To understand Kendrick Lamar, the 27-year-old bard of Compton, you might consider the circumstances of his sixth birthday. “Huge party, small apartment, lots of toys,” Lamar explains in the soft, deliberate cadence that lends him an almost mystical air. “Kids running around doing backflips in the house, cake, ice cream, noon to six. Now it’s dark, party’s over. You leave the house on your new bike. You’re out on the corner. Somebody pulls up with a shotgun and commences firing at the people right beside you. And there, happy birthday, you see your first murder.”
Lamar paints this grim tableau as dusk begins to darken the Los Angeles offices of Top Dawg Entertainment, the record label that allowed him the extraordinary creative freedom that resulted in 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city—already regarded as a hip-hop masterpiece—and is set to release his breathlessly anticipated new record any day now. The Compton of Lamar’s childhood, rife with gang violence, ravaged by crack cocaine, is a world evoked and often glamorized by the West Coast gangsta rappers who emerged from it. But Lamar’s verses do something different: They provide the running commentary of a keen observer and a reluctant participant. Lamar is tough, sure, but he is also traumatized—and unafraid to show it.
“Nurture at home, danger on the streets,” he says about growing up. “Being a dreamer but snapping back to reality when I was done dreaming—that gave me an edge as an artist.”
In the two years since his breakthrough album, Lamar has become a star, heir apparent to the kingdom of hip-hop. “Kendrick’s verses belong in a museum where sacred artifacts are on display,” says Pharrell Williams. But one senses that the crown, when it does come, will weigh heavily. Lamar, unlike his friend Kanye West, on whose Yeezus tour he served as opening act, is no natural at fame. He describes himself as an introvert and confesses that he’s amazed to find he can perform in front of stadium crowds. Though Lamar earned close to $10 million over twelve months recently, he still prefers the company of his longtime girlfriend, Whitney Alford, and shops at thrift stores near where he grew up. “My mother grabbed some things for me from there recently,” he says, “and when I wear them, because of my celebrity, people walk up to me and say, ‘Is that Alexander Wang?’
Lamar hints that his new record will address the way in which fame has jostled his sense of self. The first release is called “i,” and at first blush it may seem to inhabit the Zeitgeist of Pharrell’s “Happy,” with its jubilant hook and affirmative message. But the song is much less straightforward. In it Lamar raps about his struggle with depression—far from a safe topic in hip-hop—and about the “scars” that bind his fans to him. “In hip-hop it’s often been ‘Things were rough, but look what I got now!’ ” says his friend Devon “Devi Dev” Anjelica Brown, a hip-hop-radio personality based in Los Angeles and Houston. “That’s how we’ve taught ourselves to heal, with material things. For Kendrick, what he has is what he’s been through. That is his asset.”
His message of self-love, scars and all, feels especially poignant against the backdrop of fresh racial wounds in America. Lamar, who was a kid when the Rodney King riots burned through South Central L.A., is inclined to view the events of Ferguson, Missouri, as an opportunity not for recrimination but for self-examination. “If you’d told me about Ferguson years back, I’d have been ready to riot and loot,” he says. “I’m still angry about it, but I can’t go out with these big messages if I’m not fixing myself first. In the black community, in order for others to respect us, we have to respect each other, and that starts with respecting ourselves.”
If he hadn’t become a rapper, Lamar says, he might have liked to be a psychiatrist, and indeed his rhymes suggest that it’s time to talk not only about cars, clothes, jewelry, and women but also about feelings. “Why can’t we show a more vulnerable side?” he asks. He’s even willing to borrow a metaphor from fashion to make his point. On “i,” Lamar raps, “Peace to the fashion police, I wear my heart/On my sleeve, let the runway start.”
