Subscribe to Cloud Daze here, an regularly updating playlist that features a heady mix of ambient house, cloud disco, recombinant techno and other genres that we’re making up on the spot. This week’s offering revolves around the latest Koze release, Knock Knock.Over the past five years, DJ Koze has become one of electronic music’s greatest narrative producers. All songs tell a story, to one degree or another, but instrumental electronic music tends to evoke a vibe or push its listener towards the ecstatic highs or darker recesses. It’s rare that this emotional coloring gains nuance and texture or shifts from track to track or second to second. But Koze knows this track. This world-building, narrative-driven approach was there in the woozing shifting textures of the German producer’s epochal 2013 album Amyglada, and it’s evident on his two remix compilations -- 2009’s Reincarnations and 2014’s Reincarnations, Pt. 2. His 2018 Knock Knock finds the DJ as technically capable as ever, but it also marks his evolution as a storyteller. This maturation is clear in the album’s first two minutes. On lead-off track “Club der Ewigkeiten” (roughly translated, “Club of Eternity”), tangled strings, bubbling synth taps and a squealing vocals conjure a taught, anxious space before a warm, round melody appears and the track takes on different, brighter characteristics. Throughout Knock Knock, there is a constant ebbing and flowing. Like the best psychedelic music, the music creates its own internal logic, and it uses that logic to guide the listener through a journey. This isn’t to say that Knock Knock is a difficult listen. The songs congeal and groove, and the tension is generally soft-lit -- a warbling dissonance creates a creeping, unnamed anxiety that cuts through the smeared slice of Bon Iver vocals in “Bonfire,” while “Pick Up” positions a lovely and sad sample of Aretha Franklin next to the euphoric disco beat from Melba Moore. For long stretches, things are light and breezy, and the album frequently achieves lift-off, especially towards the end. The opening stuttering, boom bap-era rhythms of “Lord Knows” sounds like a lost, mid-’90s Pete Rock joint, while the space-age modular synth lines of “Seeing Aliens” is sublime and ecstatic. It’d be easy for Koze to end the album on that high note, but then he cuts to “Drone Me Up, Flashy” -- 6 minutes of floating disjointed Kraut ambience that feels heavenly and lost. It may not be exactly the place we wanted to land after this 78-minute journey, but it feels honest.

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you. Like the most challenging art, the music of Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly teaches you how to listen to it. Its production is dense and layered, drawing in strains of jazz, funk, blues, and hip-hop, and though squishing genres together is not new, per se, other fusionists tended to reduce the elements of each sound to, more times than not, populist beats and smooth melodies. TPAB, on the other hand, throws the boldest, loudest, and brashest elements of each genre against one another. It can be jarring and even disorienting.It’s an appropriate backdrop for Kendrick’s lyrics, which are knotty, neurotic, and, ultimately, transcendent. Those elements—anger, despair, empathy, and hope—have been present in protest anthems from “We Shall Overcome” to Beyoncé’s “Formation,” but they generally don’t converge in one song or one album. And, even less frequently, do the songs implicate their author, or blur the line between subject and the object.This is a new form of protest music, one where (to borrow a phrase from second-wave feminism) the personal is political, and the political is personal. In this new strain of agitprop, Kendrick is our most reliable narrator; he acknowledges the ambiguity, and he inhabits his stories rather than tells them to us. The moments of uplift—the chorus of “Alright,” or the first half of “i”—feel hard-won and authentic. He sounds like a savior, but, sometimes, he talks like a killer.Contradiction is a byproduct of this era. Our lives are endlessly complex, but we reject nuance. We’re globally interconnected, but locally isolated. We reject the weight of history, but still live in its shadow and play by its unspoken (and often unacknowledged) rules. All of us negotiate these things, in small and large ways, and Kendrick is no different. He’s just more talented than most of us, and perhaps a bit more honest.To Pimp a Butterfly resonated with so many of us because not only was it such a frank negotiation of these conflicted themes—identity, allegiance, history, and duty—but also because it’s a personal testimony, grounded in a very specific set of circumstances. Some of the catalysts for the album are obvious—the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; Kendrick’s well-documented hardscrabble upbringing in Compton; the continual spectre of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and police brutality—but there are also largely hidden stories that explain the context and headspace that birthed TPAB.The process for creating TPAB was familiar to anyone who’s worked with Kendrick: endless ideation, constant revision, and precise execution. “We did good kid [m.A.A.d City] about three, four times before the world got to it… new songs, new everything. I wanted to tell that story, but I had to execute it,” Kendrick recalls. “My whole thing is about execution. The songs can be great, the hooks can be great, but if it’s not executed well, then it’s not a great album.”The process for TPAB was similarly painstaking, and had begun even before the release of its predecessor. “Good kid, m.A.A.d city wasn’t even printed up, and already he’s doing brainstorms for the new album,” Sounwave remembers.“We recorded 60 to 80 tracks for this album over the three years, and Kendrick tried many different concepts and approaches,” go-to TDE engineer Derek Ali shared in June 2015. “The final direction began to emerge in the last year and a half or so, with most of the tracks written and played from the ground up.”One of the earlier sessions for the recording took place during Kendrick’s 2013 stint as opener on Kanye’s Yeezus tour. Kendrick had enlisted L.A. producer, DJ, and multimedia artist Flying Lotus to help out with his light show, and, during the process, FlyLo had slipped him a “folder of beats.” As the producer recalls, “Later that night he told me he had the concept for the album.”While FlyLo speculates that Kendrick rapped over every one of his beats, most of the recordings never made it to the album, and he only ended up with one production credit, albeit a very significant one with album opener “Wesley’s Theory.” That song begins with an invocation of sorts, a sample of the chorus from Boris Gardiner’s smooth jazz track “Every Nigger is a Star.” Afterwards, Kendrick assumes the stereotype of a newly minted rap star—“Ima buy a brand new Caddy on fours/ Trunk the hood up, two times, deuce-four/ Platinum on everything, platinum on wedding ring”—before transitioning to the persona of Uncle Sam, a familiar symbol who’s transformed here from an icon of oppression to a consumerist pimp: “What you want? You a house or a car?/ Forty acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar?/ Anything, see, my name is Uncle Sam, Im your dog/ Motherfucker, you can live at the mall.”From the inception of the album, Kendrick knew that the struggle he articulated would be a personal one, and would reflect his own battles with temptation and identity. “One thing I learned, from when you in the limelight: Anything that you have a vice for is at your demand, times 10 and it can kill you,” Kendrick said in 2012.But the album’s creation would be halted as Kendrick wrestled with a set of personal tragedies. In 2013, three close friends were gunned down in Los Angeles, seemingly one after another. Kendrick remembers being on tour, leaving the stage, where he “faced the madness, and gets these calls … three of my homeboys that summertime was murdered, close ones. Psychologically, it messes your brain up. I got to get off this tour bus and go to funerals.”On one hand, Kendrick was touring behind one of the best-received hip-hop albums of the decade in good kid, m.A.A.d city, but he was also tasked with going back to Compton to attend the funerals of loved ones. Kendrick captured this turmoil on the YG song “Really Be (Smokin N Drinkin)” from 2014: “Im on this tour bus and Im fucked up, I got a bad call/ They killed Braze, they killed Chad, my big homie Pup/ Puppy eyes in my face, bruh, and Ive really been drinkin/ Muthafucka, I really been smokin, what the fuck? Im the sober one/ Man, Im so stressed out, I cant focus.”

