The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  That’s just what happened in early 2003, when Jay-Z announced that his eighth studio record, The Black Album, would be his last. Retirement was on the horizon and, in Jay’s own words, he was headed to a life of golfing and drinking cappuccinos away from the rat race of the music industry. This wasn’t just any retirement; this was like basketball icon Michael Jordan quitting in his prime, or football legend Jim Brown leaving with a lot left in the tank. It became too easy for Jay-Z to win and he was bored with it all. Rap music was too formulaic; everyone’s albums sounded alike, and the singles they released largely fit the same format. It was all too clean—sterile, even. We couldn’t hear the grit of old soul samples, the pop and hiss of worn vinyl beneath searing social commentary. But rappers weren’t as hungry; hip-hop was a force in the mainstream and it was time to celebrate through the music.

  In the early nineties, groups like the Wu-Tang Clan and Mobb Deep made rap dark, but even they couldn’t navigate the genre’s changing tide, and by the late nineties and early aughts, they struggled to stay relevant and saw their popularity diminish. So while Jay lamented the state of hip-hop, he helped usher its demise: he and Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs made rap sound lustrous, and there wasn’t as much soul in the music. In the 1980s, back when rap was a nascent genre, the music had been rooted to the ongoing challenges in poor communities and addressed the hardships of growing up broke and beating the odds to make it out alive. Rap music was born of struggle, tethered to the flames of burning buildings in its native New York City. It was the sound of blackness, in all its unfiltered joy, pain, and celebration. It conversed with those trapped inside cramped apartments with big dreams. Rap was everything, and to young black people who didn’t have a voice, it was a way to emote without fear. Hip-hop was counterculture, much like psychedelic rock was in the mid- to late sixties, and punk in the late seventies. Over the next thirty years, rap would slowly replace rock as the expression of disgruntled youth in the United States, even as critics tried to forecast its demise.

  Jay’s retirement leveled the playing field for everyone else, and Kendrick—the baby-faced rookie that he was—wanted Jay’s spot. If Kendrick’s ambition wasn’t clear in his bars, with all the cocky bravado they exuded, he said it directly on his first mixtape, Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year (Youngest Head Nigga in Charge). He demanded the attention. He needed it. He even ripped a few beats from Jay’s discography for his own debut project as a way to make an immediate splash. “Jay left, now gimme the crown / Fuck later, I’m takin’ it now,” Kendrick declared on “Hovi Baby,” over an instrumental that Jay had used for his own album The Blueprint 2: The Gift & the Curse.

  Hub City Threat was an introduction in the truest sense, a teaser on which the burgeoning MC simply wanted to brag about his ability to put words together. On the tape, credited as Kendrick’s DJ, was a guy named Dave Free, whose voice surfaced occasionally to plod alongside the protagonist. Like Kendrick, Free wanted to succeed in the music industry. He met Kendrick in the tenth grade after his friend Antonio told him about the upstart lyricist. “He was telling me he had a friend who went to Centennial that was the craziest,” Free once said. “I was intrigued. I told him, ‘Bring him through.’ ” Free had a makeshift studio in his house, where he first heard Kendrick rap. “Everybody back then was talking about drugs,” Free told Google Play in a 2012 documentary about good kid, m.A.A.d city. “But he had this one line—‘I ship keys like a piano,’ or something like that, and I just thought that was the most amazing line for somebody his age.” That was the line that made Free want to work with Kendrick.

  From there, the two bonded over rap music and a love of Martin, a cult-favorite TV sitcom starring comedian Martin Lawrence, and were fascinated with how he created superior black art with limited means. Eventually, Free and Kendrick put that same energy into their visual work as a creative duo. They’d call themselves the Little Homies, and instead of spending tons of money on their videos (at least not at first), they went heavy on vast landscapes and profound imagery that had a much deeper impact on the black community. But back in 2003, they were eager to succeed in music—perhaps too eager by Kendrick’s own concession—and recorded Hub City Threat as a way to escape the dangers of life in Compton. Even at a young age, Kendrick had the technical prowess of Jay-Z and the work ethic of a man with nothing to lose. He’d spent countless hours with his craft—studying, thinking, and becoming one with it.

