Now might be a good time to check on Drake as Kendrick Lamar appears to have executed a checkmate-move in what has been an historic hip-hop feud between the two artists.
Here’s the backstory: the two battled back and forth earlier this year in a well-documented rap battle that Lamar is widely viewed to have won through his searing verses about Drake. The Canadian artist may have rapped that he was as “Big as the Super Bowl,” but it was the Compton-native Lamar who was announced as the headline act for the next Super Bowl.
It’s just the latest historic achievement for the artist lovingly known as K.Dot.
A rough start
Three years before he was born Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, his parents Kenny Duckworth and Paula Oliver left Chicago for California in search of a better life.
“They were going to go to San Bernardino,” Lamar told Rolling Stone magazine in 2015. “But my Auntie Tina was in Compton. She got ’em a hotel until they got on their feet, and my mom got a job at McDonald’s.”
According to their son, the couple initially struggled to find their footing in Southern California, sleeping in motels, their car and sometimes a local park.
“Eventually, they saved enough money to get their first apartment, and that’s when they had me.” Lamar recalled.
Growing up in Compton at the time was far from idyllic.
The younger Lamar has talked about witnessing his first murder at the age of five, when an alleged drug dealer was killed in front of the apartment complex where Lamar and his family lived. Three years later, he witnessed another murder, he has said, at a local restaurant.
“Eight years old, walking home from McNair Elementary,” Lamar recalled. “Dude was in the drive-thru ordering his food, and homey ran up, boom boom — smoked him.”
He was just a preschooler, but Lamar has said he has memories of when the city burned because of the 1992 South Central riots, which occurred after a jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers of most charges related to the beating of Rodney King.
But there were good times and strong community ties. Lamar remembers spending time with friends, cruising around on bikes and house parties his parents would throw.
Turning pain into poetry
It was exposure to it all that led Lamar to start writing rhymes as a precocious youngster whose intelligence, curiosity and early maturity led his parents to nickname him “Man Man.”
He was one of the spectators when Dr. Dre and 2Pac filmed a video for their hit single “California Love” in Lamar’s neighborhood, citing the impression the two rap superstars made as they filmed the video.
“These motorcycle cops trying to conduct traffic but one almost scraped the car, and Pac stood up on the passenger seat, like, ‘Yo, what the f**k!’,” Lamar told the publication, laughing at the memory. “Yelling at the police, just like on his motherf**king songs. He gave us what we wanted.”
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