He had police pull guns on him several times, once when he was 17 cruising through Compton with a friend. Lamar also had to worry about the police, which he calls “the biggest gang in California.” Another time, she found Kendrick curled up, weeping in the front yard of their home after he was shot at.īut it wasn’t just gangs that were threatening young Kendrick’s life. On one occasion, his mom found a bloody hospital gown that Kendrick kept after he went to the emergency room with a friend who was shot. Rather than a stranger, it was now his friends who were becoming victims of gang violence. Things were finally looking up, until he started getting the calls that brought him right back to the harsh realities of life in Compton.

He escaped from Compton and was getting his first taste of his new life, even getting baptized to mark his transition into stardom. Just a few months prior, he was the good kid stuck in the mad city, only to be suddenly surrounded by everything he had ever dreamed of. At this time, wealth and fame were completely new to Kendrick. It was just a year after Kendrick dropped his breakthrough album, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, and he was quickly rising to the pinnacle of the rap game. The song was inspired by an actual event that happened while Kendrick was touring with Kanye for the Yeezus tour. While Kendrick is known to make use of poetic license, this isn’t some scene that Kendrick thought up. Isolated in his hotel room with a bottle of dark liquor, Kendrick gets more and more intoxicated as the song goes on, until his subconscious completely takes over and starts attacking him, calling him a fraud, a hypocrite, and a failure.

He's overcome with depression, self-loathing, and borderline suicidal. On “U,” we see Kendrick at his lowest point ever. This inner conflict reaches a breaking point with the song “U,” on which Kendrick locks himself in a hotel room with a bottle of liquor and faces his demons head-on. One of the first lines we hear on the project is “Take a deep look inside, are you really who they idolize,” and throughout the album he repeats “I remember you was conflicted,” a testament to how his past and his future are pulling him in two opposite directions, a dissonance that tears him apart from the inside.

Kendrick takes a magnifying glass to his transformation from cocoon to butterfly, dissecting the sinister implications that come with entering a new life of fame and wealth and leaving the familiar in the past. Considered to be Kendrick’s masterpiece, on To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick is consumed by inner turmoil, suffering from crippling self-doubt and the excruciating guilt he feels for leaving Compton behind.Īt its core, TPAB is a story of self-reflection and growth that is neither painless nor comfortable. Grappling with this question led Kendrick into a deep depression that gave us his next album, To Pimp A Butterfly.

Simbolism in alright by kendrick lamar