A minute-by-minute breakdown of Kendrick Lamar’s Pop Out — Ken & Friends show, Wednesday, June 19, at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California:
My friend Chris lives in Culver City, about 15 minutes from the Forum, so a group of us are meeting here to collect ourselves and ride over together. Chris moved here from the DMV a few years ago; he has a steady, impressive job but is also one of those savants who flips shoes online with the industriousness of a 19th-century gold prospector. He tells me about the Sean Wotherspoon Air Maxes in toddler sizes that parents happily buy for $250 a pair. He has a full-sleeve tattoo of the Last Supper. A 20-year-old from Vancouver who knows Chris through the online commodities world (not, for once, a euphemism) complains that Business Is Business, the collection of songs from a still-incarcerated Young Thug that was released last year and is currently rattling through the house, was overlooked. I don’t prod too much, but it sounds like no one here paid under $300 for secondary-market tickets.
A radio edit of “Rack City” drowns out some, but not all of the bootleggers, whose shirts skew a little more Google Images than usual. It’s a relief to see a pivot away from the stark minimalism that’s dominated stadium-tour rap merch for the last few years (and the fake Pen & Pixel default templates that have become ubiquitous), but there’s nothing here that commands the $50 price tags. The clothes around us: a Doggystyle letterman jacket; a shirt that says “kendrick lamar” in script and “WON” in impact font; a perplexingly Nike-branded “Increase the Peace” tee; merch from the Big Steppers Tour; two Dennis Rodman Bulls jerseys, one red and one black; a blue long-sleeve with pictures of George Bushes junior and senior over the words “DUMB” and “DUMBER.” There’s a metal detector but we’re whisked right past it.
Almost as soon as I step on the floor, I run into Elliott Wilson, who, in my childhood, was a titanic figure at the helm of Ego Trip and XXL, but, most recently, and most relevantly, was a sort of sober arbiter in the Drake-Kendrick feud, in a way that allegedly drew Drake’s ire. We exchange an unpublishable joke about the rap media ecosystem as he’s swarmed by young men with front-facing cameras. On stage, DJ Hed jabs at straw men: “I hear a lot of people talking about, ‘That sounds too West Coast.’” No one here, surely.
Over the next 50 minutes, Hed brings out well over a dozen rappers, mostly one at a time, in a way that gives a rough outline of where L.A. rap is at present—even with a few notable exceptions. If there’s any non-Drake controversy to mine tonight, it’s the city politics of who is and is not invited to the stage. This is a concert pegged to “Not Like Us,” on which Kendrick makes conspicuous use of the late Drakeo the Ruler’s flows, cadences, and even slang. It’s not the first time Kendrick’s paid homage to that style; in both instances, he’s deployed it wonderfully while showing, like Jay-Z with Young Chris’ whisper flow, how to metabolize someone else’s approach without losing your center.
The first MC is Remble, who hyper-articulates “Touchable” from underneath a white Shiesty and a blue Freddie Freeman Dodgers jersey. Remble is more wholly imitative. Late last month, he dropped a freestyle over the “Not Like Us” beat, on which he says he’s “been talking to Drakeo/like ‘Why you leave me here with Ralfy?,’” in reference to Drakeo’s brother Ralfy the Plug, who is nowhere to be seen.
Hed brings out local Inglewood cult hero Rucci and AzChike to perform “Light It Up.” These two—along with Drakeo, Shoreline Mafia, 03 Greedo (who later said he was invited but couldn’t make it, and whose style would be evoked on stage by Wallie the Sensei), and a host of others—represented, toward the end of the 2010s, an emerging L.A. avant-garde that also seemed poised to cross over. Deaths, incarcerations, and the whims of streaming and radio slowed a lot of this momentum. And still, it’s surreal to see the BlueBucksClan rap about stealth Prada where the Showtime Lakers used to play.
Hed’s cast skews contemporary until he brings out the dance legend Tommy the Clown, who stalks around the stage with typical authority while a coterie of young dancers scythe through the drum patterns of mostly recent songs—until Suga Free’s “Why U Bullshittin?” elicits a roar from the arena. Beside me: a couple in Death Row shirts and black N95s.
