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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.
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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.