How a Good Kid from a Mad City Lived to Tell His Tale
By: Cameron Forcier
Tags: Music, Kendrick Lamar, Hip Hop

Good kid, m.A.A.d city is a concept album of Kendrick Lamar’s childhood in Compton, California. The album follows Kendrick through his maturation (and corruption) as a result of his surroundings. Kendrick, who starts off as a good kid, quickly gets corrupted by his friends. In The Art of Peer Pressure, Kendrick shows that he’s neglecting his school work to rob houses with his friends, and repeatedly says that normally he wouldn’t do stuff like drugs or “get violent”, but he’s making a special exception because “s*** I’m with the homies”. In good kid, he further pushes the image of himself as a good kid at heart who’s just being radicalized by his surroundings with the lines: “no better picture to paint than me walking from bible study. He called his homies because he had said he noticed my face from a function that took place, they was wonderin’ if I bang. Step on my neck and get blood on your Nike checks”. Those lines show that Kendrick is innocent, and gets jumped by gang members just for walking in their territory and looking familiar. The environment finally gets to him, as he finally snaps and says “if I told you I killed a n**** at 16 would you believe me? Innocent Kendrick you see in the street with a basketball and some Now or Laters to eat” in m.A.A.d city, the next track.

The message is being sent as a way for Kendrick to tell his story without coming off as “one of them”. Through it all, Kendrick finds refuge in God at the end of Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst, and gets his official offer to join TDE at the end of Real, the penultimate track. There is not one definitive reason as to what m.A.A.d stands for, with Kendrick saying that there are actually two. In one, m.A.A.d stands for “my angry adolescence divided”, perhaps a reference to his inner battle between staying a good kid or letting the madness of Compton consume him. In the other, “my angel on angel dust”, a reference to his first time smoking weed being a blunt laced with angel dust.

The cover of the regular version of Good Kid M.a.a.d City reads “A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar”, and that’s exactly what it is once the layers start to get peeled back. Consider this album a Tarantino film. The opening track, Sherane AKA Master Splinter’s Daughter, is not the beginning of the story, it’s just a way to drop the listener right in the middle of the action. Going by narrative, the final track, Compton, is actually the beginning. With a chorus of “Compton, Compton, ain’t no city quite like mine”, Compton establishes the setting of young Kendrick’s story. At the very end of the song, a young Kendrick Lamar is heard yelling “Mom I’m finna use the van real quick, be back in 15 minutes!”. Now this is where Sherane would play, and the story begins with the sound of a CD being put into a car (his mom’s van) and a prayer. At the end of the song, which is the story of how Kendrick met Sherane at a party and was at first intimidated by her family’s ties to crime, Kendrick goes to her house and sees “two n****s, two black hoodies”, and freezes while his phone rings. On the phone, his mother calling him asking where he is, telling him that he better not be messing around with Sherane, and telling him to come home because he said he’d only be 15 minutes. At the end of the voicemail, Kendrick’s father says to put music on, and that his mother is killing his vibe, and then the next track B**** Don’t Kill My Vibe plays. At the end of the song, Kendrick’s friends tell him to get in the car, because they have “a pack of blacks (wraps to smoke with) and some beat CDs” that they’re going to freestyle over. And with that, Backseat Freestyle plays. The way that Kendrick uses skits at the end of songs to connect the next one, and keep the narrative flowing, is what makes this album so complex. The ending of The Art of Peer Pressure, a song about how Kendrick is being corrupted by nights with his friends, sees Kendrick robbing a house with his friends, hitting a blunt laced with cocaine, and then the group planning to shoot at the same group of people mentioned at the end of Sherane. Two songs later, the outro skit of Poetic Justice is the interaction between Kendrick and the two guys from Sherane. Kendrick is threatened, and told to get out the van after being questioned what side of Compton he’s from. The end of m.A.A.d city has the group drinking, and the end of the following track, Swimming Pools, has them actually firing shots at the two men from earlier, resulting in one of their members being shot and killed. The next track, the 12-minute climax of the album Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst, has the group finding God after talking with an older woman (voiced by Maya Angelou) when she notices they need guidance. The track ends with the group saying the prayer from the opening of Sherane. Finally, wrapping up the story, is Real. The outro skit is Kendrick’s parents on voicemail yet again, except this time they’re not bugging him for the car back. They’ve become supportive, his dad giving advice after what seems to have been one long night in Compton. The final words, from his mother, are “I love you Kendrick. If I don’t hear you knocking on the door, you know where I usually leave the key”, and then the sound of a CD ejecting from the tray.

