The Trials of Kendrick Lamar

A drizzly Sunday morning in Compton, the sky an un-California-ish gray. Into the parking lot of a local hamburger stand pulls a chromed-out black Mercedes SUV, driven by 27-year-old Kendrick Lamar, arguably the most talented rapper of his generation. There are a half-dozen guys from the neighborhood waiting to meet him: L, Turtle, G-Weed. “I grew up with all these cats,” Lamar says. He nods to Mingo, a Compton-born sweetheart who is roughly the size of the truck he arrived in: “I don’t need to hire a bodyguard. Look how fucking big he is!”

The burger joint, Tam’s, sits at the corner of Rosecrans and Central, a famous local spot recently made infamous when Suge Knight allegedly ran over two men with his truck in the parking lot, killing one of them. “Homey died right here,” G-Weed says, pointing to a dark spot on the asphalt. “That security camera caught everything. They’re building a case.”

Lamar grew up just six blocks from here, in a little blue three-bedroom house at 1612 137th St. Across the street is the Louisiana Fried Chicken where he used to get the three-piece meal with fries and lemonade; over there is the Rite Aid where he walked to buy milk for his little brothers. Tam’s was another hangout. “This is where I seen my second murder, actually,” he says. “Eight years old, walking home from McNair Elementary. Dude was in the drive-thru ordering his food, and homey ran up, boom boom — smoked him.” He saw his first murder at age five, a teenage drug dealer gunned down outside Lamar’s apartment building. “After that,” he says, “you just get numb to it.”

It’s almost noon, but Lamar is just starting his day — having spent a late night in the studio scrambling to finish his new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, which has to be done in five days. He’s dressed casually in a gray hoodie, maroon sweatpants, and white socks with black slides, but recognizable enough that an old lady in line decides to tease him while complaining about the heat inside. “Y’all need to put the air conditioner on,” she calls to the manager. “Kendrick Lamar is here!”

Lamar may be a two-time Grammy winner with a platinum debut executive-produced by Dr. Dre, and with fans from Kanye West to Taylor Swift. But here at Tam’s, he’s also Kendrick Duckworth, Paula and Kenny’s son. Inside, a middle-aged woman who just left church comes up and gives him a hug, and he buys lunch for a cart-toting lady he knows to be a harmless crack addict. (“She used to chase us with sticks and stuff,” he says.) Outside, an old man in a motorized wheelchair scoots over to introduce himself. He says he moved here in 1951, when Compton was still majority-white. “Back in the day, we had the baddest cars in L.A.,” he says. “I just wanted you to know where you came from. It’s a hell of a neighborhood.”

On his breakthrough album, 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d City, Lamar made his name by chronicling this neighborhood, vividly evoking a specific place (this same stretch of Rosecrans) and a specific time (in the summer of 2004, between 10th and 11th grade). It was a concept album about adolescence, told with cinematic precision through the eyes of someone young enough to recall every detail (as in: “Me and my niggas four deep in a white Toyota/A quarter tank of gas, one pistol, one orange soda”).