How Kendrick Lamar Became The Greatest Rapper Alive

If I'm challenging myself in the studio, I want to challenge you too. Kendrick Laamar is better at rapping than anyone you know at anything and what's even more impressive than his tremendous accomplishments and goat status is that for the last 10 years he has been my favorite artist, his albums are the number one reason why that I began to appreciate listening to the albums from start to finish as I would a movie and what is equally fascinating as each of his albums is the constant growth he has achieved as an artist and to be able to analyze his artistic growth.

I would like to make a comparison with a world that perhaps I did not expect. I grow. I'm like a chameleon, I just bring a pure form of art to the music game. One of my past obsessions was learning how to solve a Rubik's cube and then learning how to solve it quickly. Yes, there is a pretty good online community that shares information on how to get better at this, which makes it very easy to understand and something that always stuck with me because of this hyper fixation was when one of the best speed cubes of all time , Felix Zex, posted a video talking about their thoughts on improvement, which was based on a video from another speed cube called Noah Cubes and together they talk about this concept of climbing the mountain, this basically breaks the art of being good. down into two separate types of progress, you advance when you learn new things that increase your abilities, you advance when you practice those things that increase your abilities, so, for example, you could spend a few weeks learning how to solve the cube in the first place. and that allows you to start practicing solutions, which is trying to get faster times, then you would learn the next thing and practice it until you master it, etc., this distinction is essential because you can't climb the mountain just by solving. the cube again and again you have to learn faster methods and then practice them until you have mastered them and of course you can't climb the mountain just by learning new methods either, you have to practice them until you have mastered it. best you can, is the equivalent of a chef learning new recipes and then practicing making them over and over again to perfect them, so this is a useful way to understand improvement, which brings us back to Kendrick Lamar studying Kendrick's approach to music is clear.

He believes that challenging yourself is essential for growth. It's really about me challenging myself. I think my enthusiasm for making music is that I feel like I'm never stagnant, so this is the perfect framework to understand its artistic evolution. You may like some of his earlier albums more than his later ones, which is fair, they're all fantastic, but there's no denying that he continued to learn and execute new things with each and every project. It's pretty well documented that Kendrick makes a lot more music than he ends up releasing. How many unreleased songs do you have in your head or that we haven't heard yet?

Thousands. I lost hard drives. Damn, are we really talking about a lot of music we've never heard before the process to get where you need to go? Get to Oh yeah, because you know my process after premeditating. I throw all the pain I can at the wall and get it out. It's like this image of a plate juggler with all the broken plates right behind him, hidden from the crowd. I believe this. is Kendrick's approach to artistic growth, challenging himself to learn new things he hasn't done before and then practicing as hard as he can by making songs until he gets to the ones that are most resonant and impactful and with that let's begin to take a look at The Kendrick's journey climbing the mountain Kendrick started at level one like the rest of us.

He began writing at age 13 when he was inspired by two important figures. What was the moment you really started rapping? Which is crazy. My aunt used to play and just be with us. freestyle we didn't know what we were doing when I was 9 the first person saw a rap that's my life I had Chang but I took it seriously when I was 13 yeah I was inspired by DMX's first album thank god for the album my idiz is dark and sexy, that's the start of a crazy journey. He would spend years mastering the fundamentals of his craft rhyme schemes, clever wordplay flows, all of which would come in the form of mixtapes under the name k, his idols and inspiration gave him much to study and learn increasing his capabilities.

I want to sit down and I want to perfect my craft. I really went after studying all the greats Bigg and Tupac Jay-Z Nas and building connections with other black hippie members, Jrock Absol and schoolboy Q as well. Like Top Dog and Punch from TDE they would support him in his years of practice. I've been at Top Dog Entertainment since I was 16 and they basically developed me to where I am today, you know, locked me in the booth and made me. Not that I want to, but they gave me an extra push, you know, and we could break this down into a bunch of little steps, but for the sake of simplicity, let's combine the beginnings of his career into one big one. step of mastering the fundamentals after having mastered the basics, it was time for Kendrick to challenge himself to increase his ability again.