Chad Keaton’s loss, in particular, was difficult for Kendrick to handle. "He was like my little brother; we grew up in the same community," he says. "I was actually best friends with his older brother, who is incarcerated right now. And him just always telling me to make sure that Chad is on the right path. And, you know, he was on the right path. But, you know, things happen where sometimes the good are in the wrong places, and thats exactly what happened. He got shot … when Chad was killed, I cant disregard the emotion of me relapsing and feeling the same anger that I felt when I was 16, 17—when I wanted the next family to hurt, because you made my family hurt. Them emotions were still running in me, thinking about him being slain like that. Whether Im a rap star or not, if I still feel like that, then Im part of the problem rather than the solution."

Kendrick + ChadGiven his harrowing childhood, there’s a good chance that Kendrick suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s not alone. According to Howard Spivak M.D, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Violence Prevention, PTSD is rampant among inner-city youth. Some studies have cited that one in three youth live with it. “Youth living in inner cities show a higher prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder than soldiers,” Spivak commented. And, unlike war zones, most children in these areas are never able to escape. Those that do, carry their own scars.One related condition that Kendrick has been very outspoken about is the idea of survivors guilt, a complex that occurs when a person believes they are at fault for surviving a traumatic event. It was first identified in Holocaust survivors who didn’t understand how they escaped when so many of their friends and family members died in the gas chambers. “How can I be a voice for all these people around the world, and not reach them that are closest to me?,” Kendrick wondered.In addition to the problems at home, Kendrick was having issues adjusting to his newfound fame and wealth. Throughout 2013, Kendrick’s feelings of isolation and displacement intensified, and his unease with the space he now occupied was nearly crippling. The transition was jarring and cannot be understated. "Im going to be 100 per cent real with you," Kendrick shares. "In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero… Youre around people you dont know how to communicate with. You dont speak the same lingo. It brings confusion and insecurity. Questioning how did I get here, what am I doing?"And his interactions with the black kids that were bused in from other areas more affluent than Compton were jarring. “I went over to some of their houses … and it was a whole ‘nother world,” Kendrick says. “Family pictures of them in suits and church clothes up everywhere. Family-oriented. Eatin’ together at the table. We ate around the TV. Stuff like that—I didn’t know nothin’ about. Eatin’ without your elbows on the table? I’m lookin’ around like, ‘What is goin’ on?!’ I came home and asked my mama, ‘Why we don’t eat ’round the table?’ Then I just keep goin’, always askin’ questions. I think that’s when I started to see the lifestyle around us.“You always think that everybody live like you do, because you locked in the neighborhood, you don’t see no way else … You can’t change where you from. You can’t take a person out of their zone and expect them to be somebody else now that they in the record industry. It’s gonna take years. Years of traveling. Years of meeting people. Years of seeing the world.”Luckily, Kendrick would soon get to see a very important part of the world for him. In late 2013, he did a brief tour of Africa, an experience that changed his life. It helped him understand himself—where he’s from and even where he was going. “I felt like I belonged in Africa,” says Lamar. “I saw all the things that I wasnt taught. Probably one of the hardest things to do is put [together] a concept on how beautiful a place can be, and tell a person this while theyre still in the ghettos of Compton. I wanted to put that experience in the music.”He traveled the Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban, among other places. This had huge implications for his music. According to his go-to engineer, Derek Ali, Kendrick scrapped “two or three albums worth of material.” But more than being just about subtraction, the excursion inspired a whole new suite of songs. The iconic track “Alright” has its roots in that trip. The song’s chant, “we gonna be alright,” was sparked from witnessing people’s struggles in the country.Traveling in a black-dominated continent brought into stark relief many of the symptoms of American oppression. “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” deals with the idea of colorism—that people within the same race or ethnicity can discriminate based on the shading of the skin. "Theres a separation between the light and the dark skin because its just in our nature to do so, but were all black,” Kendrick says. “This concept came from South Africa and I saw all these different colors speaking a beautiful language."But even beyond the lyrics, the idea of unity informed the sound of the album. Just as Western culture draws lines between skin types, it also needlessly segments black music. Lead producer for TPAB, Terrace Martin, explains the approach: “I kinda don’t like saying jazz no more when it comes to TPAB. It’s throwing everybody off because we haven’t had a real black record in about 20 years with real black music and real black people doing the music, and people who understand that we’re under attack everyday who show up to do the music… that album is just black, it’s not funk. It’s not jazz. It’s black.”[caption id="attachment_10843" align="alignnone" width="576"]

