The moment the two main men in Kendrick Lamar’s life met for the first time
The storytelling in Damn, Kendrick Lamar’s fourth studio album released in 2017, is profoundly rich and absorbing. But arguably the most enthralling tale appears right at the end, on the last track ‘Duckworth.’ Here Kendrick focuses on two men, Anthony and Ducky, and reflects on how their first meeting long ago proved so consequential. These guys are today two of the most important men in Kendrick’s life, but, had their early encounter played out differently, maybe Kendrick wouldn’t ever have been able to tell their story.
The Anthony in ‘Duckworth’ is Anthony ‘Top Dawg’ Tiffith, the founder of Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE), the label which, between 2005 and 2022, represented Kendrick as he rose to the tippy-top of the hip hop game. The track focuses on a moment where Top, seeking to escape harassment from the cops, slips inside a KFC, where, working, was a guy “with a curly top and a gap in his teeth, he worked the window. His name was Ducky, he came from the streets.”
This Ducky guy knew who Top Dawg was, having heard that, only a year earlier, he had robbed this very same KFC—and that somebody had gotten shot during it. “Ducky was well-aware,” Kendrick raps, “They robbed the manager and shot a customer last year.” He had to play his cards right here, so, hoping to endear himself to Top Dawg, he started slipping him free chicken and extra biscuits. It worked. Top Dawg took a shine to Ducky, which meant that, when Top decided to rob the KFC again, Ducky was safe from harm. He wouldn’t be hurt, or, worse, killed.
This is a fine story, and, delivered by Kendrick, it becomes entirely gripping. But why is he telling it? It’s because Ducky is his dad, and, had he not been so nice to Top Dawg in that KFC all those years ago, maybe life for all three of them would have played out quite differently. Top Dawg might have killed Ducky in the course of a robbery, and, consequently, a young Kendrick would have been robbed of both a father and a future mentor.
“You take two strangers and put ’em in random predicaments,” Kendrick raps at the end of the song. “Give ’em a soul, so they can make their own choices and live with it. Twenty years later, them same strangers, you make ’em meet again. Inside recording studios where they reapin’ their benefits. Then you start remindin’ them about that chicken incident. Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence? Because if Anthony killed Ducky, Top Dawg could be servin’ life. While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfi—”
It’s a wild thought. One of the most formative men in Kendrick’s life may well have killed another, and the course of the rapper’s life would have been forever altered. It seems almost too unlikely a tale to be real, but there is evidence for its authenticity. Kendrick has spoken in interviews about his dad’s job in a KFC, and Top Dawg’s criminal past is a matter of public record.
There’s every reason to believe that these two men, so central to Kendrick’s life and, accordingly, to the history of modern hip hop, really did meet in these bizarre circumstances—and things could have played out so differently.