The challenge at this point in his career would be to make his first concept album. Basically, I want to focus it on my generation. The hint I can give about the concept of each of the songs would be powerful as standalone tracks, but together they would come together to form a cohesive narrative whole that is greater than the sum of its parts and that would be section 80, the concept that unites all these clues. is the series of campfire scenes interspersed between the songs this is your generation that is willing to explain this story that helped contextualize the songs that tell the stories of people born in the '80s who lived in Section 8 housing, hence the name section 80 because he was clearly ADHD a talented

rapper

at the time and I don't know if Statics is active, but this project would give clues to the talents he had for the overall creative direction.

Doing this project would earn Kendrick the respect of West Coast legend Snoop Dogg, good at what you do. great at what you do, you say this and I mean this, you have the torch, you better run with it and run with it, he did it. I need to separate myself to stand out. I need a better way to bring your fans, now you can just listen. In his voice, this guy who has fought his whole life for this moment now that he finally has some wind in his sales there is no way he is going to miss the opportunity for it.

I need you to be fucking Cho jam, now it was time for Kendrick to put his full foot on the gas, good boy, Mad City would raise the bar by being an even more personal and polished concept album about his upbringing in Compton, California, this is bigger than music to me, you know, I mean, I haven't seen the city that hasn't. He didn't have the pass of his uncle and his cousins ​​in the city. I mean, growing up in Compton is real. I'd like to say the only word to describe it is um, it's a really unpredictable period, you know, because you never know what kind of mischief you're going to get up to.

Get into it, you know you could go to the LI store and then that's your life there, so you really have to watch your ways and your steps and how you move and watch the people you associate with. This album is the first that comes to mind when we talk about albums that play like movies and that's exactly what he was going for. He had been living with this idea for a long time and wisely waited until his skills were up to the task before doing it, good boy. M, my first first book, yes, I had that photo for so long, knowing that it will be the cover of my album.

The idea occurred to me, there is a lot of irony in that photo, baby BT, next to 40, next to a uh hum who is in the gang. culture, you know, really, says everything about my music, as well as making what feels like an even more immersive and complete concept album, tied together with a series of skits that set up the following tracks. K, get in the car, get your freestyles ready. Don't even trip, just sit back and drink that he definitely got better at writing hit singles too and you need them to reach bigger audiences and entice people to listen to the album.

First of all, Swimming Pools was a fantastically crafted song from this. In perspective, it's a huge struggle for artists of all kinds to make art that is deep and personal to them and at the same time reach large audiences because you want to do what you want but you have to make money and sometimes it can seem impossible. The Balancing Act Between Success and Substance Kendrick gives us a master class in how to do both with pools. This was the first Kendrick song that many people my age and I listened to because it was popular. It was heard on the radio.

It was heard at parties. It

became

a party song and a drinking song and it's a great drinking song when you only pay attention to the hook, although this song is really about Kendrick's upbringing and watching everyone around him struggle with substance abuse, You can fully enjoy this song while abusing. substances, but don't put out the lyrics unless you're ready to face your demons EXC, so this album showed both artistic and commercial growth for Kendrick, many say it's a masterpiece that raised the bar for the new era of hip hop artists and even though we I'm trying to raise the bar High, who's trying to jump up and get it after dropping the good boy Mad City Kendrick dropped the infamous control verse, I mean, big sea dropped the control verse song, but this song that Kendrick was just a feature on would be claimed as his as more people give more importance to just his verse than the rest of the entire song feeling confident in his position after earning the respect of his idols and taking advantage of all heart the moment with the good boy Mad City.

Kendrick felt it was time to establish himself by taking the competition to his competition. IU Kendrick reinvigorated the competitive spirit of the lyrical sport by mentioning the entire game in a verse that has a certain mentality of coming to a league where you are literally the leader. hunt everyone right because it's your time to settle down and say know I belong here so this as a result everyone has to go yeah yeah he can relate to that but it was actually a sign of respect if your name came up on the list, which means that you are a worthy participant in this competition, you know, the first thing the man tells me is the control thing, thank you very much for understanding and not taking the verse incorrectly.

I liked that and thought. oh I was like Kendrick, you don't know I'm different, bro, I was like I'm different, you know, I understand that I listen to rap, right, I understand that it's the sport of hip-hop, it's the sport, it's the sport . of hip-hop and I and I look at him as a man, you know, he's um, he yelled at his mates and they kept hip hop because that's what he did, he kept it all hip hop, he didn't go stabbing, he attacked to his friends and told them this is a friendly competition and he named it and said I'm in all of you and that's what hip hop does, that's what it's supposed to do, this verse caused such a stir that it even reached to the most specialized and least expected audiences.

