A project the magnitude of Overly Dedicated should’ve landed with more force than it did, but it entered a crowded space in which rap heavyweights like Nicki Minaj, Kanye, Drake, and T.I. were taking up all the creative real estate, and there wasn’t much room for underground rap to break into the mainstream. Kendrick’s project was released just two months before Kanye’s earth-shattering fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was dropped into a universe that craved new music from the eccentric rapper/producer who’d disappeared from the public eye to craft that thick, sprawling opus. Kanye dominated the news cycle for the better part of three months leading up to the record’s release—from the Twitter account he launched in July, to his return to the MTV Video Music Awards, where, just a year earlier, he had hopped onstage and interrupted Taylor Swift’s victory speech to proclaim Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” as “one of the greatest music videos of all time.” The listening public not only craved new music from Kanye, but relished his antics as well. He was the villain they loved to hate, and though they complained about his public rants and mic-snatching decorum, the fans still sought his creative acumen and stadium-sized rap anthems.
With the public’s eyes and ears trained on Kanye, Kendrick—and, well, a lot of rappers—flew under the radar, perhaps unfairly. Mixtapes are often denounced for sounding rough, or even unfinished, but Kendrick’s Overly Dedicated had a level of polish not often heard from up-and-coming musicians. That he wanted to make it available for free spoke to his humility. In his mind, he hadn’t done enough yet to warrant any sort of profit, but the TDE brain trust—namely Top Dawg and Punch—felt he, engineer Ali, the in-house producers, and the mixtape’s features had finally done enough legwork to generate income from the record. At last, it was time to level up to new ways of living, to get paid for all the grunt work, the sacrifice, the moments alone with just a little bit of money and the dreams of giving the world something it didn’t know it needed at the time. The general consensus was that Overly Dedicated was good, but there was still something missing from it. Kendrick was close—very close—but he needed to keep pushing toward his full potential. He needed a signature project of fresh ideas, devoid of rehashed songs from previous projects. For his next act, Kendrick would have to dig even deeper to summon undeniable work. It had to be even better than Overly Dedicated, light-years beyond The Kendrick Lamar EP, and a far cry from anything before that. For his next feat, Kendrick blacked out in ways that truly surprised rap fans.
No one saw Section.80 coming, and those who claim otherwise might be revising their own history. Kendrick released his first official album in the heat of the U.S. summer, on July 2, 2011, right as his demographic was more preoccupied with eating grilled meat and drinking cold beer along the coastline. By the time Kendrick started recording Section.80, the TDE team had gotten bigger, and more producers were brought in to cultivate a sound. For Kendrick, that sound meant—well—everything: jazz loops, atmospheric R&B, and spellbinding drums. The atmosphere was more competitive, as each composer wanted to create the most-talked-about song on the record. Of course the competition was friendly; as Terrace Martin says, it was all for the greater good of Section.80 and TDE as a whole. “We just wanted to make sure Kendrick had the best music possible, because he was younger than us, but he was our leader in that aspect,” Martin recalls. “We wanted to make sure he had the best art to get his shit off properly so the world could hear it. It was his time.” Indeed, there was a team-first mentality at TDE: if you were working on an album, everyone in the collective would concentrate solely on your project to make sure it was high quality. “It was Kendrick’s time, so everyone was focused on Kendrick. If it’s your time, you’re the leader of that time. We believe that’s how great records are done.”
To those who weren’t in TDE or close to the camp, everyone seemed to have the same question upon Section.80’s release: Who is this kid?! Of course, if you’d seen him perform or listened to the previous music, you knew he had potential. But very few people saw this—this being the flawless double-time flow of “Rigamortus,” this being the raw, “ready for war” aggression of “Ronald Reagan Era (His Evils).” Kendrick wrote the songs for Section.80 in the spring of 2011, just four months before the album came out, and just a few months after the end of the Independent Grind Tour with Tech N9ne, Jay Rock, and Strange Music. Once off the road, Kendrick retreated to the places where he felt most comfortable: to the House of Pain in Carson, and to the kitchen and couch of
