You can explain four decades of Los Angeles hip-hop through a single image captured at the end of Kendrick Lamar’s concert “The Pop Out—Ken & Friends” on Juneteenth 2024. After the historic three-and-a-half-hour testament to the creativity of Black California culture, nearly all the performers assembled onstage to be Insta-bronzed for eternity.
“Let the world see this,” Lamar announced to 16,000 euphoric fans at Inglewood’s sold-out Kia Forum and nearly half a million livestreaming the show. “You ain’t seen this many sections on one stage keeping it together and having peace.… This is unity at its finest.… We done lost a lot of homies to this music shit.… And for all of us to be on this stage together from each side of L.A.: Crips, Bloods, Pirus. This is special.”
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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The photo was a West Coast hip-hop analogue to A Great Day in Harlem, for which dozens of jazz titans, including Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charles Mingus, gathered for Esquire magazine in 1958. Or maybe it was closer to the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover—if the Beatles & Co. had thrown up the signs of their respective sets. Yet the subtext was more complex.
If Lamar’s “Pop Out” was nominally a victory lap to celebrate his steamrolling of his Canadian pop nemesis, Drake, the Compton native envisioned something more profound. By inviting rappers from rival gang factions, the “good kid” from the “m.A.A.d. city” was attempting to heal the internecine squabbles that have long plagued the streets of Los Angeles and gangsta rap itself. His eclectic curation stamped home the message that Black West Coast artists have been stylistic vanguards since N.W.A. rocked their first Raiders jackets.
It’s no coincidence that Lamar’s final costar of the night was the then-59-year-old gangsta rap godfather Dr. Dre, who performed “Still D.R.E.” and 2Pac’s “California Love,” the real anthem of this island on the land. Bridging generations, Lamar enlisted everyone from then-18-year-old phenom 310Babii to Tyler, the Creator, the genre arsonist whose Odd Future crew defined 2010s alt-rap subversion. Even Steve Lacy, the openly queer multiplatinum modern funkster, took the stage to remind the world that Los Angeles once supplied the sunshine groove of the Whispers, Shalamar, and Lakeside.
“The Pop Out” was a declaration of West Coast patrimony. A hip-hop high-water mark. A chance for Lamar to stake his from-the-soil vision of realness and authenticity—one that stood in stark contrast to a homogenized, dislocated, and spiritually bankrupt broader culture.
A HOLY WAR
On Juneteenth, Lamar did everything but hold a séance for the ghost of Tupac Shakur. Even his wardrobe—a red hat, hoodie, and jeans—echoed a famous 2Pac outfit from the 1994 Source Awards. But it went deeper than aesthetics. No artist had embodied the sound of West Coast hip-hop quite like that heir to Black Panther royalty, who first emerged from the Bay Area with socially conscious lyrics and later became an adopted son and patron saint of the Southland, writing “To Live & Die in L.A.,” which supplanted Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” as the city’s true pledge of allegiance.
It was only a matter of time before 2Pac came into conflict with the East Coast. He was an outlaw kinsman of the sun, with a sprawling vision that shattered protocol and taboos—a sensibility diametrically opposed to that of the hermetic, compact, and tightly wound five boroughs. From 2Pac, Lamar absorbed rawness, vulnerability, and a refusal to back down. So when Drake confronted him in early 2024, Lamar was prepared to go scorched-earth like his slain idol.
The Lamar-Drake beef that led to “The Pop Out” had simmered for years. Occasional offhand disses escalated in March 2024, when Lamar recorded a blistering verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s platinum smash “Like That” (which samples “Everlasting Bass,” one of the touchstones of ’80s West Coast electro-rap, as well as N.W.A. cofounder Eazy-E). With a relatively tame warning shot, he dismissed the idea that Drake and J. Cole belonged anywhere near him in rap’s holy trinity.
The former TV star from Toronto fired back, but the sardonic “Taylor Made Freestyle” was a fatal miscalculation: He trolled Lamar’s devotion to the gangsta rap canon by deploying AI 2Pac and Snoop Dogg voices to mock a famous night onstage in 2011 when Snoop passed the torch of West Coast hip-hop to Lamar. It was a declaration of holy war.
Lamar responded with a fatwa. In Drake, he saw a disingenuous chameleon co-opting organic subcultural sounds to create an amorphous globalized pop. After brutal back-and-forths, Lamar delivered the knockout punch with “Not Like Us,” a phenomenon without clear parallel in popular music that is one of the most vicious and unusual hits in history. He called Drake a certified pedophile, skewered him as a Reconstruction-era carpetbagger, and sneered that Oakland might murder him for disrespecting 2Pac. Yet the song was hilarious, virtuosic, and so catchy that it became the centerpiece of the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, took home five Grammys, and even aired during the Democratic National Convention.
Its sheer musicality aside, “The Pop Out” ingeniously blended improvisation and intentionality. Between rap performances, the rainbow-wigged Tommy the Clown showcased the blindingly athletic dance styles he pioneered in the early ’90s to keep South Central kids from gangs and drugs. The night’s narrator was East Bay slang rationalist E-40, embodying the interstate exchange of ideas that has long linked Southern and Northern California.