Kendrick in Africa[/caption]But more than being the birthplace of any given song, the Africa trip helped heal Kendrick and gave TPAB a focus. “The overall theme of [TPAB] is leadership,” Kendrick later said, “[and] using my celebrity for good.” This came into focus when Kendrick visited the jail cell in Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was locked away for 18 of his 27 years behind bars. The experience taught him the value of resistance and resilience, and it helped him understand his role as a leader in his community as well as in the larger world.“I’m not speaking to the community,” Kendrick says. “I’m not speaking of the community. I am the community.”It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the album that came from these two very different experiences. TPAB debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and would go platinum. It received nearly unanimous critical acclaim—Rolling Stone, Billboard, Pitchfork, Spin, The Guardian, Complex, Consequence of Sound, and Vice all named it their album of the year—and it would go on to win the Best Rap album at the GRAMMYS. (It was nominated for Album of the Year, though GRAMMY voters felt that Taylor Swift’s 1999 was a more worthy recipient.) The Harvard University Library archived it alongside Nas Illmatic, A Tribe Called Quests The Low End Theory, and Lauryn Hills The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.It certainly wasn’t the first “woke” album, but it set the stage for the budding social consciousness of an entire generation. It also established Kendrick as a generational spokesman, and earned him a visit to the White House, where he met another African American who was also wrestling with issues of identity, experience, and power."I was talking to Obama," Kendrick says, "and the craziest thing he said was, Wow, how did we both get here? Blew my mind away. I mean, its just a surreal moment when you have two black individuals, knowledgeable individuals, but who also come from these backgrounds where they say well never touch ground inside these floors."Related Reading:The Narrative Guide to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a ButterflyTo Pimp a Butterfly Album Review—Dead End Hip-HopFlying Lotus Details His "To Pimp A Butterfly" InvolvementHere’s A Timeline Of Everything That Led Up To Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A ButterflyKendrick Lamar Breaks Down the Making of To Pimp a ButterflyKendrick Lamar: "I was DRAGGED off the street & FORCED into the studio" (2017)Kendrick Lamar, By David Chappelle Real Talk | Producers Talk Making Kendrick Lamars "To Pimp a Butterfly"SaveSaveSaveSave

