By now, you’ve probably heard — or at least heard ABOUT — J. Cole’s new song “7 Minute Drill,” in which the North Carolina rapper goes in on frequent collaborator-turned-rival Kendrick Lamar. That’s probably why you’re here in the first place. You heard — or at least read about — his line that goes: “Your first sh*t was classic, your last sh*t was tragic / Your second sh*t put n****s to sleep but they gassed it.” And now you’re thinking, “Huh, what WAS Kendrick Lamar’s second album?” I mean, look at the title of this post; you’re only getting this if you searched for it.
And hey, we here at Uproxx understand any possible confusion. After all, Wikipedia has a list of albums that seems to undermine the common consensus about those albums (setting aside, I guess, how you personally feel about any of Kendrick’s output); going by that list, Section.80 was the classic and n****s gassed Good Kid, MAAD City.
However, I’m going to posit that he was starting with Good Kid, and that the gassed album was To Pimp A Butterfly. After all, when Section.80 was first released on Apple Music back in 2011, there was some debate about whether it counted as a “mixtape” or an “album” — a common source of confusion in those days. It was also released independently, without the backing of Aftermath and Interscope that Kendrick’s later output received.
So while Section.80 is technically K. Dot’s first album, many people contend that Good Kid was his actual debut. In any case, it’s the one that best fits the description given in “7 Minute Drill,” despite what some pedantic rap nerds on Twitter are probably carping on about right now. That would also make the description of “Butterfly,” its Grammy-winning 2015 follow-up, the album that fans slept on while gassing it.
And hey, setting aside what the aforementioned rap nerds are talking about… I was there. I remember. People did not like — or just did not get — that album. Even today, it’s got the second-lowest streaming numbers of any album in Kendrick’s discography on Spotify after Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers (or, okay, the independently-released Section.80). Most of those streams appear to be retroactive, by the way. I’ve called it a case of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in the past, and the numbers appear to bear that out (men lie, women lie, etc….). Internet FOMO drives a lot of the discussion of K. Dot’s catalog, but to use Occam’s Razor here, while he has some truly outspoken fans, it looks like there aren’t all that many of them — or they’re just lying to look cool.
So, TL;DR: even though Good Kid is technically Kendrick Lamar’s second album, most people consider it his first, making To Pimp A Butterfly the second album J. Cole trashes on “7 Minute Drill.”
