Kendrick Lamar’s wordsmith journey to Super Bowl halftime headliner

By Lisa Respers France, CNN

(CNN) — 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.”

Despite having a stutter as a child, Lamar fell in love with words and language. His seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Inge, introduced him to poetry. Writing gave Lamar a means of expressing his innermost thoughts, even if he wasn’t always secure enough to share them.

In 2022, he talked to W about how the seeds of his then new album “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” were “stuff that I’ve written that’s just now seeing daylight, because I wasn’t secure with myself in order to do it…. It was really about not being insecure [or] tormented by opinions.”

“When I did this, it was kind of the marker and the growth of everything I’ve always wanted to say,” he said. “I think that was really my purpose of writing my way out of things that I was feeling, from the time I was 9 years old, all the way up to 35.”

The birth of K. Dot

While in high school, Lamar began releasing music under the moniker of K.Dot.

He was still a teen when he signed with Top Dawg Entertainment in 2005, where he would go on to co-found the super group Black Hippy, which included fellow West Coast rappers Ab-Soul, Jay Rock and ScHoolboy Q.

But it wasn’t until 2011 that he released his debut album “Section.80.” That success led him to connect with Dr. Dre and Lamar’s sophomore album, the critically acclaimed “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” was released in 2012 under the artist name Kendrick Lamar.

Thus began the rise with more acclaimed albums, including 2015’s funk and jazz influenced “To Pimp a Butterfly, ” pop-flavored “Damn” in 2017 and his double album “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” in 2022.

“Damn” helped him make history in 2018 when he became the first rap artist to ever win a Pulitzer Prize after the Pulitzer board deemed it “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”

Over the years both Lamar’s attitudes and art have shifted even as he has garned 17 Grammys.

“A lot of times, I’m doing interviews and speaking on the general basis of my childhood, and years later, I see them questions reoccur—maybe on social media, and they pop up and me answering the questions—and I’m like, Damn, the answer was true, but it’s not how I think about it [anymore],” he told W in 2022. “I had to damn near repattern my thoughts to see things that I didn’t necessarily see in those interviews, or just in life in general.”

His ability to grow and change has also let to a variety of collaborations with everyone from Beyoncé to Taylor Swift.

Yet it was his work with fellow rappers which led to one of the most prodigious rap beefs of all time.

Taking on Drizzy

Back in 2011, Lamar appeared on Drake’s second album “Take Care” on “Buried Alive Interlude.” It was the same year Lamar released his debut studio album “Section.80.”

The two men were still carving places for themselves in the industry, with Drake then best known as an actor for his role as student Jimmy Brooks in the Canadian teen TV series, “Degrassi.”

The pair would go on to tour together and collaborate on the track “Poetic Justice” on Lamar’s sophomore studio album, “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City.”

But their collaborations cooled.

As one of hip-hop’s rising stars, Lamar leaned into his growing success with the swagger one would expect in the rap game during a guest appearance on Big Sean’s 2013 single, “Control.”

Multiple artists are name-checked in the song, including Drake. The lyrics include, “I got love for you all but I’m tryna murder you,” a euphemism for besting them professionally. Lamar proclaims himself both “King of New York” and “King of the Coast.”

“I didn’t really have anything to say about it,” Drake told Billboard of the verse.

“It just sounded like an ambitious thought to me. That’s all it was,” Drake said at the time. “I know good and well that Kendrick’s not murdering me, at all, in any platform. So when that day presents itself, I guess we can revisit the topic.”

Lamar and Drake continued to take shots at each on various songs until October 2023, when rapper J. Cole collaborated with Drake on the song, “First Person Shooter.” On the track, Cole refers to himself, Lamar and Drake as the “Big three” in rap. Drake likened his own popularity in the game to the stardom of the late singer Michael Jackson.

Lamar seemingly took exception to the comparisons and hit back on a collaborative track with Future and Metro Boomin that caught fire in March 2024, titled “Like That.” Lamar makes clear on the song that there is no “Big three” just “Big me.” He casts himself as Prince to Drake’s Jackson, noting that the former outlived the latter.

“Like That” is a cut on the album “We Don’t Trust You,” which many believe is filled with disses aimed at Drake.

In response Cole released “7 Minute Drill” on a surprise project “Might Delete Later” in which he came after Lamar, only to later declare the song lame. He removed it from streaming services, publicly apologized and since distanced himself from the situation.

Drake, however, leaned in, dropping the diss track “Push Ups” in which he poked fun at Lamar’s shoe size and his past collaborations with pop stars.

“Maroon 5 need a verse, you better make it witty / Then we need a verse for the Swifties,” Drake raps, appearing to mock Lamar’s work with Maroon 5 on their song “Don’t Wanna Know” and with Swift on her song “Bad Blood.”

Lamar responded with multiple diss tracks aimed at Drake, who fans refer to as Drizzy.

First there was “Euphoria,” which is now as famous for the insults lobbed at Drake as it is for making the general public aware that the rapper was also an executive producer on the hit HBO drama. (HBO is owned by CNN’s parent company.) Lamar followed that with “6:16 in LA,” which many interpreted to be making fun of Drake’s penchant for titling songs with times and locations.

Drake got even more personal with the eight-minute diss track, “Family Matters.” He makes allegations about abuse and infidelity involving Lamar and his fiancée, Whitney Alford, on the song.

Not to be outdone, Lamar didn’t even let an hour go by after the release of “Family Matters” to drop a response, titled “Meet The Grahams.” (Drake’s legal name is Aubrey Graham.)

The song gets heavy as Lamar addresses Drake’s parents and Drake’s parenting, suggesting he had a secret child. Lamar followed that within hours with another song, titled “Not Like Us.”

Drake countered with “The Heart Part 6” in which he claims he’s the one who fed Lamar fake information about a secret child.

“We plotted for a week and then we fed you the information/A daughter that’s 11 years old, I bet he takes it,” Drake raps.

That volley barely made a ripple in the rap battle because “Not Like Us” went on to become arguably the song of the summer, breaking streaming records and sitting atop the charts.

The video for the song contained several digs at Drake, including an appearance by Lamar’s fiancée and their two young children to counter the narrative presented by Drake in “Family Matters.”

It also paid homage visually to Lamar’s beloved Compton, the neighborhood which is sure to be even more proud of their native son when he takes to the Super Bowl halftime stage in New Orleans in February 2025.

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