Erykah Badu is this generations queen of soul. Her music is the sound of apocalyptic premonitions, bedroom recriminations, African headwraps, Rhodes keyboards, political claptrap, Nag Champa ashes, and dusty, broken breaks. It’s an oeuvre that is hypnotic, sensual and, above all else, iconic. It’s safe to say that Erykah from Dallas is an emancipation artist: She’s liberated the funk from soul, soul from the past, history from herself, and her audience from their seats. It’s a loopy, wrinkle-in-time logic: One of the foundational figures of R&B’s current futurist, post-everything heatwave is a woman who was considered a nostalgist when she first appeared 20 years ago.And if those mathematics are confusing, swiggle this: What artist, of any genre, has remained as consistently unpredictable or this fearlessly unremitting in her will to constantly redefine her sound for as long as Ms. Badu? If R&B is the lingua franca of modern music, then Erykah was the one who tagged the Rosetta Stone.But what are Erykah’s musical foundations? Luckily, that’s an immensely answerable question. She has always been generous in citing her various influences, and we’ve scoured various interviews, DJ sets, mixtapes, live setlists, and sample databases to compile a list of the tracks that made Erykah, Erykah. If you want to hear her best work, check out our Erykah essentials playlist here; if you’re looking to understand how she got here, this is the place to start.There are at least a few basic sensibilities at play in Erykah’s music. Funk is at the forefront, in various permutations, from the genre’s godfather, James Brown, to his various global descendents: Fela in Lagos, Maurice Washington in Chicago, Prince in Minneapolis, Zapp in Cincinnati, and Thundercat in Los Angeles. Brown’s “King Heroin,” which Erykah included on her phenomenal FEEL BETTER, WORLD! mixtape, features the godfather at his most pensive and mournful, calling for a “revolution of the mind”—another liberation of sorts—over a slinking, understated backdrop.There’s a similar sadness running through Fela’s “Army Arrangement,” which Erykah selected as part one of her favorite Fela tracks in an interview with OkayAfrica. The track was recorded in 1985, as Fela was facing concurrent five-year sentences for trumped-up currency-smuggling charges. After he was imprisoned in Nigeria, his record label gave the masters to Bill Laswell, who chopped up the track’s 30-minute length into something more approachable for Western audiences. "Listening to it was worse than being in prison," Fela quipped. Luckily, the full original version has been restored, and you can hear echos of the track’s loping, hypnotic funk throughout Erykah’s own work.But while funk may be the spoken undercurrent, it’s hardly the only note. Her take on interplanetary psychedelia is also present here. For her BEATS BEES LIKE FOR B-BOYS AND B-GIRLS mixtape, which premiered in 2016 on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show, Badu chose Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War.” Sun Ra, an afrofuturist pioneer, was perhaps most famous for claiming that he was an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace. “Nuclear War” is the apocalypse as a shuttling, chanted, obscene zen koan. This 11th-hour spiritualism is refracted through Erykah’s own shambolic, shamanistic 2008 masterpiece, New Amerykah Part One, an album that alchemizes the dread and loathing of George W. Bush’s second term. That album also famously sampled Eddie Kendricks’ moody “My People...Hold On,” a track that skirts the boundaries of funk, jazz, psych, and soul to craft an an ode to perseverance and defiance.And while the almost all of the selections here are culled from artists of the African diaspora, the exceptions are notable. For a Complex interview in 2015, she revealed that Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon taught her the value of “evolving through experimentation.” It echoed what she told Rolling Stone in a 2011 retrospective of the album, where she relayed being turned onto the Floyd in 1995 by Andre 3000. In that aforementioned Complex interview, she also names Joni Mitchell’s Blue as one of her favorite albums, saying that the Laurel Canyon icon has “one of the most soothing voices I’ve ever heard. The music is haunting.”There’s an underlying tenderness and intimacy in Mitchells work that informs both singers’ work, regardless of which genre the songs work within. It’s the same delicacy that informs many of her soul picks, from Stevie Wonder’s phosphorescent “Visions” to J Dilla’s ethereal “Bye.,” which chopped The Isley Brothers’ “Don’t Say Goodnight” to haunting effect. While no one one-ups Dilla, Erykah did her own impressive interpolation of the Isleys’ version of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” for her 2016 hit collaboration with Andre 3000, “Hello”—a track that conveys the tenderness and warmth of those old friends and lovers.And, in many ways, that yin-yang dynamic—the balancing of intimacy, poetry, and grace with power, prose, and rhythm—sums up Erykah. She’s not only one of pop music’s most powerful artists, but one whose work channels the brightest and boldest impulses of the best popular music of the past five decades.

Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusses classic composition was originally recorded by Cy Grant in 1964, and, a year later, was covered by Nina Simone, whose version became one of the iconic tracks of that decade. Since then, its been covered, sampled and remixed dozens of times, including recently by Lauryn Hill.

