Kendrick Lamar’s history with XXL Magazine pre-dated mine, but we all knew the story. Vanessa Satten, the mag’s longtime editor-in-chief who had been at the company since its early days in the late 1990s, heard the scrappy Compton kid’s ferocious freestyle over Kanye West’s ‘Monster’ beat – released with a low-budget video showing Kendrick rapping with barely-concealed exuberance in an apartment stairwell – and called Dr. Dre.
At the time, the super producer was finalising his endlessly-delayed third solo album Detox – he would appear on the cover of XXL’s December 2010/January 2011 double issue a few months later – and was looking for homegrown, West Coast talent to contribute. Weeks later, and with another behind-the-scenes vote of confidence from Eminem manager and Shady Records co-founder Paul Rosenberg, Lamar landed in the studio with the former N.W.A. legend. And just like that, Dr. Dre found his next superstar.
Earlier that year – before Dre, before ‘Monster’ – Kendrick was just another young, hungry rapper on the rise, acting as fellow TDE MC Jay Rock’s hype man as they toured the country. He would hang around the XXL offices, sit in on staff meetings, record freestyles over old Dre beats and rap karaoke along with 50 Cent, Eminem and Jay Z tracks for the magazine’s annual Freshman cover – which selects 10 MCs likely to break into the mainstream in a given year. That April, Jay Rock appeared alongside the likes of J. Cole, Big Sean and Wiz Khalifa. Kendrick had tagged along to the shoot months before, an experience he rapped about on mixtape deep cut The Heart Pt. 1: “I was at the XXL, just tryna excel/Networking, meanwhile my stomach turning/Wanted to be apart of it/Cater it to my audience/J. Cole runnin’ late/If he don’t show up, think I could take his place?” A year later he made his first appearance on the cover of XXL as part of the 2011 Freshman Class, right on schedule.
By March 2012 Kendrick had signed with Aftermath/Interscope, and the next time he appeared on the cover was that August, with a stone-faced Dr. Dre towering in the background. The previous year’s independent album Section.80 had fully established Kendrick as the Next Big Thing in West Coast hip-hop, an intensely lyrical, deeply introspective rapper with multiple distinct flows and a fearless honesty. But his major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city, released that October, was a different animal entirely. Eschewing radio hits – despite the woozy unexpected chart success of ‘Swimming Pool’ – Kendrick instead delivered a semi-biographical narrative of growing up on the crime-infested streets of Compton, spinning tales of witnessing murders and participating in robberies over 12 tightly-constructed songs strung together with skit interludes. As a body of work, gkmc was easily the most stunning hip-hop album in two years.
A year after the album Kendrick was back on the cover flanked by ScHoolboy Q, Ab-Soul and Jay Rock, his TDE comrades. I was an editor at XXL by then, and stayed up deep into the night transcribing the interviews for the story for our writer whose laptop had been stolen. The conversation opens with an awed and humble Kendrick reacting to being ambushed by TMZ cameras the day before with question about his verse on the leaked Big Sean track ‘Control’, which eviscerated several rappers by name – including Sean himself – the month prior, and reflecting on how quickly fame can sneak up on someone. “I can only look in the mirror and know I’m Kendrick, and see that same little boy I seen seven years ago, but I can’t see what everyone else sees,” he says. “So more and more, I’m really unfazed by it as more and more success is hitting me. And I’m not really sure about it all. It’s a tricky thing.”
By then he had been touring non-stop for a year, including an opening slot on Kanye West’s Yeezus Tour, and had landed on Forbes’ hip-hop cash kings list. From those conversations, he still seemed to be the same upbeat, thoughtful kid that rapped Eminem lyrics with abandon when he thought no one was watching, if a little more withdrawn and guarded. If anything, he was like someone who had just accidentally opened the door to an awkward scene on the other side; smile frozen in place, introductions all around, mind racing to concoct an escape plan while someone whispers in his ear, “They love you!” He had always said on his long climb up the ladder that he wanted to be the greatest rapper alive. But the closer he got to that dream, the further he got from his own reality.
The transition was clearest in his music. Always a varied MC capable of expressing a vast array of emotions, his style hardened into one of vicious arrogance, then ferocity, leaving him almost dazed by the reaction to his verses. “What is competition? I’m trying to raise the bar high/Who tryna jump and get it?” he raps on Control. No one stepped up.
That 2013 cover served up its own set of controversy, which only served to further separate Kendrick from his past. The cover line read “Kendrick Lamar and Black Hippy”, which particularly upset ScHoolboy Q and Ab-Soul, who both tweeted negatively to the possible allusion to them as merely a back-up band. That wasn’t XXL’s intention, but it inadvertently made him an “other” once again, separate from his closest collaborators.
In September 2014, that quick elevator ride to ubiquitous fame, as well as that “otherness” that comes with universally-acclaimed talent, produced the single ‘i’, a funky, guitar-driven, determinedly upbeat single that, for the most part, confused Kendrick fans. He had been largely silent and out of the spotlight for a number of months, and few people truly understood what it meant to defiantly yell, “I love myself.” “Nobody ever really asks about what it’s like trying to adapt to fame and money and how much of a depression it can make for you,” he wrote in his self-penned cover story for XXL’s winter 2014 issue, his first solo appearance on the cover of the magazine and fourth overall. “What I do is for a greater purpose, and we all need money and things like that to survive, but the energy around some of these spaces, it can draw you into a crazy place. And I’ve seen and heard some of the greats go out because of it.”
Three months later, To Pimp A Butterfly was released, and the fans finally saw the whole picture. TPAB was a political album, of course, and one that spoke directly to the deeper issues and problems afflicting America. But it also chronicled an inner turmoil, and the 16 songs tracked a transition – once again strung together with skits, though this time in the form of a building poetic narrative – through the issues and personal drama that accompany near-instant success. It was almost cathartic for both artist and listener alike; nakedly personal, deeply emotional, troubling and defiant. It was an album as complex as the human existence, and it showed that Kendrick was as human as the next person.
The tour that supported To Pimp A Butterfly could have taken Kendrick to mammoth theatres, big arenas or venues originally designed for football teams. Instead, he performed at clubs and halls, with a live backing band and a frenetic energy. His performance at Terminal 5 in New York City in November was one of the funkiest hip-hop shows on record, and ended – as many of his shows during that tour did – with the crowd chanting the hook to ‘Alright’ as the night slowly faded. “I think about how I’m two projects in and you have the world saying I’m the one,” he wrote in his Winter 2015 XXL cover story, a year after his last; then he continues with a vulnerability and honesty that is rare in hip-hop, but is maybe the most central theme of his music as a whole: “And I’m still trying to figure out who I even am.”