I'll never forget playing Starcraft 2 in 2013 when a random general chat was saying that Kendrick, in all caps, had just mentioned the whole rap game, so I mean it when I say that everyone was talking about this, it really is worth it for this guy to do something like that. a claim to have the audacity if you're going to talk about such an important game, you better be able to back it up if you're going to talk about such an important game, your next album will be better for pimpa Butterfly is widely recognized by modern music fans as one of the

greatest

albums of all time, which is a real bummer because most artists can only reach the level that Kendrick reached with the good boy Mad City Once, how the hell would he continue to raise the bar for himself once again ? not be satisfied with doing the same thing again his ambition and artistic integrity would lead him to do the only thing he knows how to do challenge me the challenge with this project would be to go all the way in the artistic direction Kendrick Lamar is a real Artist, yes the true definition of the word pimpa.

Butterfly was sonically out of place and Kendrick knew it before any record came out. He had to go through me and they had to go through my team first and we were all listening like Is that like that, especially when you hear it first from start to finish? It takes several times to digest it. Oh seriously, this would be Kendrick making the poetic masterpiece he always wanted to make, even if it wasn't radio friendly, even if there were people who At first I thought it wasn't like that, it was completely unexpected, no one expected you to do that, yeah, definitely, um, and I knew from the beginning that there was going to be a challenge, you know, for my listener's ear, but I do. challenging myself in the studio I want to challenge you too to pimp a butterfly is an incredible synthesis of the whirlwind through whichHe subdues the music industry as he rises to stardom and finds himself abusing his newfound power, feeling like he has abandoned those he left struggling to get back on their feet.

At home, realizing the exploitative nature of the industry that praises the talents of the butterfly but shuns the caterpillar, he began while replacing hip-hop's more familiar beats with a large amount of live instrumentation, combining his talent to the flows with this would make Creations. like free, which is a total mind, your option if we abort more, more divorce and this, I have two this day, I never heard a single song. As if you complicate this song, it feels like we're plummeting into the depths of Kendrick's soul down the darkest path as he desperately struggles to cope with the relationships he's destroyed.

Coming home being absent when he was needed most feeling like the left behind by his own success you are not a friend to or leave his best friend brother you promised him that you look I think that making a song that is this heavy and Being able to identify it with a single lyric is something brilliant and weak and the polar opposite of this song I am I which is about self love and it is very uplifting and every time I hear this line it makes me feel like I can rise again. This is an album I revisit basically every year and get more out of it as I get older and wiser, and if you're too repulsed by how artsy and artsy it is to pimp a butterfly for enjoyment, you were reminded that Kendrick is that guy when he and competition-conscious

rapper

Jay Cole rapped over each other's beats during Black Friday.

This was great for the fans but brutal for Cole. It's not that he hasn't given his best. He's still solid, but Kendrick is just everything. Different Beast and the rhythm that Cole let him have is one of his best rhythms. That's when we knew for sure that Kendrick Laar is the definition of going hard in the paint, just like with the control verse. Kendrick's part is definitely a fan favorite. On both YouTube and SoundCloud, the only places you can listen to him, the numbers don't lie and they spell disaster for you, so Kendrick just made another masterpiece of an album, which begs the question of how he would do it again such as I see it. moved into full-fledged artist mode on Pimpa Butterfly, risking sacrificing commercial viability and popularity in favor of what matters most to true fans of music, art, and now the challenge would be to prove that he can not only do that but also going all the way in the other direction and making an enormously popular album without diluting his art and he did, it was huge, many of his songs reached billions of streams and

became

, by far, his best-selling album 2 3 I am, there are some really clever ways he achieved this too, the single Take the Lead in the music video that came out before the album.