Four Tet (nee Kieran Hebden) has said that he wants his music to tell the story of his life, and his tracks do occupy the same psychic space as a certain class of Instagram pictures: the sun-dappled portrait taken on a mountaintop, or the early morning shot of the steam rising off an alpine lake. These are the sort of moments that are too slippery to adequately capture in a caption, though, invariably, we try. A lot of musicians spend their career chasing a sound, and while Hebden does have a certain sonic palette -- one that is inordinately taken up by anything that chimes -- the listener gets the distinct impression that, more than anything, the British producer is in search of a feeling.This is true of the work he does on remixes. Hebden is not only one of the most prolific remixers of his generation, but also one of the most catholic. He’s remixed Riri as well as the Australian avante-electro-jazz quartet Tangents. And while his remixes generally correspond to the stylistic shifts and whims of his own work, there are times when they precede his own transformations, seemingly blurring the subject and object. In many ways, these remixes provide an alternative history of Hebden’s own music.One thing you’ll notice is that while Hebden’s sound is unmistakable, he rarely transforms the tracks he remixes, at least not entirely. There is an occasional bit of brinksmanship with the source material -- for Bonobo’s early track, Pick Up, Hebden takes the originals dusty breakbeats and adds a stuttering, polyrhythmic pounce; and the fact that he would remix half of Madlib’s Madviliany album feels somewhere between an homage and a dare -- but, for the most part, Hebden’s remixes are retellings of the original, albeit a bit refractured. Hebden latches onto a specific idea, melody, vocal line, or beat in the source material, and tweaks that according to his own muse. He’ll add a bit of electronic swirl to the spacial post-rock of The Drift, draw out the pinging keys of Matthew Dear’s “Deserter,” or tuck a thumping disco beat and skronky sax line beneath Nenah Cherry’s after hours swinger “Dream Baby Dream,” though, ultimately, the focus of that remix remains on Cherry’s smokey voice. Similarly, his remix of The XX’s 2002 “Angels” adopts the original’s chimy key drops and maintains the vibe of post-coliatal emotional surrender, but Hebden flips the melody and adds in airey textures that make the track more tender than sensual. It feels as if two artists are viewing the same scene -- lovers, naked, intertwined, near daybreak -- and coming to slightly different, though complimentary conclusions. Hebden is also very savvy when it comes to selecting the tracks he remixes. It’s easy to understand why Radiohead commissioned him to remix “Scatterbrain” from the band’s 2003 album, Hail to the Thief. With its spare, hypnotic guitar figure at its core, the original sounds like a daydream -- albeit a particularly dark one -- and in many ways it matches with the more pastoral, delicate electronic music that Four Tet was making at the time. But Hebden has mentioned that he very quickly came to resent the folktronica tag that critics and fans applied to his 2003 album Rounds, and he quickly pivoted to a new sound. This remix could be a early indication of that transformation His remix takes the track into an entirely different direction.Thom Yorke’s vocals are sliced and reprocessed, and paired with a jittery drum pattern and (towards the end) atonal, skronky sax outburst, which hints at the IDM-tinted free jazz experiments of Hebden’s middle period work.As Hebden’s own sound evolved, from the more acoustic/organic work of Rounds to the dancefloor-ready tracks of his later work, his remix work gained a fuller, more bass-heavy sound. A great example of this is his remix for Scandinavian nu-disco DJ/producer Todd Terje. The track starts out with a swell of chiming synths (of course), and the motif pops up repeatedly through the track, but the song soon settles into a four-on-the-floor dance groove, giving the track an immediacy that balances out Hebden’s more delicate tendencies. In some ways, Hebden’s work as a remix is just as satisfying as his own solo work. Yes, the latter feels more high-stakes and substantial, but his remixes are oftentimes more playful and experimental, as if Hebden is testing out ideas and aesthetic masks. Yes, to an extent, the payoff for these are his full length albums, but, as with many things in life, the journey is oftentimes more fascinating than the destination.

Frank Ocean is a great artist, but not a particularly gifted vocalist, at least not in the traditional sense. His range is rather limited, his phrasing is straightforward and voice is somewhat generic. His power lies in the risks he takes, as a musician, songwriter, and as a personality. There are few albums of the past decade as adventurous as Channel Orange, and there have been few celebrities who’ve navigated the media machine as seamlessly and eloquently as Ocean. Stripped of the context of his own music, his guest turns work best when he’s allowed to be himself; either in the prickly politics of “Church in the Wild” or on the laconic, SoCal anthem “Sunday.”

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Kendrick Lamar’s albums are holistic, meticulously crafted meditations on the idea of blackness in America; they’re novels disguised as albums, and one gets the sense that every couplet and every bass lick has been labored over. All this is great, but sometimes you just want to hear Kendrick rap. This is what made his untitled.unmastered outtakes album from 2016 so enjoyable, and also why his guest verses are always so charming. The span of artists on this playlist reflects the central tension in Kendrick’s own music; the transcendent, post-electronic jazz of Flying Lotus nestles beside the rickety soul street reportage of Schoolboy Q. Navigating the space between those two poles is Kendrick, who moves forward and raps his ass off.

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Kendrick Lamar witnessed his first murder at age five. "It was outside my apartment unit," Lamar remembers. “A guy was out there serving his narcotics and somebody rolled up with a shotgun and blew his chest out. Admittedly, it done something to me right then and there. It let me know that this is not only something that Im looking at, but its something that maybe I have to get used to.”Three years later, Kendrick would see his second murder. This time it was at the Tam’s Burgers on Central and East Rosecrans, just six blocks from where Kendrick grew up. Though it’s now closed, it was an iconic Compton hangout spot known for its cheeseburgers. For the opening of his Reebok commercial, Kendrick is standing on its rooftop, and he also calls it out on “Element” from DAMN.: “I be hangin out at Tams, I be on Stockton/I dont do it for the Gram, I do it for Compton.”

It’s also notorious for being the spot where Suge Knight plowed down and killed Terry Carter in 2015, and, like most things that have to do with Compton, its memory is bittersweet for Kendrick. "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," Kendrick says.Kendrick is a supremely gifted craftsman and storyteller. He is perhaps the greatest hip-hop lyricist of his generation, and his songs touch on universal themes of dislocation, spirituality, and personal integrity. But Kendrick is also a product of a specific time and place, a city and era where violence was commonplace and the degree of poverty was nearly unimaginable for most of us. It’s amazing that Kendrick didn’t succumb to this. These experiences have shaped him, and his power—both as an artist and as a human—is tied into this narrative.“Everyone know Kendrick Lamar for who I am now,” Kendrick offers. “They feel like I have a whole bunch of insight, but, in order to gain that insight, I had to come from this place of loneliness, darkness, and evil. Nobody knows that.”

