It’s Top Dawg who penned the five-point plan that hangs on the studio wall. “ locked me up in the studio and I’ve been there ever since.” “I was one of those young cats and knuckleheads that was hard headed, that didn’t listen,” he explains. He credits fellow Nickerson citizen, TDE’s founder and namesake Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, with pointing him in this new direction. On last year’s Follow Me Home LP he sounds like a changed man, still tied to his affiliations but considerably more thoughtful and eloquent about them, In a matter of a second nothing matters when you reppin’ for your turf…it’s a sickness when you kill your own kind. 2007’s “Blood Niggaz” is a simplistic and single-minded banging anthem: I’m a Blood nigga when you see me better give it up/ Nothin’ but a B thang homie we don’t give a fuck. A product of Watts’ decidedly Blood-leaning Nickerson Gardens housing projects, his earliest music is blindingly gang affiliated. At 26, he is the eldest of the posse, as well as its earliest initiate. The next day, eating with the other three Black Hippies at a Korean fast-food chain a scant mile from their home base, Rock speaks of his dedication. He blacks out, so to speak, perpetually lunging forward as he raps as if he’s about to jump out of his own skin. After about two hours of this, Rock finally hops into the darkened vocal booth, where that whisper immediately turns into a growl as his trapped-in-the-hood lament comes to life.
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All the while, Jay Rock stays the course, playing that same damn beat, only breaking away from his digital notepad periodically to pull Lamar or TDE president/general manager Dave Free to the side to mutter rhymes in their ears in exchange for a nod of approval. Ab-Soul jumps up from his semi-comatose couch state and breaks into a set of loose, upper-body dance moves as the small assemblage of TDE artists and associates cheers him on half-jokingly. When someone throws on his “Niggahs Already Know,” a minor anthem from his Habits & Contradictions LP, on laptop speakers, the seriousness of the room immediately cracks. Schoolboy Q is nowhere to be found this evening, but his presence is felt nonetheless. He dines and vibes, bobbing his head with a focused calm, alternately staring down the monitor and the rapper behind it, as if to form a psychic connection with whatever it is that Rock is building. When Lamar arrives, with carryout teriyaki chicken in tow, he greets everyone with little more than a simple, distant pound and then makes an immediate beeline to where Rock is sitting. He’s just zoning out, his bushy afro pulled back behind a pair of big black Eazy E-type Loc sunglasses. Behind him, Ab-Soul sits unassumingly on a torn up couch, accompanied by a lady friend. He’s playing the same beat repeatedly, writing and rewriting in his iPhone notepad, mumbling rhymes to himself in the process. On a mild winter night Jay Rock sits transfixed by the dual glow of his phone and a studio monitor. “Perfecting the craft.”Ĭraft is not a word his circle throws around lightly. “We’ve just been in the studio since, that same studio,” says Lamar. It’s here that the roster of Top Dawg Entertainment- Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, Ab-Soul and Schoolboy Q, collectively known as Black Hippy-first met seven years ago.
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The dimly lit studio space leaves just enough room for a tattered couch, a vocal booth and a Pro Tools rig. The inauspicious nerve center for Los Angeles’ most promising hip-hop movement is the back room of a residential home at the end of a cul-de-sac in a reasonably idyllic neighborhood in the city of Carson.