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JUST A FEW DAYS PAST HIS 25TH BIRTHDAY, KENDRICK LAMAR IS ANGRY. NOT NECESSARILY AT THIS VERY MOMENT, AS THE SUN SETS BEHIND HIM ON A BALCONY AT HIS RECORD LABEL’S SANTA MONICA OFFICES. HE’S ANGRY IN THE GREATER SENSE—AT SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC injustice, at rappers that rap well and say nothing, at rappers that don’t rap well at all.

“I’m more angry about my family history, outside of anything,” he says with a smile.

His smile is a contagious thing that swallows up his face, pushing his cheeks up and out, his eyes into little slits. It’s a smile that’s thinking, searching, connecting, communicating. Right now, along with an easy giggle, it conveys the pain of being the first person he knows of in his family to graduate from high school. “I’m not saying in my immediate family,” Kendrick clarifies. “I’m talking about family.” He stresses the word in a way that implies the history and intimacy of shared blood. As the sun sets red over the sleepy hills of this coastal city, one can’t help but think that this is the vision his father, a former member of Chicago’s notorious Gangster Disciples, imagined when he sought to leave a life of poverty and crime behind by moving to California with Kendrick’s mother. Unfortunately, he “just happened to land in Compton—probably one of the worst parts in that muthafucka,” says Kendrick. Known as the “Hub City,” due to its location in the geographical center of Los Angeles, it’s also the birthplace of the Piru street gang, and by extension ground zero for the 40-year war between the Bloods, the Crips and their internecine sets. On one hand, Kendrick’s dad was able to leave his old life behind, if only by default. “After you move out here, you can’t push that line,” says Kendrick of his dad’s old Gangster Disciple allegiances. “You can’t come over here with your hat broke off in L.A. and have them understand that. They don’t give a fuck about that shit. It’s Bloods, Crips and Pirus.”

More family followed. A next wave, sent out when kids hit their teenage years and their grandmother could no longer control them. It didn’t help. “They got caught in that lifestyle and never changed,” Kendrick recalls of his kin. They dropped out of high school and fell in with the Compton Crips. “But they always looked at me as the little nigga they wanted to make something out of, to make it out from what they was doing.” Many of them never made it out themselves: One did 15 years for robbery before coming out in 2010 and going right back in; Another is serving “forever” for attempted murder, grand theft and more; a third, a relative Kendrick was particularly close with, is in the system too. “I ain’t heard from him in a while,” Kendrick says, wistfully.

The experiences that formed him are peppered throughout his music—the OG wisdom imparted on him by his dad and uncles, the relationship dynamics he saw growing up in a large but young family, the time when his friend dragged him to church and he caught the Holy Spirit until he passed out, the “bodies dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping.”

“My homeboys going to jail, getting locked up,” he says. “Life. Kids. And it clicked. Clicked right then and there: I can’t go out here and be another statistic. If I really got respect and love for my homeboys that I grew up with since elementary, and respect for my pops and respect for my uncles, the best thing for me to do is not to go out there and continue the cycle. It’s to go out there and make something positive out my life to give them inspiration to do something better. It’s that simple. Respect for my homeboys. More so, respect for my pops. All the game he gave me, all that would have been going down to waste. Respect for my uncles, to remind them that the game they was giving me, I heard that.”

FIND OUT KENDRICK'S INITIAL THOUGHT PROCESS BEHIND GOOD KID, M.A.A.D CITY

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All that soaked-up game delivered Kendrick here, to Interscope Records, today, preparing for the fall release of his major-label debut album, tentatively titled good kid, m.A.A.d city. It led him to spend his day at a photo shoot with Dr. Dre, Compton’s greatest rap legend, rap music’s greatest kingmaker, who recruited the MC to work on the near mythical work-in-progress Detox last year, and signed him to Aftermath Records this spring—a deal that allowed Kendrick to move his parents out of Compton. “I had to move my parents first before I made my situation straight,” he says matter-of-factly. “That’s who I wanted to look out for first.”