The roots of this violence are very deep. His family’s gang affiliations stretched back even before they moved to Compton from Chicago in 1984, three years before Kendrick was born. Kendrick’s father, Kenny Duckworth, was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing project on the south side of Chicago that was notorious for its gang violence and poverty. During the 1970s, rival gang members would throw objects from the top floor of the buildings, intending to hit their rivals but frequently striking children. And, at one point, 95 per cent of its residents were unemployed.[caption id="attachment_10827" align="alignnone" width="450"]

An interior photograph of Robert Taylor Homes[/caption]As a young man, Duckworth was reportedly running with a South Side street gang called the Gangster Disciples, a Chicago gang led by Larry Hoover, the legendary Midwestern gangster who Rick Ross immortalized in his 2010 song “B.M.F.” Hoover is currently serving six consecutive life sentences. “My parents don’t come from the Black Panther side of Chicago,” Kendrick says. “They believe in certain things, but they were just trying to manoeuvre through the cracks.”Sensing that the threats, Lamar’s mom, Paula Oliver, issued Kenny an ultimatum. "She said, I cant fuck with you if you aint trying to better yourself," Kendrick recounts. "We cant be in the streets forever."They stuffed their clothes into two black garbage bags and boarded a train to California with $500. "They were going to go to San Bernardino," Kendrick says. "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 McDonalds."[caption id="attachment_10826" align="alignnone" width="455"]

Kendrick and Paula[/caption]For the first couple of years, Paula and Kenny slept in their car or motels, or in the park when it was hot enough, both working a series of disposable jobs at fast-food joints. "Eventually, they saved enough money to get their first apartment, and thats when they had me," Kendrick says. Though they had fled Chicago so that Kenny could escape the gangs, that lifestyle found the family again in Compton. Kenny started dabbling in street life again, two of Kendrick’s uncles were locked up on robbery charges, and his Uncle Tony was shot in the head at a burger stand. “My whole family is Crips and Pirus,” Kendrick states.There’s a context for this. Violence was endemic during that period in Compton. In 1995, when Kendrick was eight, the murder rate in Compton was 81.5 out of 100,000 people. By comparison, New York City, with a murder rate of 2.2 per 100,000 people in 2015, looks like a playground. Even Chicago, which is the current strawman for violent crimes in modern America, only had a murder rate of 8.52 in 2015. It’s not as bad in Compton as it once was, but it’s also not particularly great. The per capita income is still just a little above $13K, a fraction of the $58,030 US average.For Kendrick, the violence was at times unrelenting. At the age of 15, he would be beaten down in front of his mother at the Avalon swap meet—an incident he would later relay in “Element” from DAMN. And then there was the time his mom found a bloody hospital gown among Kendrick’s clothes. Kendrick was initially cagey, but he eventually admitted that it was from being in the ER with "one of his little homeys who got smoked."Or there was the time Paula found him curled up and crying in the front yard, and figured he was sad about his grandmother’s death. "I didnt know somebody had shot at him,” she said. And then, one day, the police knocked on their door, claiming he was behind a neighborhood incident. His parents promptly kicked him out for two days.

Kendrick’s childhood home, 1612 137th St. Compton, CA.It wasn’t just gang violence that Kendrick had to worry about. One of Kendrick’s first memories was of the ’92 riots, which began after the acquittals of four police officers who had assaulted Rodney King. The chaos lasted six days—from April 29 to May 4—and resulted in 63 deaths, 2,383 injuries, and over 12,000 arrests. Over 3,700 buildings were burned, either partially or completely destroyed, and damages totalled over $1 billion. Eventually, the national guard was shipped in to restore order, but those six days would scar the community, in both big and small ways, for decades to come.Kendrick was four when it went down. "I remember riding with my pops down Bullis Road, and looking out the window and seeing motherfuckers just running," he says. "I can see smoke. We stop, and my pops goes into the Auto-Zone and comes out rolling four tires. I know he didnt buy them. Im like, Whats going on?"Years later, Kendrick would reference this story in the good kid, m.A.A.d. city bonus track, “County Building Blues.” The second verse almost exclusively captures Kendrick’s impressions of the riots: “Couple stolen TVs and a seat belt for my safety/ Played the passenger I think it’s five years after ’87/ Do the math, ‘92, don’t you be lazy.”All of this nearly broke Kendrick. "We used to have these successful people come around and tell us whats good and whats bad in the world,” Kendrick says. “But, from our perspective, it didnt mean shit to us, because youre telling us all these positive things, but, when we walk outside, we see somebodys head get blown off. And it just chips away at the confidence. It makes you feel belittled. The more violence youre exposed to as a kid, the more it chips away at you. For the most part, the kids that I was around, it broke them. It broke them to say, Fuck everything, Im gonna do what Im gonna do to survive … Before I let it chip away at me 100 per cent, I was making my transition into music."The seeds for Kendrick’s music career were also planted very early. Kendrick was born Kendrick Duckworth on June 17, 1987. As his parents drove him home from the hospital, his father played a track from the legendary old-school rapper Big Daddy Kane. “[My mom] was telling him, ‘Cut that music down, that shit too loud,’” Kendrick recalls. “And he was like, ‘Don’t worry about it. He gonna be listening to music when we get home, when he grow up, and forever.’”As a child, his father would take him to the Compton Swap Meet at North Long Beach Boulevard and Orchard. “As a kid, thats where I used to get all my cassettes, all my CDs,” Kendrick says. “My pops, too—hed buy music. Id get my Nikes there. You might see Suge Knight, other folks from Compton."But it was one time in particular that proved to be foundational for a young Kendrick. In 1996, he watched Dr. Dre and Tupac film their video for the remix of “California Love” at the swap meet. Just a few months later, Tupac would be killed, gunned down on the streets of Las Vegas, but at the time he was the world’s biggest hip-hop star. “When Tupac was here, and I saw him as a 9-year-old, I think that was the birth of what Im doing today,” Kendrick says. “From the moment that he passed, I knew the things he was saying would eventually be carried on through someone else. But I was too young to know that I would be the one doing it.”

