The moment Kendrick Lamar understood what “gangbanging” truly was
While many kids aged five or six are busy playing with toys or obsessed with their favourite cartoons, Kendrick Lamar was being educated by street life. In fact, he learned what the word “gangbanging” meant while he was still learning the basics.
Born in 1987, Kendrick is the child of former gang hustler Kenneth ‘Kenny’ Duckworth, who was associated with the Gangster Disciples. He grew up in Section 8 housing around members of the Westside Pirus, but Kendrick didn’t partake in anything illegal himself. It didn’t take long for the rapper to understand the Crips and Bloods lifestyle, which arguably played a part in him avoiding it.
“I remember the first time I actually understood gangbanging, I was in kindergarten,” he told Complex, “We was having a house party and my uncle’s in there, they was Compton Crips, and my uncle was like ‘Cuz’ this and ‘cuz’ that and, ‘Yeah, cuz. I had the blue this on. The blue, everything’. I’m like, ‘What is cuz?'”
Precocious as he was, when confronted with spotting the difference between a Crip and Blood in school, he used logic to find his was out, identifying correctly by the colours, which surpised his elder peer, prompting him to ask how he knew. Kendrick responded, “Because my uncles was talking about it the other night”.
At the time, he didn’t understand the weight of knowing about that lifestyle. Instead, he simply felt positive about being in the know when someone doubted his knowledge. This inspired his curiosity about travelling across the world and learning everything he could.
“As a kid, you don’t know, you felt like you just learned something, even though they talking about some scandalous shit,” he said, admitting that he simply changed the outlook on that to a positive one, adding, “A question somebody gave me and I knew the answer to it, made me feel good. I’ll never forget that.”
Kendrick has always been a man with a thirst for the unknown and constantly evolving in the process, whether it be personally or creatively, crucially retaining his self-awareness, and he doesn’t put a tag on that experience.
Despite the harsh spotlight on Compton‘s parcel of gang activities, Kendrick feels positive about the future of the city, believing there are plenty of people who need to be seen or heard through creative arts and sporting abilities. He also thinks many general voices from the area deserve to be seen on bigger stages, pointing to a bias in media reporting disproportionately the negatives over the positives, if at all
“Aside from how they feel about us with the gang culture, we are all optimistic in what we have in our hearts as far as our ability to speak on something good,” he told Vice, highlighting the gulf in his lived reality and the one reported: “You know. When that news cut on, all you’re hearing about is killing”.