The rising stardom and its attendant cash flow should be enough to make him happy, but Kendrick isn’t the type of thinker to deal in binaries. For him, all things are connected, and the parts cannot be separated from the whole. “The people I grew up with are locked up,” he says. “There’s built-up anger because I can’t enjoy what I’m doing as much as I want to because they’re not here. They remember when I was peeing in pajamas. We were spending the night, eating out of the same cereal boxes. But they can’t see that right now.”

“The people I grew up with are locked up. There’s built-up anger because I can’t enjoy what I’m doing as much as I want to because they’re not here."

The dance between emotions and autobiography is what makes Kendrick Lamar the most exciting, original and captivating voice that mainstream hip-hop has heard in years. His debut independent album, last summer’s Section.80, was effortlessly high-concept, incredibly thrilling and invariably insightful—a true work of art. With a style that might be described as a mix of Andre 3000 at his most lyrically eccentric, Nas at his most lucid and steely-eyed and Ice Cube in high-definition, Kendrick is an MC that remembers what truly matters: not just a message and a narrative, not just poetry, but a method of delivery, a mastery of craft and point-of-view, steadfast individuality and the creation of new conversations.

“In my eyes, how I view music, how I view the art form—anybody could put some words together,” he says. “My little brother can say, ’Cat and hat/the dog was black’—anybody can do that. But what my little brother hasn’t shown me right now is certain ways to say it and make me believe it. My whole thing that I’ve learned is, no matter what I’m saying, it’s always supposed to move you—period. I can be saying the most simplest shit in the world, but does it have that feeling to where you feel like something and where you think it’s clever? That’s how I approach the whole structure of a song.”

Kendrick is that rare breed: a thinking man’s rapper and a rapper’s rapper both, able to captivate with worldview and meaning while excelling as a technical traditionalist and progressive experimentalist. His bars are dense with internal rhymes and ideas folding in on themselves. He paints pictures that are at once abstract, impressionist and precisionist. He doesn’t rhyme like anyone else, displaying evolving thought pathways and rhyme patterns with each song.

FIND OUT DETAILS ON KENDRICK'S FIRST MEETING WITH TOP DAWG

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“I couldn’t tell you what type of sound or where I’ma be in the next five years as far as music,” he says. “It’s a big difference from the next project compared to the last. And that’s what happened with this album. Going back to the neighborhood and going to different spots, chilling with my homeboys, put me back in that same space where we used to be, bringing back them thoughts, reminiscing how I was feeling. I put myself right back in that mode and I got inspired by that. So this album won’t sound like Section.80. Completely nothing like it.

“With this album, I really wanna shed a different light and reasoning behind the history of my city,” he continues. “And that comes with my own personal story, a story that’s never really been told. You think of Compton, all you think about is street credibility, gang violence, of course—and that’s something that’ll probably always be in my music. But there’s another side that hasn’t been told: the times when the kid that’s trying to escape that influence, trying his best to escape that influence, has always been pulled back in because of circumstances that be.”

“With this album, I really wanna shed a different light and reasoning behind the history of my city, and that comes with my own personal story, a story that’s never really been told."

Ten years ago, inspired by 50 Cent’s mixtape takeover, Kendrick, who was then going by the stage name K.Dot, took to studying his rap heroes on an analytical level, breaking down their traits and attributes in a scientific manner—2Pac, Eminem, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Nas, The Notorious B.I.G. “Whoever he listened to, he absorbed a lot of their style,” recalls Dave Free, Kendrick’s manager. Dave grew up in Gardena, next door to Compton, and went by the name of DJ Dave as a teen. He’d heard Kendrick’s reputation before meeting him, but was taken aback when he heard him rap. “For him to be so young and have that confidence, you would have thought he had been in the rap game for years. You could tell he was way further ahead than everybody.”

