Kendrick Lamar has a lot of fans, and no doubt, if someone saw him on the street, they would be starstruck and in awe of the To Pimp A Butterfly creator. However, before he acquired fame, he was a fan himself, and he had a lot of idols.
Lamar’s path into music was organic, and he was thrust into the world of West Coast rap when his father took him to see Dr Dre and 2Pac shoot the music video of ‘California Love’ only five minutes from their house.
From the age of five, he was in love with Dr Dre, and during an interview with Annie Mac following the release of 2015’s To Pimp A Butterfly, he explained that one song that really impacted him as a kid was ‘Lil Ghetto Boy’ from the iconic 1992 project The Chronic. Lamar harked back to his childhood, explaining, “I can just remember being a kid listening to the story and being blown away because it was really the reality that we [were] in and I understood it! The storytelling of it was wild!”
As a Compton native, it is unsurprising that the ‘Simming Pools’ rhymer respected Dr. Dre. Still, he never expected to meet him, as he was signed to Top Dawg Entertainment, headed by Ted Griffith, for the first four years of his professional career.
That said, when K Dot found himself face-to-face with Dr Dre as a potential Aftermath artist, he was starstruck and in disbelief that he was meeting the person who had made so much of the music he listened to growing up.
Lamar’s first meeting with Dr. Dre was during a studio session. Dre invited Lamar to the session after hearing a K Dot mixtape that Paul Rosenberg (Eminem’s manager) had given him. During the session, they recorded the 2012 track ‘The Recipe,’ on which the two traded verses.
In a 2013 interview with Google Play, he detailed how Dre put him in the studio the first day, stating, “I wrote the lyrics the day I met Dre. I easily got inspired, I just started writing. And that was actually the first studio session I had with Dre. That’s the last song on the album for a specific reason. That’s the first song I did with Dre, that was the start of my new life.”
During an interview with Q, He detailed the pressure he felt, recalling, “I had to write the lyrics to that one on the spot. That was him testing me. Next week he signed me.”
Still, even being around Dr Dre left him awe-struck. In his discussion with Annie Mac he declared, “It came to a point where I had to really snap out of fan mode and become a professional because after we were introduced, he said he liked my music, and I said that I’m a fan of his work,” he recalled. “Then he said, ‘Okay, now write to this, write a full song to this’. Right after I said, ‘Man, Dr. Dre, you’re the greatest,’ he was like, ‘Yeah, man, you’re good too. You could be something. Alright, now write to this beat. And that beat ended up being the first song I did with him and ended up on my album called ‘Compton.’”