Kendrick quickly immersed himself in hip-hop culture. When Pac died, he gravitated to DMX. Like Pac, DMX was a supremely conflicted character, with songs that threaded the line between hardscrabble machismo and stark vulnerability. “That’s the first album that got me writing,” Kendrick says of DMX’s seminal 1998 album, It’s Dark and Hell is Hot. “That album inspired me to be a rapper.”While DMX inspired Kendrick from a distance, there were important people closer to home. “I was in seventh grade, I had an English class and a teacher by the name of Mr. Inge and he would give us these poetry assignments, and there was one particular homework assignment that I didn’t do and I said to myself, ‘When I get to school I’m going to write it as fast as possible’, and I did,” Kendrick remembers of his time at Vanguard Learning Center. “I had like 10 minutes until I had to turn it in, so I did it and I turned it in. Later that day, he was passing out the grades and I was looking at my friends going, ‘Man, I got a D, I got a C,’ and I looked at it and it was an ‘A.’ From that moment on, I knew I had a gift to put words together and draw my inspiration out on a piece of paper.”[caption id="attachment_10825" align="alignnone" width="636"]

Vanguard Learning Center[/caption]The hobby quickly turned into a passion, to the surprise of Kendrick’s parents. “We used to wonder what he was doing with all that paper," his dad says. "I thought he was doing homework! I didnt know he was writing lyrics.""I had never heard him say profanity before," recalls his mom. "Then I found his little rap lyrics, and it was all Eff you. D-i-c-k. Im like, Oh, my God! Kendricks a cusser!"Soon, Kendrick began attending Centennial High School. The school is firmly considered “Blood territory,” with a graduation rate lower than 60 precent. (Federal-government guidelines for high school graduation rates dictate that all schools should be at 83 per cent.) But it’s also a school with some notable alumni, including the legendary G-Funk producer DJ Quik and, most significantly, Dr. Dre.

It was here, in 2003, that Kendrick met Dave Free, who would go on to be Kendrick’s manager and president of Top Dawg Entertainment. “Me and Kendrick go back since the beginning of 10th grade,” Free recalls. “I was the local DJ at my school and I used to have rap battles during lunch. And my boy Antonio, he was like one of the best rappers at the school. And he was telling me that he had this friend that was the craziest. I was intrigued. I set up a makeshift studio in my house… and I remember he had this line like, ‘I ship keys like a grand piano.’ And I just thought that was the most amazing line for someone his age.”“We had a little sock over the microphone” Kendrick remembers. “Did a bunch of freestyles over that little mic, gave it to his little brother who was producing at the time, and built something more than just people working together, built a friendship, built a brotherhood over the years.”Around the same time, Kendrick would have another life-changing event. As with many of the landmark events in his life, this one is rooted in violence. “It was a situation, an altercation that happened. One of the homies got popped,” Kendrick says. “And, [afterwards], we was walking the side parking lot, and this older lady walked up to us and asked us, ‘Was we saved?’ We believed in God and everything, but at the same time, we dont know what it means to actually be saved with the blood of Jesus. But… she blessed us right then and there: ‘Close your eyes and repeat after me.’ And it was said and done. And from that moment on, I knew, its real people out here that really care.”Later in 2003, Kendrick and Dave would put out Kendrick’s first release, Y.H.N.I.C. (Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year). It’s only remarkable for the the fact that it was created by a 16-year-old. The rhymes sound like rote regurgitations of a radio rap hits, but it did what it needed to. After putting it out, Dave began shopping it around, though he really only had one person in mind: TDE leader Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith.[caption id="attachment_10830" align="alignnone" width="356"]