  In Carson, California—some nine miles from Compton—was a guy named Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith. He was from Nickerson Gardens, an infamous housing project in Watts known for its wall of names that honored the building’s dead residents. Tiffith was an intimidating presence, a tall and stoic dude who’d spent his early days as a hustler. Yet by 1997, he was beginning to grow tired of the lifestyle and wanted to do something more legitimate. Plus, the streets were getting a little too hot. Tiffith decided to get into music after he saw his uncle, Mike Concepcion, have success with it. In 1990, Concepcion produced the song “We’re All in the Same Gang,” which featured rappers like Ice-T, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, Eazy-E, and MC Hammer promoting a message of antiviolence. Concepcion was an original member of the Crips in South Central who had gone legit in the 1980s and became a quiet force behind some of the most remarkable music from the West Coast. “Uncle Mike helped me with pretty much all of this. I watched him do music, so it made me think, that’s a way out,” Tiffith once told Vibe. “I watched him in the streets; I wanted to do that.… He had everything that inspired me. He taught me so many things.” Concepcion taught Tiffith how to be stealthy, that true power is quiet and not loud. As he once told Billboard, “He was always like, ‘Be low-key. Don’t be no loud nigga.’ ” Tiffith governed himself by this mentality, and even as his popularity grew, he remained a mysterious figure in the industry. As a result, he was unfairly compared with another stoic label owner, Death Row Records CEO Marion Hugh “Suge” Knight Jr. But where Suge earned his reputation as a hothead and an erratic leader, Tiffith played the background and let his artists take center stage.

  Tiffith constructed a studio space in the rear of his Carson house, and stocked it with high-end recording equipment as a way to attract big-name rappers. He also wanted it to be a hub for burgeoning talent, though it wouldn’t be that right away. The streets still tugged at Tiffith and he abandoned the space not long after he furnished it. “It was inactive,” Tiffith’s cousin Terrence “Punch” Henderson Jr. told XXL in 2012. “Top Dawg was doing Top Dawg things.”

  Tiffith named the company after himself, calling it Top Dawg Entertainment. Once he fully dedicated himself to music, he started working with a producer named Demetrius Shipp, who had made his reputation as an in-house beatmaker for West Coast powerhouse Death Row Records, and whose son, Demetrius Shipp Jr., would later play Tupac Shakur in a big-screen biopic. That connection helped legitimize Tiffith’s operation; soon after, rappers like The Game and Juvenile (a southern rap legend who helped put New Orleans hip-hop on the national map) ventured to the upstart studio. “Game came through before he really kicked off,” Tiffith told XXL. “Juvenile came through there, and a couple of other rap dudes came through. We were just trying to sling tracks to them.” Tiffith was trying to win like everyone else, and his work ethic made him an immediate force in the underground scene. He wanted to get his label’s music to anyone who’d listen, and his experience as a hustler gave him the fortitude to deal with the ups and downs of life in the industry. Dave Free was equally tenacious; in Tiffith’s Top Dawg Entertainment, he saw a man who was incredibly serious about building and sustaining a viable company. He had the connections and the willpower to win, and Free needed to get Kendrick’s music to Tiffith however he could.

  One day, Free—then working as a computer technician—got a call from Tiffith to fix his computer. A few minutes after Free arrived, he realized he couldn’t salvage the mogul’s machine but didn’t want to squander this opportunity. Who knew if they’d be in the same room together a
gain? As Free worked, or at least looked like he worked, he played Kendrick’s music loud enough for Tiffith to hear it, and by the end of the job—when Free finally admitted he couldn’t repair the device—Tiffith was eager to hear more. Except, next time, it would have to be in a live setting where he could assess the bars for himself. Kendrick had to freestyle for Tiffith and wow him on the spot.

