with the cinematic good kid, m.A.A.d city, the seismic force of To Pimp a Butterfly, or the dark, claustrophobic tone of DAMN., and is often forgotten when debating Kendrick’s best recordings. That’s not a diss to the rapper or Overly Dedicated; rather, it’s a testament to Kendrick’s unconventional brilliance, and how—just two years after the mixtape’s release—the songs on it felt obsolete. His collaborators willingly called him a genius whose old-school ways of creating meant he’d come to your house unannounced with a rhythm in his head and clear-cut ideas for albums that weren’t even next in line to be released. Kendrick was always thinking two steps ahead, and even in 2010, he was already thinking about 2012 and beyond, strategizing on what his music would sound like, long before he’d put pen to paper. “He’s the most hands-on person I’ve ever, ever dealt with,” Sounwave once told Red Bull Music Academy. “I can be in the bathroom, on the toilet or something, and he’d just knock, ‘Yo, I got this melody. Can you do this for me real fast?’ ”
Indeed, you couldn’t rest around Kendrick; he was an ambitious creator. So it’s no surprise that he eventually became the best, because while other rappers might’ve held Overly Dedicated as their landmark project, Kendrick and TDE weren’t resting until they released the very best record possible. It’s a fool’s errand, really: Kendrick was a perfectionist, and people like him don’t always fare well in creative arts. Even Dr. Dre fell victim to such perfectionism; after years of tinkering with Detox, adding and subtracting verses, deleting drafts and fine-tuning new ideas,
