Kendrick Lamar’s modern masterpiece good kid, m.A.A.d city: 5 Years On
“Bitch, with the grip of my fingertip I can hold this coast together,” Compton native Kendrick Lamar rhymes as he closes out his feature on fellow Top Dawg Ent. member Ab-Soul’s “ILLuminate,” a track that was part of an album that came some ten months before Lamar himself would make his debut. It’s a statement blistering with confidence and self-awareness, a warning to anyone else who might claim that they resurrected the West. And who could refute the kid, especially with the knowledge that Dr. Dre loomed as his mentor?
Kendrick Lamar was coming off of the success of 2011’s Section.80, an ambitious but perhaps not-fully-realized expression of a story based on his own life. Despite this, it still remains a stellar early 2010s hip hop project. The atmosphere isn’t organically California, lacking the usual bounce expected of the coast. Instead it references a burgeoning trap sound, layering samples atop live drum loops and culling feeling from the sardonic to the moody to the highs of social drugs.
In what was mostly a nasally monotone, Lamar brought listeners into his world. His stance as an MC was that of a restless conscience, aware of his place as an intelligent young man amongst partygoers and future deadbeats. He knew when to brag, aware of his skill and ability, unafraid to lambast critics and haters. But his supreme focus always fell back into making sense of where he grew up: Compton, California.
As his star grew and hip hop began to recognize his unique position as perhaps the West Coast’s greatest prospect since The Game only seven years prior, Lamar prepared his major-label studio album, a record that, like Game’s, would debut on Aftermath/Interscope under the helm of Dr. Dre. Lamar himself claimed that Section.80 was just a warm-up, and the few shortcomings that appeared on that album would evaporate on good kid, m.A.A.d city.
While Section.80’s cinema was created by a burly voice (played by Kendrick) urging action in front of a trashcan fire on his neighborhood corner, good kid, m.A.A.d city’s story is promulgated behind the whine of a CRT playing a film on tape: the album itself. Voices, including Kendrick’s, his parents and his friends, would usher in songs and create the cohesion essential to a conceptual listening experience.
The moods of his 2011 album are apparent in GKMC, but explored more deeply. Odes of teenage love languishing under street violence, the search for one’s identity and safety amongst roaming gangs who seek his reciprocation in their activity, and becoming the rapper he knew he’d become create a palpability that was perhaps tinnier, for lack of a better term, on Section.80. Here, the messages are more fleshed, the production is more gorgeous, and a greater conviction lives in his pen that ultimately moves him from being the city’s human sacrifice to its savior, a juggernaut rumbling across hip hop’s stratum and into the public eye.
Concept albums rarely win in the way that GKMC did and does. It manages to tell its story without awkwardly inserting radio-ready singles in its midst. Bangers like Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe, Backseat Freestyle, Money Trees, Swimming Pools (Drank) and Poetic Justice are all critical components of the album; their absence would absolutely jeopardize Kendrick’s story, yet their pop presence and repeat value is undeniable.
With that being said, the tracks set between the “radio songs” are certainly not filler; nowhere close. In fact, they may be the most potent sections of the record. The Art of Peer Pressure is a dark scene that bridges Backseat Freestyle and Money Trees, highlighting the dangers of wont of excess. The definitive showstopper, however is the 12-minute narrative, Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst, told in two parts and possessing a throttling potency that very well serves as a summation of the entire GKMC story. Kendrick’s external influence as both a popular artist and hometown figurehead is painfully expressed in Sing About Me, while the consequences of his hometown’s violence is lamented in I’m Dying of Thirst.
Not a single instrument, rap or breath is wasted on good kid, m.A.A.d city. There is a calculated deliberateness and undying authenticity seeping out of every single song. No guest feature is shoehorned in or feels out of place, and certainly no sound on the album arrives as a hindrance to the album’s ultimate message. Dr. Dre himself, whose hand in mixing the project is an unsung blessing for Kendrick’s story, helps his young protege close out the album on its finale song, a triumphant west coast banger: Compton. It leaves the listener, and indeed the world, with Kendrick Lamar’s manifesto: the story of a kid from Compton who took his city international.
In early 2014, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis took home the Grammy for Best Rap Album of the Year for their 2012 album The Heist, “robbing” good kid, m.A.A.d city. Then, in an embarrassingly apologetic text message that he publicized having sent to Kendrick, Macklemore admits that GKMC should have won. Nevertheless, the Compton MC would go on to receive the same award two years later for his follow-up, To Pimp A Butterfly, an album which deserves commentary through dissertations rather than mere articles. But despite The Heist beating out what was almost unanimously considered the best damn rap album of the year and even the era, only one of those two albums is still being spoken about to this day in the manner in which it deserves.
Before good kid, m.A.A.d city, it could be said that Kendrick Lamar was a rapper poised to merely bring the west back. But following its release, and in the five years since it dropped, it can now easily be said that Kendrick Lamar has become one of hip hop and modern music’s most important artists. His expressions in music have gotten sharper, more layered and intricate, but his mind remains on the city that birthed him. He’s never lost sight of his past, but his restless mind careens him into the future with an awareness of the precipice he stands on as perhaps his generation’s most talented rapper. In his own words, as on The Heart Part 4, his mind state has clearly moved beyond the task of just holding his coast together:
“Yelling 1–2–3–4–5, I am, the greatest rapper alive.”