Kendrick in a 2003 promo photo for Y.H.N.I.C.[/caption]Though just a neighborhood label, TDE was the “closest thing we knew to the industry,” according to Kendrick. But Tiffith wasn’t particularly receptive to hearing a mixtape from a 16-year-old. “I tried everything to get around the dude,” Dave says. “One time, I posed like I could fix his computer and the whole time I was playing him music and just taking apart his computer, and he started paying more attention to me. And I came over and joined the company, and brought Kendrick in, and we started grinding from there.”It was a grind that would take him to the top of the hip-hop world within a decade, but Kendrick never forgot his Compton roots. His childhood, however bleak, serves as the backdrop for his music—it’s there in nearly every song and in every interview. “What happens is it invites people in to get another perspective,” Kendrick says of the role of Compton in his music. “It brings a whole ‘nother side to the world of Compton, to this backyard and say, ‘Okay, these are actually people.’”And Kendrick also stays plugged in through much more tangible ways. In 2013, shortly after the release of good kid, m.A.A.d. city, he donated $50,000 to Centennial’s music department, and much more for the various sports and community programs. His contributions to the music department made it possible for the school to buy new instruments, and establish both string and jazz ensembles. LA Weekly recently named it one of the top music programs in America. According to its director, Manuel Castaneda, 95 per cent of participants in the music program went on to four-year colleges on full or partial scholarships—an amazing number considering that less than 10 per cent of Compton residents have a college degree.Shortly after his contribution, the California State Senate honored Kendrick Lamar for his donations, bestowing upon Kendrick a “Generational Icon Award.”

And two years later, in 2015, while shooting the video for “King Kunta,” Kendrick returned to the Compton Swap Meet, the same place where he had seen Tupac and Dr. Dre 18 years prior. “All them kids were out there looking,” he remembers. “And a good friend said, ‘You was one of those kids looking at Pac up here when he was doing that, and now they’re looking at you.”Related Reading:An In-Depth Conversation with Kendrick LamarChicago Gang History: Robert Taylor HomesVideo: Kendrick Honored On Senate FloorKendrick Lamar: “I Am Trayvon Martin. I Am All of These Kids.”Kendrick Lamar’s Guide to LABounty Hunters (Bloods)Video: Jay Rock: Only Blood in Crip High SchoolJay Rock Talks About Living in Nickerson, WattsNPR: Kendrick Lamar: I Cant Change The World Until I Change Myself FirstRolling Stone: The Trials of Kendrick LamarNoisey Bompton: Growing Up With Kendrick LamarSaveSave

The hot weather has melted our otherwise highly analytical, somewhat elitist brains, leaving us lounging on rooftops with a cold beer and humming the latest Future jam. Please join us in this blissful state of non-sentience with this handpicked selection of summery jams from SZA, GoldLink, Kendrick, Chronixx (pictured), Kamaiyah, and more.

I’m old enough to remember a time before Spotify, iPhones or even the Internet. These weren’t such bad times. We all looked a little bit different -- a lot of us wore flannel shirts and our jeans were baggier -- but we slept, ate, drank and fucked pretty much the same. To discover music, we’d listen to the radio or MTV, or maybe read Rolling Stone or Spin. If we wanted to listen to something other than top 40 pop, classic rock or mainstream rap, we had to search for it. If you lived in some place like New York, Los Angeles or Seattle, this wasn’t too hard. You could go to a cool record store, or maybe check out a show at a local venue. But I didn’t live in one of those places. I spent my high school years in Charlotte, NC -- a city that was aggressively unhip. Charlotte imagined itself as the “new Atlanta,” and was a sprawl of strip malls, megachurches, and fast food restaurants. No major band had emerged from the area; there were more gun shops than there were record stores. Information trickled in, but just barely. In an article about David Bowie, I’d discovered the Velvet Underground; and from a Bob Dylan biography, I’d found Leonard Cohen and Arthur Rimbaud. I took notes and gradually began to piece together a map of a larger, more exciting world beyond the top 40 and creationist textbooks. For most of those years, this was a solitary journey. Most of my friends wanted to talk about girls or basketball or Saturday Night Live skits. They weren’t interested in Tom Waits, Tom Verlaine or even the Tom Tom Club. There was no message board that I could go to congregate with the like minded.In the 10th grade, this changed. I met a girl. She was from Atlanta, scrawny, a bit boyish and a pretty mean drunk. She smoked constantly, wore scruffy Doc Martin ripoffs and made exaggerated gestures when she sang aloud, which meant that she rarely used her hands when driving. She worked at a place called the Silk Plant Forest -- an artificial flower shop that was in a vast warehouse just south of downtown. When business was slow, we’d get high and explore the warehouse’s outer-edges, the various display rooms curated to resemble distant, exotic locales. The girl introduced me to Front 242 and Skinny Puppy, Happy Mondays and Siouxsie. But, mainly, we listened to The Smiths. It’s long been a given that Morrissey was the patron saint for misplaced teenagers, but we didn’t know that. My other friends regarded him, at best, as a curiosity -- an effeminate R.E.M. knock-off -- and my parents burst out laughing when they heard “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” We assumed that the rest of the world was like this - that The Smiths was ours alone. We’d make tapes of our favorite songs for one another. She had a soft spot for Morrissey’s first two solo releases, which I thought were garbage, and I leaned towards later-period Smiths (Strangeways Here We Come is a fave). Of course, it’s clear now that I was right about that, and that we were both wrong about nearly everything else. But it didn’t matter then; it was just nice riding in her car.