This album is an aesthetic masterpiece. On the first few listens, the album is great, but after deeper dives, it’s near flawless. It’s uses of intros, outros, skits, gunshots, and prayers help keep the listener’s attention and following along with the story, trying to piece together the events of one wild night, given partially out of order.

Even with everything already mentioned, Kendrick is still in high school. Songs like Sherane and Backseat Freestyle are about what you’d expect from a 17-year-old. In Sherane, the following: “The music of being young and dumb is never muted”, “Seventeen with nothing but p**** stuck on my mental, my motive was rather sinful”, and Kendrick saying that her family’s “reputable history of gang bangin’ did make [him] skeptical but not enough to stop [him] from getting [his] nut in”. These lines, in the song where he meets Sherane, who arguably acts as the catalyst for his corruption, show a sense of immaturity. In Backseat Freestyle, which is stylistically a literal freestyle in the backseat of his friends white Toyota, is just him and his friends goofing off and having fun. The lyrics don’t mean anything in this one, as opposed to almost every other song which tells a story or helps in pushing forward a narrative. Backseat Freestyle brings an energy that’s infectious- it’s almost as if you can hear a young Kendrick smiling as he raps “I pray my d*** get big as the Eiffel Tower, so I can f*** the world for seventy-two hours”. The upbeat tempo and youthful lyrics of Backseat Freestyle are almost directly contrasted in the next song, The Art of Peer Pressure. In it, Kendrick tells a story about him and his friends driving around, still in the same white Toyota, drinking, smoking, while “on the mission for bad b*****s and trouble”. The innocence is quickly lost, as the corruption of Kendrick quickly materializes, ending in the group robbing a house they’d been surveying for two months, getting in a police chase, and then hitting a blunt laced with cocaine.

Seeing as how this album is a story of maturation, there’s a lesson at the end. In the outro to the penultimate track, Real, Kendrick’s father lectures him that no amount of robberies, violence, or gang affiliation makes someone “real”. The realest thing a man can do, according to the voicemail, is take care of his family. His mother reminds him that he has a special talent in music, and the best way he can give back to his city once he makes it big is to tell his story and offer encouragement to the kids in Compton- to act as living proof that it’s possible to escape the lifestyle of gang violence that so much of its youth gets caught up in. In the song Poetic Justice, Kendrick asks the listener “if I told you a flower bloomed in a dark room would you trust it?”. In the conclusion of Real, his mom alludes to multiple things, telling him that he “rose from that dark place of violence, becoming a positive person”. Not only is she referencing the line in Poetic Justice, but a poem by Tupac Shakur, another Compton native, called The Rose that Grew from Concrete. In the short poem, Shakur talks about a rose that cracked through the concrete and grew despite all odds. Additionally, Tupac also played the lead in a movie called Poetic Justice.

Kendrick is the rose that bloomed in darkness; that cracked through the concrete. He got stomped out in Poetic Justice and Good Kid, robs a house, gets chased by cops, and gets introduced to drugs in The Art of Peer Pressure, reveals his cousin was killed, watched his friend kill someone, and say that he may or may not have done the same in m.A.A.d city, holds his friend as he dies in his arms in Swimming Pools, then finds God in Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.

A young Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, a good kid stuck in a mad city, rose from the struggles, bloomed into a superstar, and is now telling a story of a young kid in Compton.

Himself.