The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  Around the same time, Tiffith opened his studio to another rising prospect: producer Mark Spears, a recent graduate of Compton High School, who made beats under the name Sounwave. He was brought into the fold by Punch Henderson, who’d been a friend of his family for years. Punch used to play basketball with Sounwave’s older brother in the backyard, and one day during a break in the action, he heard the then-thirteen-year-old making beats in his room using Sony PlayStation’s MTV Music Generator. “He was like, ‘Yo, you make beats? My cousin [is] Top Dawg, you know,’ ” Spears recalled during a lecture with Red Bull Music Academy in 2019. “I didn’t know who [Top] was at the time.” Spears went to Tiffith’s studio and played him a few instrumentals, some of which were “trash,” by the producer’s own admission. “[He] was like, ‘This ain’t it, but since Punch is cosigning you, I’m gonna give you a chance. Take these a capellas, see what you [can] do.’ I took that as a challenge. I took my time, and the next day I brought it back to him, and he was like, ‘Yo, this is better than the original. I’ll mess with you.’ That was about 2005, and I’ve just been rocking ever since.”

  Sounwave met Kendrick the year prior during a talent showcase at a studio in Gardena, California. The producer was asked to cue up one of his beats; he played a remake of an old soul track by a group named Aalon. Kendrick was so taken by the beat that he walked into the recording booth and started rapping for two minutes straight—a freestyle mixed with rhymes he’d already written. “He was the hungriest person I’d seen in my whole life,” Sounwave once told Rolling Stone. “I had to stop the beat and ask him his name.” “K-Dot,” the young rapper retorted. A year later, Sounwave was at Tiffith’s studio when he saw a familiar face; there was Kendrick sitting on the couch, waiting to audition for the collective. The two had been looking for each other since that fateful encounter at the Gardena space. And while Kendrick deserves credit for seizing the moment, he also has Sounwave to thank for staying in Tiffith’s ear: “I looked at [him] and said, ‘I met this kid a year ago, you definitely can’t let this dude go, it’s fate right here. We have to keep him, do whatever you have to do to sign him.’ ”

  Tiffith’s studio soon became a sanctuary to other young guys looking to jump-start their careers. In 2006, a guy named Terrace Martin started coming to the studio. He was a prodigious talent who had learned how to play jazz from the great Reggie Andrews at Locke High School, and had been making beats on his own. By the time he started working with TDE in 2006 (though he wasn’t signed there), Martin was a producer and multi-instrumentalist in jazz, soul, and hip-hop. He remembers walking through the gate at Tiffith’s house, then to the back room, where he’d hear Jay Rock and Kendrick rapping in the studio booth. “It was a fun, everyday creative collective,” Martin recalls. “It was also work. It’s the ultimate test of humility, because the ultimate ego is the music.” He also remembers the phone calls from Tiffith: “If Top give you one of them phone calls, it’s serious. When he has a deadline, he means that deadline. And the deadline could be two hours from now. You gotta get it done. With TDE, I learned to always expect the unexpected.”

  That same year, a twenty-year-old Carson native who rapped under the name Ab-Soul made his way to the famed studio. Two years prior, he’d inked a deal with a small local label called StreetBeat Entertainment that hadn’t borne fruit. As soon as that deal expired, Ab went to TDE at the behest of Sounwave, who knew the rapper through his cousin. In a 2012 interview with Complex, Ab remembered why he was so drawn to TDE: “They weren’t coming at me talking no paperwork.… We were really just trying to build as a team and try to create a new sound.” And if Ab thought he was the best rapper alive when he joined TDE, he soon discovered that wasn’t the case at all. Ab met Jay Rock and Kendrick his second time at the studio, where he saw the TDE members working on music for their joint mixtape, No Sleep Til NYC. “I hopped right in and we’ve been a team since then.”

