In the beginning I was very doubtful. Once I was done, the jitters hit me so fast. I was so confident in making it, because I was like, “This is it, man. Nobody heard this story and if you heard it, you heard it in bits and pieces but I’m finna put it to you in a whole album—from Compton, from the hood, from the streets—it’s a whole other perspective and light, I’ma go back and do the skits just like how Biggie and Dre and Snoop and ’Pac did it. And I’ma tell my story.” Then I wrapped up with it and said, “Man, what’s on the radio right now? I don’t think they doin’ skits and things like that.” I don’t know if the people are gonna understand what I’m talkin’ about on this album because it’s almost like a puzzle pieced together, and albums ain’t been created like this in a long time.
The rapper was nervous until he got a call from producer Pharrell Williams that shifted his perspective. “He said he had a copy of the album and it’s amazing,” Kendrick wrote. “That call was right on time because that was when I was feeling super insecure about it. Pharrell said, ‘Never feel that way again. When that little negative man come behind your head, always follow your first heart, and that was your first heart, to put the album out like this.’… He said, ‘Watch what’s gonna happen.’ ”
Suddenly, Kendrick was famous. Fans trekked to his childhood home to take pictures of his mom’s van, so much so that she had to hide the vehicle. Go to Google Maps and type “Good Kid M.A.A.D City House”; pictures of the home pop up like some sort of Graceland for rap fans. The album became source material for an English composition class at Georgia Regents University, where Professor Adam Diehl used it as a gateway to study authors Gwendolyn Brooks, James Joyce, and James Baldwin. “With Kendrick’s album,” Diehl told USA Today, “you’ve got gang violence, you’ve got child-family development in the inner city, you’ve got drug use and the war on drugs… a lot of the things that are hot-button issues for today are just inherent in the world of Compton, California.” The professor didn’t just stop there: his course on good kid, m.A.A.d city led to themed classes involving Kendrick’s work for the next five years. In 2016, he taught a class on leadership based on To Pimp a Butterfly; in 2017, he taught a class about emotions centered on Kendrick’s DAMN. “Everything synthesized around the concept of good kid, m.A.A.d city,” Diehl tells me. “I used it as a way to look at the things that happen to kids. It’s a rap album that sinks into literature. He’s a master storyteller, and it’s such an engaging album to play through.”
Whether you were a teenager in Compton or a young adult from Landover, Maryland, good kid forced you to think about your own upbringing, of hot summer days riding shotgun in your friend’s car, going nowhere in particular. The album felt like basketball at the park on rusty goals with chains dangling from the rim, the spiritual richness of your grandma’s old hymnals, the humidity so thick you can almost see it. It evoked barbershop convos, the feel of shabby concrete beneath your fresh Nike sneakers, and the taste of fried chicken wings fresh out of the grease. It was a record for the hood, for black and brown kids with big dreams and little resources, who loved their environment but knew they couldn’t thrive there. It was about the unconditional love between Kendrick and his friends, Kendrick and his neighborhood, Kendrick and his parents, and how—ultimately—he’d have to leave the city but it would never leave him. It celebrated home and all the angels who didn’t know they were angels, the ones who shielded Kendrick from harm, although they didn’t have the same cover. Time has been kind to good kid, m.A.A.d city; it’s now considered one of the best albums of the 2010s, and one of the best hip-hop albums of all time.
5
The Fight for Black Life
Even as Kendrick thrived, race relations continued to erode in the United States. On February 26, 2012, a seventeen-year-old boy named Trayvon Martin was in Sanford, Florida, visiting family, not thinking this trip would be his last. He’d traveled there with his father, Tracy, to stay with Tracy’s fiancée, Brandy Green, in the townhome she rented in the gated Retreat at Twin Lakes community. Once there, Trayvon figured he’d walk down the street, pick up some Skittles and a can of AriZona brand juice from the 7-Eleven, then head back without any problems. But being black in the United States means you have to move differently; you don’t have the freedom to just be. You can’t wear bad days on your face. You have to look nonthreatening and make others feel comfortable, not realizing that your brown skin will never be fully accepted in a country built on white supremacy. Such supremacy is the foundation of America, right there with hate crimes, apple pie, and mass shootings. This creates someone like George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch coordinator, and gives him the power to trek a gated community with a handgun and the perceived right to kill. White supremacy also creates the perception that Trayvon—a tall, scrawny kid from Miami Gardens—is somehow a threat simply because he’s black. White supremacy breeds the idea that blacks are monolithic, that because a young kid wears a dark hooded sweatshirt, he’s up to no good and doesn’t belong in certain neighborhoods. Then he’s not allowed to ask why he’s being followed; he was supposed to ingest the harassment and move on like it didn’t happen. In a land that proclaims freedom for all, it doesn’t extend those same liberties to black people. None of this is new, but on that night in 2012,
