On Section.80, Kendrick Lamar had a point to make: “You know why we crack babies?/ Because we born in the ’80s/ That ADHD crazy.” On the song “ADHD,” those words don’t belong to Kendrick. But Kendrick wasn’t really interested in talking shit. Even at his sleepiest, Kendrick charged every line with emotion and ferocity, and on those rare occasions when he indulged in better-than-you stunting, he was almost frighteningly potent. He was fast and jittery and technically impeccable, and his syllables hammered down like raindrops on a car’s rooftop. Kendrick’s level of pure, raw talent was off the charts. I reviewed Section.80 for Pitchfork, and the album mostly struck me as a document of a young artist with unlimited potential. It wasn’t the first album-length collection from Kendrick Lamar, but it was the first major statement. Section.80, an album that turns 10 today, was the culmination of all of that. Dre, which carried a whole lot of weight, though it wasn’t yet clear what the Kendrick/Dre connection would become. He’d come together with three Californian peers to form Black Hippy, a sort of supergroup of prospective young stars. He’d released 2010’s Overly Dedicated, a mixtape that worked as an album. This was still a relatively new development, and Kendrick Lamar was part of it.īy 2011, Kendrick was a regular character in the rap blogosphere. They’d come up on the internet, and they’d found fans there. The artists on that first cover - B.o.B., Wale, Currene$y, Kid Cudi - mostly hadn’t come up through regional scenes. In 2009, when XXL first made a regular feature out of its freshman-class issue, the magazine more or less admitted that the blogs were dictating things. Kendrick had come up on a few different circuits - first locally around LA, then on a small-scale touring level, and finally on a network of blogs and websites that had essentially moved to the center of the rap conversation. Anyone who paid attention to rap music knew that.
A decade later, that spark has long since become a raging inferno.īefore that night, I knew Kendrick Lamar had promise. That night, in that college cafeteria, I saw a spark. Kendrick himself brought a demonic intensity that the setting didn’t really encourage. People were rapping every line of Kendrick Lamar’s tracks back at him, an impressive feat given how twisty and complicated those lines were. The crowd that night wasn’t big, but it was locked in with everything that Kendrick was doing. That night, though, something different was going down. Rappers run through canned crowd-participation routines and sometimes get mad that the crowds aren’t participating in those routines enthusiastically enough. People show up to rap shows because they like a song or two, or just because that’s what’s happening in town that night. If you’ve been to enough rap shows, you know that a fundamental, instinctive connection between fan and performer doesn’t happen that often.
#Section 80 album credits full#
Something special was happening, and I had to give it my full attention. At a certain point, though, I had to break off the conversation. This didn’t seem like the kind of situation that could lead to anything transcendent, and I spent maybe the first half of Kendrick’s set behind the stage, chatting with opening act Stalley. The room was maybe half full there couldn’t have been more than 300 people there. I don’t think there were any stage lights. In the fall of 2011, a few months after Kendrick Lamar released his album Section.80, I went to see Kendrick play a college cafeteria in the town where I’d just moved.
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