So he went home to where it all started, back to the dungeon, back to familiar settings. It was his way to reset, to remind himself that, despite the shows and the fan support, there was still plenty of work to be done, and that—as a creator—you’re only as good as your last project. Much like The Kendrick Lamar EP and Overly Dedicated, Section.80 was equally about Kendrick and those closest to him. But where his previous two projects were more about his own peaks and valleys, Section.80 widened the scope to discuss his generation as a whole—the kids born in the mid- to late 1980s who were around when crack cocaine flooded the streets, but were too young to understand what was happening to their friends, families, and neighbors. The song “A.D.H.D” speaks to this: here, Kendrick dissects the natural connection that he and his peer group have to drugs and dependency as a whole. It’s not just age-old addictions like marijuana and liquor; his peers are now addicted to cough syrup, pills, and video game consoles. Compare that with the song “No Makeup (Her Vice),” where Kendrick questions why a woman he knows hides her natural beauty beneath layers of cosmetics. “Damn girl, why so much?” he asks. “You ’bout to blow your cover when you cover up / Don’t you know your imperfections is a wonderful blessing?” We learn later in the song that she’s a victim of domestic violence, and the makeup is covering black eyes.
Then there’s “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain),” on which the rapper tells the story of a young woman fighting against societal ills: Keisha was molested as a child and later works as a prostitute. After a short life of fighting crooked cops and overzealous johns, she was found dead—raped and stabbed. Section.80 is where Kendrick became a masterful storyteller who could elicit joy, deliberation, and sorrow in equal measure, and where he merged his two very distinct personas—the aggressive K-Dot and the introspective Kendrick Lamar—with the best results to that point. On a song like “Ronald Reagan Era,” Kendrick summoned K-Dot to a certain extent, leaning upon the unfiltered aggression of his old persona to salute city gangs as one united front. To him, colors didn’t matter; this was him declaring once and for all that Compton was one city. Crips, Eses, and Pirus, it didn’t matter, he said they all had his back. The same went for “Fuck Your Ethnicity,” Section.80’s opening track. This time, he flips the notion of color, broadening it from gang culture to race, lumping all ethnicities into one group. Everyone was the same; when he looked into the crowd from the stage, he saw black, white, Asian, and Hispanic faces all in one place. The song also finds him trying to embrace God, a theme that would define his career. In this moment, it was as if he were rushing to find Him before the sins of his past caught up.
With Section.80, the rapper wanted to achieve balance in his music and in life, with art that addressed all facets of the city’s culture while paying homage to the men in his family who were still active in the streets. Kendrick pulled from these experiences—from the hard lessons he learned from his uncles and cousins, to the nurturing he got from his mother and father, who always encouraged him to dream and live life abundantly. “They taught me the world is bigger than Compton and to go out and explore it,” he once told Billboard. “That made me an individual. I actually know who I am, where I come from, and what I got to do to represent and connect people.” Section.80 was partially influenced by a close friend of his who was given a sentence of twenty-five years to life for a violent crime. “He had no guidance and was caught in that negative stigma of our generation that [we] don’t care about anything and don’t listen to anybody,” Kendrick told the publication. “He was so young and his life is almost completely gone, it’s like he missed the whole world. Just the fact that’s gone from him at such a tender age shows me that we have a lot to go as far as listening and being able to critique ourselves as individuals. That’s what Section.80 represents. [It’s] that particular moment [in which] I thought back to the pain I felt when one of my friends was about to be gone for a minute. That’s the creation process going into the studio, thinking about those emotions.”
With Section.80, Kendrick portrayed his peer group as actual human beings with real concerns. They’re not apathetic and only addicted to themselves and their cell phones. They hurt and they bleed like everyone else. They lament the state of the world, and just because they don’t protest the way their parents did doesn’t make them any less thoughtful. Section.80 was an exercise of duality, a walk through the pleasures of pain and the dark sides of temptation. It was a story about real life and good times, and the uncertainty looming at every corner of the inner city. It was also an album of self-discovery, of Kendrick trying to evade the pitfalls waiting for him. The rapper spoke to this in detail on “Poe Mans Dream (His Vice).” Here he unpacks his own flawed thinking, that he once believed going to jail was cool. That was until he saw the stress and strain that prison had put on his family.
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