  Derek Ali, of Gardena, was an All-American football player in high school who used to disassemble his computers just to see how they worked. The seventeen-year-old learned of Tiffith’s collective from Dave Free, whom he saw passing out Jay Rock CDs at his high school. Ali told Free that he wanted to get into the music business; Free invited Ali to Tiffith’s studio to learn more. He never left. Back then, though, Ali didn’t have the skills to engineer; he knew only how to record his friends’ raps for custom ringtones, not steer the sound of a full-on hip-hop album. Plus, Ali needed to make personal changes. He’d recently been kicked out of his grandmother’s house and needed to be part of something real. “I was doing bad,” Ali recalls. “I’m seventeen, wet behind the ears, still stumbling over my left foot.” But working with Tiffith, Sounwave, Free, Jay Rock, and Kendrick gave him confidence. It also straightened him up; nonsense wasn’t tolerated in TDE’s vicinity. “You don’t want to bring no shit to [Tiffith]’s house,” Ali asserts. “There’s the respect that we have for him because of the opportunity he was giving us. All [of] us ran away from the streets to find somewhere else to kind of call home, and he had that for us. If it wasn’t for Top, we wouldn’t have a house to connect. It was a real collective thing that really happened that kind of catapulted all of us into our respective careers.”

  Ali had a friend before his TDE days named Quincy Hanley who spit raps under the name ScHoolboy Q. He was a member of the 52 Hoover Crips who gangbanged from the age of twelve until a few months before his debut album, Setbacks, was released. Q wrote his first rap verse at the age of sixteen but didn’t get serious about the craft until five years later. Around 2006, Ali had Q come through TDE’s studio. “I walked in and the beat was playing. Ali told them that I rap,” he recalled in a Complex interview. “Punch told me to jump on the beat. It was a record that Jay Rock and Ab-Soul were writing to, so then I wrote [to] it. Punch liked it and he told me to come back through. I kept coming back, kept getting better, and eventually they signed me to TDE.”

  With his core in place, Tiffith had the makings of a dynasty, and though they had to endure some hardship, that was the truest way for them to grow as men and for TDE to become stronger as a unit. This was boot camp, and domination was the ultimate goal. They convened in the small studio and worked nonstop to fine-tune their music. There was even a list of serious—yet hilarious—rules on the wall outside the studio:

  If you ain’t one of the homies don’t be Instagramming you creepy muthafucka. I don’t wanna look on yo twitter and find a creepy ass pic of me or one of the homies, matter of fact, No Twitter or Instagram in the studio! Act like you been around a bunch of rich niggaz from the bottom before!

  If the homies just met you and decide to clown your bitch azz, sit there and deal with it. It’s part of the creative juices.

  Don’t touch, ask, or reach for Q’s weed, unless he thinks you cool enuff to pass it to you. We only smoke stersonals around here, boy.

  Shut up and look ugly for the homies.

  Remember these rules and you might get a meal out the food budget!

  As you can see, the TDE squad wasn’t always so poker-faced; they liked to play pranks on each other and ridicule strangers who tried to impede their creative space. Kendrick had a great sense of humor, though you had to be close to him to know it. Like any introvert, the musician wasn’t going to show his personality to just anybody. No, you had to be in the circle to watch him re-create old MySpace photos by superimposing himself in the shots. And years later, when Twitter became the world’s top social media platform, Punch implored Kendrick to flex his humor there—to no avail. By 2013, Tiffith would bring two other top talents to TDE: a Tennessee-born rapper named Isaiah Rashad, and a New Jersey–raised singer named Solána Rowe, who went by the name SZA. Soon enough, TDE would be the most revered crew in music.

  Tiffith’s mentality came from his own coming-of-age during the height of gang activity in L.A., when many of his friends were dying or going to prison for long amounts of time. But he envisioned something different for the TDE roster. “
I had the money to do whatever I wanted, but they weren’t going to appreciate shit if I just handed it off to them,” Tiffith once told Billboard. “So they were rushing to McDonald’s to look at what’s on the dollar menu, or going to get a River Boat special from Louisiana Fried Chicken. But I was showing them family life because my family lives in this house, too.” The rappers survived on greasy poultry, biscuits, and coleslaw, but if they wanted to reach the promised land, they needed to revel in the pain. They had to embrace it to truly value the awards that arrived later. Just like other musical empires—the Beatles, Motown, Dr. Dre—the guys locked themselves in and developed their own distinctive sound, which had never been just one genre. Sure, it was rooted in rap, but TDE never wanted to be boxed in as artists or as black men. “We gave you all of these elements,” Sounwave says. “So to this day, [Kendrick] can do whatever the hell he wants to do. It’s strategic moves like that, and just the brotherhood of us being in that small little room forever.” This was long before TDE had to be great, before fans of black music, then the world, paid attention to the squad’s every move. In the House of Pain was the hope of better days and the promise of a brighter future—not just for Kendrick, but for everyone at TDE.