It wasn’t merely about nostalgia and reverence for the past. “The Pop Out” introduced (and reintroduced) the homegrown heroes of the past decade and a half of Southern California hip-hop. The concert was divided into three acts, the first featuring the younger generation from San Pedro, Compton, South Central, Long Beach, and East Hollywood. Some were Bloods, some Crips, some from graffiti crews. Lamar conscripted the city’s hottest female rap quintet, Cuzzos, and nodded to L.A.’s massive Latino hip-hop fan base with OhGeesy of Shoreline Mafia, which assumed Cypress Hill’s mantle of narcotically inclined, multiracial party rap.
Some artists instantiate a radical break from tradition, and others inherit and understand the weight of it. Lamar is one of the latter, the latest and last in a line of lyrical messiahs anointed by Dr. Dre, including Snoop Dogg, Kurupt, Eminem, and 50 Cent. Lamar also soaked up sauce from the avant-garde jazz-cracked levitations of Freestyle Fellowship, born of the fabled open mic nights at venues like South Central’s Good Life Café and Project Blowed.
For most of L.A. hip-hop’s first 25 years, Dr. Dre was the kingmaker. Without his cosign and beats, it was next to impossible to become a household name east of Las Vegas. L.A. lived in the shadow of New York, which originated the art form and where most major music publications were headquartered. Then, in the late 2000s, grimy Atlanta trap became the de facto national sound, even at frat parties. But after Dre executive produced Lamar’s first masterpiece, 2012’s triple-platinum good kid, m.A.A.d. city, he signaled a changing of the guard.
Around the same time, YouTube and SoundCloud upended traditional gatekeepers. One of the breakout stars was the super-producer DJ Mustard, who organically bubbled to fame after producing era-defining underground hits for L.A. natives Tyga, Ty Dolla $ign, and YG—the latter two of whom joined him onstage at “The Pop Out.”
If Dre made sinuous, slow-rolling G-funk for cruising in ’64 Chevys, Mustard cooked up a modern, dance floor–ready fusion that retained gangsta rap menace. It was no fluke that he produced “Not Like Us,” furnishing Lamar with napalm strings and playground-snap snares.
While “The Pop Out” affirmed living life outside and on one’s own terms, it didn’t ignore noirish realities of the flatlands south of the 10 freeway. The first West Coast gangsta rap song, Ice-T’s “6 in the Mornin’,” chronicled an LAPD raid, but his first chart hit was “Colors,” a harrowing saga of gang violence. Onstage, Lamar openly acknowledged the devastation: “Everybody on this stage got fallen soldiers.” Nipsey Hussle received a beatification as Mustard honored the late rapper with a suite of his songs. In Hussle, 2Pac’s pro-Black ethos and community-mindedness had shone particularly bright.
Hussle wasn’t the only deceased modern great whose impact was felt at “The Pop Out.” While street politics and the still-unsolved nature of his gang-related 2021 homicide kept his name from being uttered more than once, the stylistic influence of the late Drakeo the Ruler was omnipresent in cadences and lingo. Just as Dre and Snoop had revolutionized California rap, Drakeo’s sinister and paranoid “nervous music” triggered a seismic rupture with its traditionalist predecessors.
The specifics mattered, but Lamar’s brilliance was in executing these epochal, generations-straddling ideas without flinching from dualities. Gangsta rap is as ingrained in the Southern California cliché as sunshine and freeway traffic, yet its causes and effects are rarely considered outside incubating communities. At “The Pop Out,” the only rapper to ever win a Pulitzer artfully delivered on N.W.A.’s promise: the strength of street knowledge.
SHOWTIME
It was no accident that “The Pop Out” was staged on sacred turf. The former “Fabulous Forum” was the home of the Showtime Lakers and a young Kobe Bryant (“We’ve been fucked up since Kobe died,” Lamar said). As a child, Lamar couldn’t afford game tickets; he once sneaked in to watch the final two minutes of a fourth-quarter blowout to see his hero, Kobe.
In the show’s final act, Lamar unloaded a lacerating arsenal, including “Swimming Pools (Drank),” “Alright,” “Money Trees,” and “DNA.” Despite the subject matter—substance abuse, racial upliftment, home invasions, generational trauma—they all went hard. Alongside him were Jay Rock, Schoolboy Q, and Ab-Soul, his brethren at Top Dawg Entertainment, the powerhouse label Snoop called the new, “better version of Death Row.”
Everyone was welcome, but the performance was for locals only. Lamar was speaking directly to those raised in these streets, who knew which hats not to wear, for whom this music was the soundtrack to life and death.
Forty years were distilled into four hours. For once, no one could ignore the sonic innovations that Southern California’s most impoverished communities had spawned—innovations that changed the world. Here was an original heritage no AI or interloper could replicate.
The concert culminated in “Not Like Us.” Sometimes Lamar performed it solo, sometimes with the “us” implied in the title. He rapped it five times back-to-back, including before and after the group photo.
The meaning was both figurative and literal. This was a cultural transmission disguised as a rap concert. For a few hours, the world glimpsed the resurrection of the past, the indomitability of the present, and the hope for the future of the West Coast. And in Los Angeles, the message was unmistakable: Unity was possible if the ancient vendettas could finally be retired.•
Jeff Weiss is the founder of the music blog and online magazine Passion of the Weiss and author of the book Waiting for Britney Spears.
