Watch Footage From 2009 of Kendrick Lamar Rapping Over “So Appalled”

Kendrick Lamar's ascension as one of rap's greats continued last year as he dropped his his highly influential To Pimp a Butterfly and received a staggering 11 Grammy nominations. It wasn't too long ago though, that the rapper was simply trying to put the rap game onto who he was. In the discovered footage above, a 22-year-old Kendrick talks about his then upcoming Kendrick Lamar EP and freestyles over Kanye West's "So Appalled."

In the interview portion, which spans about three minutes, Kendrick puts on display the reasoned, self-aware intellect that has become a staple of his media interactions. "God made me to spread my voice to the world, straight up" he says. And later, while prefacing the Kendrick Lamar EP, calling it "human music," he says, "I’m a good kid in a mad city, so before I get off into that, I need you to know who I am as a person first, before I get into my story."

As for the freestyle, it's a seedling to the tone, point of view and scope that we now know Kendrick to shoulder so well. At one point, he discusses his entry into the music world and his own background, rapping, "People don’t understand why I went southpaw/I looked in the mirror and said I can’t be like y’all/I can’t be like Game, I can’t be like Eazy/To get in this rap game, I know it won’t be easy/Cause my shit different, I know/he from Compton, where he from, have he killed before?/Truth is, I ain't the most ruthless, but I’m not you bitch/Before she had two kids, my momma had two gigs." And further into the three minute long freestyle, Kendrick promises his self-titled project and diagnoses the industry saying, "The Kendrick Lamar LP I’ve been promoting for bout a month/Don’t worry it’s coming soon, like a fast nut/I never been gassed up, some labels they passed up/Now the industry crashing, I guess they got bad luck/Your bad, you don’t write neither?/There goes another fad, shit I write ether."

The video is a worthwhile page in the scrapbook of Kendrick's rise, which is all the more remarkable when considering where the young rapper was just six year ago.

See Best Rap Performance Nominees & Winners at the Grammys Over the Years