  3

  The Birth of Kendrick Lamar

  In 2007, Jay Rock was the first from TDE to sign with a label when he inked a deal with Asylum Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. The label had a handful of respected rappers at the time, including the Atlanta-based Gucci Mane and OJ da Juiceman. Southern hip-hop had taken off, and Jay Rock, a West Coast gangsta rapper through and through, didn’t fit the profile of what label executives wanted at the time. Enter Richie Abbott, an executive at the Warner Group who’d spent years putting out music from his native Los Angeles; he wanted to push Jay Rock as the next big star to emerge from Southern California. The Watts MC was beginning to work with other noted rappers while putting out his own well-received mixtapes. Abbott remembers Jay, Tiffith, Punch, Kendrick, Q, and Ab-Soul working from his office three days out of the week, essentially making his office their own, turning it into a hub for TDE business. Kendrick rarely spoke in the office, only smiling occasionally when he played his music for Abbott. “He loved to get my reaction to it,” the executive recalls.

  In 2008, Jay dropped his first commercial single, the autobiographical “All My Life (In the Ghetto),” which featured rapper Lil Wayne at the height of his power. The track was receiving radio airplay and TV time, and Jay Rock was poised to be TDE’s first breakout star. According to some close to Jay, it became clear that Warner had no interest in pushing him: XXL, the tastemaking hip-hop magazine, put him on the cover of its 2010 “Freshmen” issue and dubbed him an artist to be reckoned with, but Warner didn’t even pay for him to fly to New York for the shoot. Then the money for Jay’s promo was halted and apparently reallocated to OJ da Juiceman. “Top was pissed,” Abbott recalls. “This was their chance, this was their time. They flew OJ out to the shoot, but they wouldn’t fly Jay Rock. That’s when I was like, ‘Okay, this shit is over.’ ” Jay Rock’s momentum halted, and so did plans to release his debut album, Follow Me Home, which was supposed to be his breakthrough. Disheartened, Abbott started making moves behind the scenes to get himself and Jay Rock away from the Warner Group.

  Abbott had started working with a record label out of Kansas City, Missouri, called Strange Music, which was cofounded by a hardcore rapper named Tech N9ne. Tech was a ball of fire, an affable man who took no prisoners onstage and proved several times that he was one of the baddest MCs on the planet. Abbott took Jay Rock’s music to him, and while aesthetically it didn’t seem like a good fit, signing with Strange Music made the most sense back then. The Strange Music fan base was largely comprised of white kids who liked hard rock, a demographic to which Jay Rock hadn’t connected before. But Tech’s fans were rabid and they loved deeply. Says Abbott, “It wasn’t his core audience, but anything you bring onstage, they’ll go nuts for it unless it’s shit.” By the fall of 2010, Jay Rock found himself in front of thousands of Tech N9ne’s fans, opening for the cult favorite during Strange Music’s nationwide Independent Grind Tour, gracing the same stages with label rappers Krizz Kaliko, Kutt Calhoun, and Big Scoob, and Oakland stalwart E-40.

  During a tour stop in Reno, Nevada, Jay Rock’s cousin and hype man, MJ, walked off the tour bus after a show to call his lady. A group of guys, who hadn’t even attended the concert, saw MJ wearing a red shirt—the same color the Bloods wore—and decided to cause trouble with the performer. Shots rang out and MJ was hit. Days later, Tech and MJ were on the phone celebrating the fact that he hadn’t died that night, and that they’d have to celebrate when he rejoined the tour from the hospital. But MJ never left the building; he died from a blood clot. “It was a bad day, a really bad day,” Tech N9ne recalls. Not only had Jay Rock lost his cousin, but he had lost his hype man for the tour.