  This was the shot Kendrick had been waiting for; his first grand moment. Once in the vocal booth, Kendrick freestyled off and on in Tiffith’s studio for what seemed like forever: “Top said, ‘Let me see if this is really you,’ and I was just freestyling, rapping whatever came into my head, sweating for two hours.” Tiffith was so taken by Kendrick’s ability, that—at just sixteen years old—he was fully grown as a rapper, even if he didn’t know how to write an actual song yet. As Tiffith told Vibe: “I put him in the booth and put this double time beat on, trying to throw him off. He went in there and started going off! So I’m trying to play like I’m not paying attention. He notices I’m not moving and starts going crazy. So I look up and I’m like, ‘God damn. He’s a monster.’ So the next day I had a contract for him.” Kendrick’s signing with Tiffith raised a few eyebrows, though. The rapper grew up on the west side of Compton, and the local Pirus had beef with the Bounty Hunter Bloods, of which Tiffith was a member. “For Kendrick to sign with a dude from the Bounty Hunters and from Watts, people were looking at him like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” says Matt Jeezy. “They were looking at it from the wrong perspective.”

  By 2004, there wasn’t a true King of West Coast Rap like there had been in years past. Ice Cube was focused on acting. Dr. Dre was more concerned with running his record label, Aftermath Entertainment, than putting out his own music. Snoop Dogg was still around, but he was more preoccupied with pimp life than hip-hop. In a 2006 Rolling Stone article, he spoke of how his marriage almost ended due to the lifestyle, until a few pimps at a Players Ball in Detroit told him to go home to his wife. So the icons were preoccupied, leaving the field wide open for new talent to vie for the region’s top spot. The epicenter of West Coast rap shifted north—from Los Angeles to the Bay Area of San Francisco and Oakland, where the hyphy—or “crunk”—movement was in full swing, and hip-hop started to blend with dance-oriented genres like funk and “crunk music,” which used accelerated rhythms made for vigorous dancing. West Coast hip-hop—and hip-hop overall—was bigger, louder, and more in-your-face, and through the stewardship of Bay Area pioneers like Vallejo rapper Mac Dre and Keak da Sneak, hyphy became the sound of California. It was the subgenre of flash, humor, and bravado, and for the first time since the 1990s, the laid-back aggression of L.A. gangsta rap had taken a backseat in its home state. It seemed the industry didn’t have the same palate for the gripping social commentary and tough-minded lyricism that put Cali hip-hop on the map in the first place. That didn’t stop rappers like Kendrick from upholding the glory of the past.

  A Compton-born lyricist named Jayceon Taylor—known creatively as The Game—would ascend to the fore as L.A. rap’s newfound savior. He was considered a throwback, and his arrival recalled the cold-blooded imagery and steely bravado of the 1980s and ’90s. He also had something that very few rappers received in Los Angeles: a cosign from the elusive Dr. Dre. By the early 2000s, Dre was a mythical figure, and to have his blessing was to be touched by the right hand of a divine being. His golden ear was proven: In the early nineties, Dre let a skinny unproven kid from Long Beach rap on a number of his songs—including the ominous “Deep Cover,” “Fuck wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’),” and the silky “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” His name was Snoop Doggy Dogg. Then, in the late nineties, Dre signed an unknown rapper who’d been making waves in the underground circuit as the talented white lyricist with a penchant for tongue-twisting flows and outlandish imagery. His name was Eminem. In 2005, The Game released his debut album, The Documentary, and its commercial success brought renewed interest to gangsta rap in L.A. The glory days were back, and there was a sense that his prosperity would open the door for like-minded rappers to walk through.

  The Game served as a mentor to the younger generation of L.A. lyricists, and for a while, he was the main guy looking out for MCs like Kendrick and Nipsey Hussle in the city. The Game was paying it forward, just like the local heroes had before him, and just like Kendrick and Nipsey would do in subsequent years. The Game was an overachiever who believed in hard work as the foundation of everlasting success. Likewise, unfazed by internet buzz and fleeting fame, Kendrick wanted to rule forever, and the only way to do that was to make sure his rhymes were incredibly sharp. He also benefited from the “SoundCloud era” of hip-hop, in which rappers could forgo the old ways of making it in the music industry. Because the internet was the great neutralizer, anyone with Wi-Fi could upload their music to the wildly popular SoundCloud streaming service and find immediate celebrity. The internet offered immediate access to fans without the filter of a record label or some tastemaker to cosign the music first. Kendrick didn’t have to be visible, and that notion would dictate his career.

