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50. good kid, m.A.A.d city - Kendrick Lamar (2012)

Hip Hop

Good kid, m.A.A.d city is an all-access tour of Kendrick Lamar’s notorious stomping grounds, Compton, CA. It offers an acutely detailed look behind the curtain at what life is like for the youth of the neighborhood, specifically the “good kids” trying, against all odds, to survive the gauntlet of the mad city without succumbing to seemingly neverending violence and temptation. Related as an autobiographical account of day-to-day life in Compton, GKMC became the springboard from which Kendrick Lamar rocketed to the tip top of rap in the early half of the decade. 

The album is a heavy dose of brutal realism, interspersed in places with doses of necessary escapism. The narrative laced throughout is one of inner city grinding, with interludes of concerned voicemails from Mom and fly-on-the-wall accounts of conversations between scheming adolescents precariously flirting with and eventually inviting disaster. Kendrick, the good kid in question, explores the confounding complexity of trying to get by in such a malicious environment as a young teenager who still wants to do the things that young teenagers are supposed to want to do. He found his groove lyrically and stylistically on the album and established himself as an introspective and decidedly conscious rapper even before overtly taking up Tupac’s mantle on 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly. 

Lauded as an instant classic and a modern hip-hop masterpiece, critics, fans and casual observers alike all scratched their heads as good kid m.A.A.d city lost out at the Grammys in 2014 to The Heist, the perhaps aptly named debut album by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. The result was a travesty to be sure, but looking back through the lens of the present, its clear that Kendrick’s best work was yet to come. Plus everyone knows the Grammys are a joke, right?

*image; cover art for the album good kid, m.A.A.d city by the artist Kendrick Lamar