Humble is damn what pools are to good ol' boy Mad City, but to a greater extent, like pools, it would make for more accessible repeatable radio. friendly song that would help entice new listeners to check out the rest of the album, but humble would go even more viral with a phenomenal music video directed by one of the goats Dave Meyers. This video has become a classic moment in Kendrick's career as he re-emerges in 2017 as Kung Fu Kenny k k millennium recap. I see Kung Fu Kenny as a master of the craft. Now you have the ability to make songs and you still have the Smith word technique, intertwined and composed. mentality about how to approach music now you're just not connecting with people in the studio, your friends, you're connecting with people around the world universally.

However, the really interesting thing about humble is that it reads as if it were an exercise in minimalism as if it were really funny if Kendrick challenged himself to minimize the complexity and the syllables because the song is written on a reading level of third grade, the Gunning Fog Index is a tool to measure readability and if you treat each line of this song as its own sentence, then the song registers at this level and it worked. Kendrick made his most popular album on purpose, he and his The team wanted as many people as possible to connect with it, so it was going to be called What Happens on Earth, Stays on Earth, but they simplified it to Damn and While this would become, by far, their best selling album of all time, it is still very artistically satisfying, it is an abstract tragedy about being cursed or condemned in one way or another, evil or weakness, evil, a weak listen to this album normally versus in order Reverse is your The decision to live or die listening to this album on Reverse for the path of evilness is a very dark ending with this angry pop off at the end of DNA that is triggered by Geraldo Rivera's incredibly ignorant and damaging comment on the news that harms young Africans.

Americans that racism in recent years and then he dies in Blood and that guy is on the news misrepresenting his damn legacy and when the world needed him most he disappeared, we anxiously waited 5 years for his next album to come out and when that time came, as? Would it raise the bar this time if you've proven that you can be completely artistic and still be commercially successful? If you've proven that you can achieve complete commercial success and still be artistically satisfying, where do you go next? Kendrick's entire discography so far. has been largely a tragedy, the challenge with this next album would be to break the cycle of Breaking Free from the position of the torturer artist and Breaking Free from the generational cycles of pain into which he was born.

That's why Kung Fu Kenny would now re-emerge as Mr Moral the guy doing the hard thing but the right thing this album is Kendrick's journey through therapy starting with superficial complaints about the world and slowly progressing more and more towards his own problems that are Rooted from his childhood this album is Kendrick making art for his own health and well-being now and the concept that ties this album together is much more subtle than the Section 80 parodies on Good Kid Mad City or the poem To Pimp a Butterfly, There's Only snippets of conversation from Whitney, someone who is hardcore. fans would know that she is Kendrick's high school girlfriend and mother of his children, she is urging him to tell us the truth and go to therapy, tell them, tell them, tell them, tell them who you are, we also hear footsteps in the background near the end of much. of topics open to interpretation.

I like to think he's making great strides toward healing, among other things. At the end of We Cry Together, a song about a couple who argue and then engage in the toxic behavior of making up with sex instead of addressing their problems. Whitney. tells Kendrick to stop tap dancing in the conversation, he finally tells us the truth and, mother, I'm sober, the guy we always knew doesn't have any addictions, he's never been a drinker or a smoker, reveals that all along he has. been hiding an addiction, a sex addiction, that would lead to infidelity with his partner Whitney, so we really owe this whole album to Whitney, who even in her pain cared more about him getting help .

The miracle of this album is breaking the cycle of tragedy and choosing healing, this is possibly the most important album in Kendrick's career because, once again, he is finally moving in the direction of self-healing, setting an example by embracing a stance for mental health and if Kendrick chooses it, I'm here for it. is the final message of his discography. I think it's a perfect ending and I support him because he's already given us a lot, but if he chooses violence and makes more music, I'm here for that too, so he was just doing it. This video to appreciate Kendrick.

What we do on this channel is appreciate art and like I said, he's been my favorite artist for the last 10 years. I didn't know that while doing this he would criticize Drake and Jcole, but for my part. When recording this, all that happened is Kendrick dropped a one minute verse, uh, jcole responded with a 4 minute song and then apologized for it, took it down and Drake's record supposedly leaked and everything What I can say is that as a Kendrick fan he is artistically in a different league than these other two and if we get a proper Kendrick Dis Track it will be legendary, he has been developing for so long on tracks like Heart part 4 and element and Rich Spirit, and I'm here for it until then.

You can see more great art here and bonus content on Rock's patreon and if Kendrick ever makes another album, you better believe he'll challenge himself.