The Butterfly Effect

Kendrick collab. Where the album’s other songs felt tethered to Kendrick’s coming-of-age in 2004, that track seemed to merge all eras of Compton, the teacher and the student. Just Blaze admits that he wasn’t impressed with Kendrick’s music at first; he’d downloaded Section.80 but hadn’t played it before the rapper’s session with Dre, then he’d heard another song—though he can’t remember which one—and wasn’t feeling it. But then Just Blaze heard an advance of good kid, m.A.A.d city in the studio while mixing “Compton” and was hooked. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is different,’ ” the producer recalls. “When I heard the fact that it was a story line that was woven through the album, which is something that had been missing in hip-hop for a while, and then when I heard that mix of more traditional hip-hop sounds with what was considered more contemporary at that time, then you had MC Eiht on the album. All of that together, you could tell this was a kid who was young and on the cutting edge of what the next group of young artists were gonna be. But it was also a kid who understood and respected what came before him. And that’s what made it special to me. Just how he embraced both sides of it, from the production to the song references to the slang and the language. Not too many artists in his age group were doing that in hip-hop at that time, with the skill and the caliber with which he was doing it. I did not expect it to become this new wave of hip-hop only because I wasn’t sure the climate was ready for it. So when it became successful, I was that much more happy for him.”

The Kendrick heard toward the end of good kid is the guy we’d see for years, the intensely private guy who took time for himself and eschewed the approval of others. The album chronicled his evolution from a cocky child who was quick to succumb to peer pressure to an independent, self-assured person. This is where he put God in control of his life and art, and where his work became therapeutic for himself and listeners at large. Close your eyes, and the combination of “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and “Real” play like old church records, the feeling of stress relief in harmonic form. In its totality, good kid, m.A.A.d city presented the full spectrum of Compton and its people, not just the negative aspects you’d see on the news. By presenting the good and the bad, the light and the dark, Kendrick triumphed; the world caught on, and it became a massive critical and commercial hit. Rolling Stone praised the rapper for “setting spiritual yearnings and moral dilemmas against a backdrop of gang violence and police brutality.” Pitchfork lauded the album’s “autobiographical intensity.” “Listening to it feels like walking directly into Lamar’s childhood home and, for the next hour, growing up alongside him,” music critic and author Jayson Greene wrote.

Upon its release, good kid hit the Billboard 200 chart at number 2 and sold roughly 241,000 copies in its first week. It marked the second-highest opening for an R&B/hip-hop album that year, with only Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded selling more in its first week of release. Still, good kid, m.A.A.d city went gold by the end of 2012, selling 500,000 units, and platinum a year later, with more than one million units sold. As of September 2019, the record surpassed Eminem’s 2002 record, The Eminem Show, as the longest-running hip-hop album on the Billboard charts. It was fitting that Kendrick shared the same milestone as Eminem; when good kid, m.A.A.d city came out, Em was one of his biggest supporters. “When I first heard Kendrick’s debut on Aftermath, I couldn’t believe it,” he said in 2016. “The fact that it was his first real album and he was able to make it into a story [that] intertwines with the skits like that was genius. That hasn’t really been done that many times, let alone on someone’s first time up. The level of wordplay, the deliveries, the beats—it’s just a masterpiece.”

The album also drew praise from another acclaimed storyteller in hip-hop: Nas. “No disrespect to nobody else in rap music, but Kendrick Lamar,” the rapper told the Associated Press; his 1994 debut album, Illmatic, is considered by some to be the greatest rap record of all time. “I’m really happy about his record. I needed that. His record reaches you. It gives you hope.” In an interview with Vibe, Kendrick revealed that he wanted Nas to rap on “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” but didn’t have time to reach out. “I was so wrapped up in getting the music done, samples cleared and mastered,” Kendrick said. “I didn’t really wanna rush the process. I actually wanted to sit in the studio and vibe with him.” Nas was right: good kid, m.A.A.d city connected because it came from such an authentic place, and it used a wide array of beats, vocal manipulation, and personal history to make it resonate with listeners everywhere. There are strong parallels between Illmatic and good kid, m.A.A.d city, from the baby pictures that don the front covers to the filmic way the music unfurls. Both rappers wanted you to see the world with their eyes: in Nas’s case, it was the drugs and devastation in New York City’s Queensbridge projects; with Kendrick, it was the trauma beneath Compton’s bright sunshine. Nas and Kendrick wrote incisively about their respective cities, uncovering vast worlds through subtle imagery that puts you in the scene they’re narrating. Illmatic transported us to the subway and the block; good kid put us in the car on the freeway.

Privately, though, Kendrick wondered if listeners would understand his debut album. “I’d be lying to you to say I knew good kid, m.A.A.d city would be as successful as it has been,” the rapper wrote in a