The vulnerabilities expressed on ‘good kid, m.A.A.d city’ changed expectations for what can be popular in mainstream rap music. As Kendrick Lamar’s major label debut turns 10, GRAMMY.com examines the legacy of an instant classic. Dr. Dre released The Chronic in 1992. He was 8 when his father took him to watch Dre and Tupac Shakur film the first of two videos for Shakur’s “California Love” in his hometown of Compton, and 25 when he released his album good kid, m.A.A.d city through a deal with Dre’s Aftermath label, Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) and Interscope Records on Oct. 22, 2012.
In the 10 years since its release, the GRAMMY-nominated good kid, m.A.A.d city ushered in a new era for authentic storytelling in rap music. Lamar’s 12-track release — which captures a dramatized day in his life as a 17-year-old back in 2004 — is no focus group-engineered collection of heat-seeking singles. Instead, GKMC embraced the creation of an album as a whole conceptual body of work.
Yet in the years following The Chronic and leading up to good kid, m.A.A.d city (Lamar’s second album following 2011’s Section.80, though his first major project), Compton’s rap output was squarely street-centric. Leading this wave of artists was The Game, whose double-platinum selling debut The Documentary was released in 2005. While Lamar raps about envying “Jayceon” (The Game’s given name) on good’s “Black Boy Fly,” no major label artists at the time represented the perspective of the average Compton kid who didn’t gangbang.