In 2003, the two recorded what would eventually become Kendrick’s first mixtape, Youngest Head Nigga in Charge, in Dave’s mom’s garage and handed out copies at their respective high schools. The CD, which has not been available to the public since, made its way to Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, from Nickerson Gardens Projects in Watts, who had built a recording studio in Carson a few years back and launched a label, Top Dawg Ent. “In the city—in Compton, Watts, L.A., Carson— we look at Top Dawg as a nigga in the industry,” Kendrick says, “the only nigga in the music industry that was close, that we could touch.” Dave knew Tiffith’s son, Moosa, and had been imploring him to set up a meeting. Tiffith, who kept his ear to the ground, already had one in mind. “I actually had his mixtape,” Tiffith says. “He didn’t know I had it, though. Dave was hunting me down to try to put me in contact with him, but I already had his shit. I’m looking for them, too. And when they get there, I don’t tell them I got the tape or none of that shit.”

“The moment I walked in, he was like, ‘Let me see if this is really you rapping on here,’” Kendrick recalls. Tiffith sent Kendrick in the booth, threw on a double-time beat and basically ignored him as he rapped for the better part of the next two hours. “That’s kinda how I work,” says Tiffith. “A lot of cats come in with a lot of confidence. But when they get there, I want them to really go hard and win me over. By me shining the dude on, it just made him rap harder. He just really started spitting like crazy and that’s what really sold me.”

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Eventually becoming the second artist signed to Top Dawg Ent. (Nickerson Gardens’ Jay Rock being the first), Kendrick continued to release tapes as K. Dot—2009’s C4 was an impressive homage to Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III that contained  “Compton Chemistry,” a riff on Wayne’s “Dr. Carter” that is possibly the most detailed lesson in cooking crack cocaine ever put to music, which is even more exhilarating due to its closing confession that “you learned from a chemist who never moved a brick in his life.”

But it wasn’t until Kendrick discarded the pretense and began recording under his government name that he found his “niche”—which was himself. A song called “Let Me Be Me,” from that same year’s The Kendrick Lamar EP, was a mission statement. “Almost lost my life to the industry,” he rapped. “Had to look through a photo book to remember me/These label heads ain’t nothing but bullshit/Have you with professional killers, chasing hits/Lying to yourself, all over an image/Making records they want, that was wrecking my brilliance.”

“He played me a bunch of music that he was working on on the low that he wasn’t really playing for a lot of people. It was incredible. I was like, Man, this is some real shit. It made me change my whole perspective on how to put out his music.”

“He was like, ‘I’m fed up trying to make music that other people want to hear,’” says Dave. “He played me a bunch of music that he was working on on the low that he wasn’t really playing for a lot of people. It was incredible. I was like, Man, this is some real shit. It made me change my whole perspective on how to put out his music.”

The music was intensely personal, a meditation on identity that allowed for greater honesty and broader perspective than most MCs ever access. On a trilogy of songs on Section.80 about women—“No Make-Up (Her Vice),” “Tammy’s Song (Her Evils)” and “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain)”—Kendrick writes of individuals with complexities that transcend the standard tropes of bitches and goddesses, without coming off  as pretentious or preachy, or sacrificing entertainment.

“K.Dot was just rapping,” says Kendrick, using the third person to discuss his evolution. “Kendrick Lamar reminisces when his older cousins, 16, 17 years old, had their little girlfriends over there, being in a relationship with them and they whooping they ass and shit in my living room while I’m playing Sega. K.Dot wasn’t thinking about none of that shit. K.Dot was just trying to rap a bunch of lyrics and put them together. Kendrick Lamar thinks about the one time my older cousin actually got him a cool girl—the girl went to school and he respected her for that, but he didn’t have enough respect to keep her and went out and still did what he did and still had the temptation of being a man.” He smiles. Not because he’s angry now, but because he’s reminiscing on his family. And putting them in context, whether good, bad or indifferent, makes him whole, while bringing him closer to himself.

“I learned a lot of shit at a tender age,” he says. “The gift and the curse—it’s bittersweet.”

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