  But Jay had a solution. “He said, ‘I got someone else who could help me. He’s usually onstage with me,’ ” Tech remembers Jay Rock saying. “That’s the day I met Kendrick.” He took over as Jay Rock’s hype man, pumping up the crowd during Jay’s set and occasionally performing his own music. The time on the road taught Jay and Kendrick how to perform, and how to turn what they’d recorded in the studio into a captivating live show. It wasn’t enough to simply go up and shout rhymes to the masses; the TDE guys had to be different. Kendrick studied Tech N9ne to make his set—which, back then, was just a few songs from his first few mixtapes—much more engaging. “He said he watched every night to understand what it meant to be an entertainer,” says Tech. Adds Abbott, “Kendrick was legitimately interested in finding out everything he could about the business.” He wanted to know everything about everyone, their roles and exact contributions to the concert experience: “He was a sponge. Everybody was on the bus drinking and kicking it, but he was on the side stage, asking a lot of questions.”

  It’s no surprise then that Kendrick became Kendrick. Greatness is achieved in moments like these, behind the curtain when no one is looking. It’s not enough to simply desire such brilliance; you have to be consumed with it, letting it permeate the core of your very being. It’s the old 10,000-hour rule that author Malcolm Gladwell once wrote about, that you master your craft by practicing it over and over again, and true expertise arrives once you reach 10,000 hours of application. Basketball legend Kobe Bryant was well known for this line of thinking; if you’re putting up 500 jump shots in a day, he’s shooting 1,000. And while you’re relaxing, he’s on the court—just him and a basketball, practicing his fadeaway, his postgame, and his layups near the rim. For him, basketball was everything, and being good wasn’t enough. Kendrick took the same approach with learning the music industry, achieving greatness through tireless dedication to his career. He knew he had something that could change the world, but talent without hard work couldn’t get him to the top. Somewhere alone, away from the noise, Kendrick was planting the seeds of a career. “He was Kobe shooting in the gym,” Abbott says.

  Before the Independent Grind Tour, Kendrick didn’t even know how to dress for the stage: he’d come out wearing knitted, hooded sweatshirts, frayed jean shorts, and Crocs sandals. “Real hippie,” Tech N9ne remembers. But those days up and down the road taught Kendrick a lot about discipline and how to operate with quiet, intentional force. The guys at Strange Music operated like the military: go over your set time by a minute and your pay is docked. The Tech crew ran a tight ship, and ten years after the Grind Tour, TDE operated in similar fashion—silent and steadfast, almost machinelike, with the strictest attention to detail and perfection as the ultimate goal. Where other rappers dropped new music at a furious clip, TDE artists stressed quality over quantity, eschewing the speed at which others released their work. The internet was insatiable; anything more than two months old was considered yesterday’s news. So there was something quite noble about TDE’s nonchalant pace in an industry that craved new material right away. Silence of an
y sort is deafening, and because the collective didn’t say much—or anything, really—between album releases, TDE built a level of intrigue that became its own kind of marketing. Their releases became events; with each new album came a wave of hysteria that ended with massive sales and shiny gold trophies.

  Still, it was tough for TDE; the sting of the failed Jay Rock deal lingered and they were unclear where to steer next. Jay had been the first with even the slightest glimmer of shine, and through his opportunity, Kendrick had gotten an early taste of the business alongside men who’d eventually become his brothers. These were the guys with whom he had come into the game, and they were all learning on the fly. That suited Kendrick just fine; he’d always prided himself on loyalty and working hard behind the scenes. He’d sleep on floors, rewrite hundreds of rhymes, and stay in the studio until 4:00 a.m. on a school night if that was what it took. It also helped that Tiffith, Jay Rock, and Sounwave were genuine people who wanted only the best for the unit. A win for one of them was a win for all of them, yet in the early days, it was tough to see the road ahead. The Jay Rock experiment hadn’t worked as well as intended, forcing TDE to head back to the lab and keep working. There wasn’t as much interest in Jay Rock’s Follow Me Home by the time it was released in 2011. “People don’t understand, we did a lot of trial and error with Jay Rock,” Sounwave recalls. “He was the first person out of TDE, so a lot of our mistakes happened, unfortunately, on [him].” Jay didn’t regret those days, though. As he saw it, he was building up a name for himself and TDE, kicking down doors for Kendrick and company to walk through.