Mustard comes out to pyrotechnics and, confusingly, a few bars of “Back That Azz Up.” From there he spends a while doing an out-of-the-box set: “Rack City,” “I’m Different,” “Show Me,” and “I Don’t Fuck With You.” Collaborators come out for a pair of songs each—Blxst and Steve Lacy hear warm welcomes, Ty Dolla $ign a bigger pop for “Paranoid”—and none, up to and including Tyler, the Creator, are quite as rapturously received as Dom Kennedy, whose “My Type of Party” brings the Forum to a fever pitch. The back half of the set is an extended tribute to Nipsey Hussle, which is augmented by a Roddy Ricch appearance, and a mini-set from YG which, one imagines, he might have made career-spanning if there were anything in the back half of his career that fans cared to hear.
“Fuck Wit Dre Day” plays on the house speakers between sets, in case anyone was worried this wasn’t about to get pointed.
Well: “Stan.”
As Guru said, it’s mostly the voice. For as unique as Kendrick, or any number of rappers who touched the stage tonight sound, there is no one quite like E-40. The last time I interviewed him, late last year, we were riding in an SUV from downtown L.A. to SoFi Stadium, which shares a parking lot with the Forum. Somewhere on the 110, he told me: “L.A. and the Bay have always been family. That’s what’s beautiful about it: You’d assume that we would have some type of war or something, but we never let that happen because we’re all family.” The back half of his pre-recorded intro to Kendrick’s set is drowned out by screams.
When I moved to L.A. more than a decade ago, I worked at what was then called the Staples Center, and, since then, I have regularly covered shows at virtually every venue in the city; I’ve seen rap concerts of every conceivable size, ambition, and level of execution. And still, I’ve never heard a room get quite as loud as the Forum did in the silence following “Euphoria,” Kendrick’s scorched-earth opener. I saw and heard people rap every lyric—except for the new ones, which referenced Pac, and Drake’s ridiculous AI gambit.
When Kendrick arrives at the line, in the first verse of “King Kunta,” about the “rapper with a ghostwriter,” he underlines it—just as he had with a half-dozen other bars on songs like “DNA.,” “Element.,” and “King’s Dead.” A whole catalog recast as a character indictment.
When “Like That,” the Future and Metro Boomin song that finally brought the Kendrick-Drake beef to the surface, drops, the lighting scheme abruptly changes. The lasers and the underside of the jumbotron are red, like always, but the screens themselves are black-and-white; you really can picture Melle Mel being dragged into this. Until this point, Kendrick had only brought out his Black Hippy compatriots, Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock. But then those Scott Storch keys hit, and Dr. Dre hops on stage to run through “Still D.R.E.” and “California Love”—just the first verse, though. The logic tracks: If Kendrick is going to take issue with Drake’s clumsy attempt to channel Pac, he’d better stop short.
When the Roger Troutman sample cuts off—and after a little bit of goading from Kendrick—Dre whispers the four words the crowd has been waiting all night to hear: “I see dead people.” In all, Kendrick will play “Not Like Us” five times, in full or in part, often restarting it after fans stretch the “A-minor” line to cartoon dimensions. In the past decade, Billboard has reconfigured its formula to account for streams when measuring a song or album’s popularity. And in fact, “Not Like Us” did become a No. 1 hit, Kendrick’s first solo debut on top of the Hot 100. But some things aren’t quantifiable. I think I’m typical of Angelenos in that I’ll never forget where I was the evening it dropped, or the way it was inescapable outside as soon as the next morning. It’s one of the most outrageous, audacious diss songs ever—a radio hit accusing a pop star of being a pedophile!—and ends with a full verse of music criticism, hand-waving away Drake’s marathon of inertia by shading the whole project as parasitic. It’s a rallying cry of shocking specificity. And even on a night of imperfect reunion—fissure lines of tension patched hastily or not at all—it is, for now and maybe forever, undeniable.