  Observers in the L.A. rap scene were introduced to Kendrick much like the rest of us elsewhere, as the mysterious kid whose sound was incredibly tough to pin down but was remarkably pleasant to the ear. But that aesthetic cut both ways for Kendrick. Yeah, he could rhyme, but who was he really? Which was the real Kendrick? There was no grand breakthrough for him; rather, he rose through word-of-mouth praise that slowly trickled through the community and made him a cult hero. It was better that way, in fact: this approach gave Kendrick the creative freedom to grow authentically in front of the people who knew him best, the local folks who saw him as Kenny and Paula’s son, the quiet, driven boy from the neighborhood. In turn, they wanted only the best for Kendrick, and regardless of the potential fame and fortune coming his way, the people of Compton rallied around the young man—for the most part. Because gangsta rap ruled there, some chided the MC for not honoring the city’s musical lineage. To get love from the neighborhood, you almost had to be a gangbanger, and Kendrick stopped just short of perpetrating the lifestyle.

  Kendrick was actually the second musician Tiffith signed to the label. In 2005, Tiffith had signed a guy named Jay Rock, a rapper and fellow Nickerson Gardens native who’d been recording songs with other local lyricists and generated a buzz. Tiffith heard Jay Rock’s music and literally drove around looking for the upstart lyricist to invite him to his studio. “I was chasing him around and he hides, thinking I’m trying to discipline him about some bullshit,” Tiffith told Billboard in 2017. “I finally catch him while he was getting a haircut: ‘Yo, you rap. I’m trying to do this shit. Let’s go.’ ” Jay walked into the deal having known Kendrick from Centennial High School, where Jay had friends and would skip classes at his own school to spend time at Kendrick’s. However, there was slight tension between Kendrick and Jay in the early days, as their respective neighborhoods had beef and the two rappers didn’t know how to respond to each other. “With me being the big homie,” Tiffith once said, “you guys can bridge the gap between the hood, because y’all can speak to the world now. You can get some money and change all this gangbang shit.” The ice soon melted between the two, and soon enough, they spent many hours together in Tiffith’s studio, later dubbed the “House of Pain,” testing each other bar for bar in the tiny, unassuming space. Jay often tells the story of his first creative interaction with Kendrick, when he caught his first glimpse of the Compton native’s transcendent talent. “I’m writing on a piece of paper, and it’s taking me damn near 30 or 40 minutes to write like two, three lines,” he recalled. “And [Kendrick] just goes in there in five minutes. Dropped my name in the song and all that… I’m like, ‘Damn, how you just go in there and don’t even write this shit down?’ From that moment on, I knew he was something special.”

  That year, Kendrick put out a second mixtape titled Training Day under the name K-Dot, and by then he had more real-life experiences to draw from. T
he bars didn’t feel so contrived, and his personality began to emerge. He came into his own inside Tiffith’s studio, which became a proving ground for Kendrick and Jay Rock to sharpen their skills, and a safe haven to escape what was happening outside. In 2005 alone, some seventy-two people were killed in Compton, which marked the highest death toll in the city in ten years. One resident was reportedly bludgeoned to death in his home, and a woman—who was eight months pregnant—was gunned down. And those were some of the milder incidents. The sheriff’s department’s gang officials reported 282 shootings and attempted murders in Compton through much of the year, which led many to believe that city and county leaders were oblivious to what was happening in Compton. Despite the very public spotlight that N.W.A cast on Compton’s societal ills, there was a notion that the government simply didn’t care about black and brown lives within the town limits. Young black men were dying or going to jail at an alarming rate, and if Kendrick and Jay could just make it to Tiffith’s place, they could harness the uncertainty of life in Watts and Compton into beautiful art that could impact generations for years to come. For Kendrick, that harkened back to the teachings of Mr. Inge: Put your pain into the poetry; transfer that stress to the page.

  Kendrick had time to funnel his angst inside a hub that was completely free to use, and that gave him and Jay Rock the proper space to conceptualize different ideas. Unlike other studio heads who charged exorbitant amounts for the use of their facilities, Tiffith didn’t rush his creators to beat a clock before some other dude came through. The music had time to gestate, and in turn, it came out better. In these quiet moments, Tiffith was building a genuine rapport with his artists. It felt more like family than a business relationship. It was there that Top Dawg sowed the seeds of an empire through tough love, fairness, and unwavering respect.