The Butterfly Effect

to feel not just that he was here to headline, but we were also about his people and community,” Kaskie says. “We booked ScHoolboy and SZA not to appease, but to also celebrate what we know to be a powerful thing growing on the West Coast.” Indeed, there was a renaissance of sorts happening in West Coast rap, due in part to Kendrick and TDE. Around 2010, a collective of L.A.-based rappers captivated pop culture with shocking antics and hardcore rhymes. They called themselves Odd Future, and they were led by the garish Tyler, the Creator—a fire-breathing producer and MC who once bit into a cockroach in a music video. Also in the group were rapper Earl Sweatshirt and singer Frank Ocean, two superstars-in-waiting who would become respective cornerstones in underground rap and R&B. Sweatshirt birthed a movement of heavy-eyed, conversational rap that paired weed-induced flows with obscure soul-sampling loops. In 2012, Ocean released channel ORANGE, his spectacular major-label debut album, and was quickly dubbed an R&B savior. Then there was YG, a Compton-born gangsta rapper whose work with producer and fellow L.A. native DJ Mustard was a glossy alternative to Kendrick’s heady approach.

On July 31, 2012, Kendrick released “Swimming Pools (Drank)” as the first official single from good kid, m.A.A.d city, and his life changed forever. On the surface, “Swimming Pools” seemed to celebrate the joy and eventual crash of excessive drinking, with its unforgettable hook that crowds love to recite. “Pour up (Drank!), head shot (Drank!),” the chorus goes. When performed at open-air festivals like Pitchfork’s, and after several hours of guzzling beer and eating street food, “Swimming Pools” hits like a party song, with its deep, vaporous bass line and sledgehammering drum loop. Dig into the lyrics and you hear Kendrick wrestling with his family’s history of alcoholism, and how their struggles led to his own complicated relationship with the drug. “Now I done grew up ’round some people livin’ their life in bottles,” he raps. “Granddaddy had the golden flask / Backstroke every day in Chicago.” When he was younger, Kendrick wanted to fit in with the popular kids, so he drank solely for that reason.

The song also addresses the peer pressure associated with drinking, that if you’re out with friends, you’re expected to get drunk. If you don’t, you’re somehow considered soft and clowned for “babysittin’ only two or three shots.” This speaks to the genius of Kendrick Lamar: on this song and others, the rapper knew how to weave serious themes through pop-infused beats, educating listeners without preaching to them. He wrote illusively and buried the message, thus making it connect with passive and active listeners. “Swimming Pools” was a dark song teeming with Kendrick’s personal torment, but because he talked to you and not at you, the rapper was able to relate on a human level. Many of us have some sort of connection to alcoholism, so the lyrics hit home in a way that simply wasn’t on Top 40 radio at that time. It was just different, much like Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” in 2004; with its backing choir and marching drums, that song was gospel masquerading as hip-hop. (In 2019, Kanye leaned heavily into that aesthetic; his ninth studio album, Jesus Is King, was essentially a Christian rap record.)

“I wanted to do something that felt good, but had a meaning behind it at the same time,” Kendrick once told Complex regarding “Swimming Pools.” “I wanted to do something that’s universal to everybody but still true to myself. What better way to make something universal than to speak about drinking? I’m coming from a household where you had to make a decision—you were either a casual drinker or you were a drunk. That’s what that record is really about, me experiencing that as a kid and making my own decisions.”

People never address alcoholism in mainstream music, said producer T-Minus, who compiled the beat for “Swimming Pools.” “A lot of people, when they first hear it, they think it’s just about drinking and the positive effects of getting drunk,” he told Complex. “But this record talks about the negative effects as well. Which is really dope because not a lot of people want to touch on all the other things.” Because Kendrick went against the grain, and because he was a real person talking about real topics, and because he appreciated the spotlight (yet wasn’t seduced by it), “Swimming Pools”—and his music overall—gave us energy. It peaked at number 17 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, making it Kendrick’s first big hit. Almost overnight, he’d broken away from underground rap.

From there, it was full speed toward the October release of good kid, m.A.A.d city, now one of the most anticipated albums of 2012. Though the rapper played it cool during the press run, there was a lot riding on good kid for him and TDE as a whole. The memory of Jay Rock’s failed Warner deal was still fresh in their minds. Coupled with the critical success of Section.80, along with the Dre and Gaga cosigns, Kendrick’s major-label debut had to be a home run. There were too many eyes on him; no way this could flop. “We’ve done a lot, but we haven’t sold any records,” Tiffith said at the time. “This is our real first release. This is going to set the tone for TDE.”

Kendrick’s interviews leading up to the album release only heightened anticipation: after listening to the record, he declared, we were going to know why he didn’t drink too much or smoke at all, and why he held his family and friends so closely. He only gave us a little bit in these interviews, and in some instances, he’d start to unpack the album’s concept before stopping himself. He’d been planning this album since his days of dropping mixtapes and he didn’t want to give too much away. He wanted us all to be surprised, to see his hometown in all its nuanced splendor. The good kid album