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Kendrick Lamar · S2 E5
Lil Wayne & the C4 Tape
Rapping over Wayne beats, studying the best, and learning what he didn't want to become
2007. Lil Wayne is on every radio station, every mixtape site, every car stereo in Compton, and K-Dot listens and thinks: I need to understand what this man is doing.
Kendrick Lamar, Ignorance Is Bliss. This is the song where K-Dot stops imitating and starts becoming. Recorded after the C4 phase, it is the first track where Kendrick sounds entirely like himself. When Dr. Dre heard this, he picked up the phone.
The C4 Tape
K-Dot records an entire mixtape rapping over Lil Wayne instrumentals, calling it C4 as a nod to Wayne's Tha Carter series. It drops in 2009 and sounds exactly like you would expect: a talented young rapper doing his best Wayne impression. The flows are borrowed, the ad-libs are borrowed, even the cadences feel like carbon copies.
Lil Wayne in 2007
Ignorance Is Bliss, Kendrick Lamar (2010)
From Overly Dedicated. The beat is sparse and menacing, built on a lurching bass and a loop that sounds like a warning siren. Kendrick raps about street violence with a detached, journalistic clarity that is nothing like Wayne's playful bravado. Every Wayne trick K-Dot studied is still in his toolkit, but the voice, the perspective, the intent are entirely his own. Dr. Dre heard this track, called Top Dawg, and asked who the kid was.
TAP TO REVEAL: What specific Lil Wayne technique did Kendrick permanently absorb?
What was the name of Kendrick's Lil Wayne tribute mixtape?
P&P 1.5, Kendrick Lamar ft. Ab-Soul (2010)
From Overly Dedicated (2010). If C4 was the imitation phase, this is Kendrick learning to have fun in his own voice. He and Ab-Soul trade bars over a bouncy beat, loose and confident. No Wayne impression anywhere, just two TDE kids figuring out their sound.
The Wayne phase is over and K-Dot has found his own voice, but he is still carrying someone else's name. Next: the day K-Dot disappears forever, and Kendrick Lamar is born.
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