If you’re going to ride through Compton, Kendrick Lamar might be one of the best tour guides you’ll come across. For his new Reebok ad, K. Dot takes us through his beloved city and explains that he’s always thinking about home. “It was really about getting to that success level where you can go back to your neighborhood and people feel like they look up to you,” he says in the black and white ad. While Kendrick got his start in Compton, the MC explains how he was able to make the moves he needed to make to establish himself as one of rap’s most prominent figures today.
“The moment I defined myself and freed myself was the time I locked myself in the studio and said, ‘You need to do music,’” Lamar explains in the clip. “Sometimes the most riskiest things you can do can end up being the most important.” Take Kendrick’s tour through Compton and watch as he appears to tinker with a new rhyme and then also as he recites part of his now famous “I Am” verse, a part of which he also spit for GQ last year.
