Kendrick Lamar’s tragic past as he witnessed a murder aged just five

Kendrick Lamar is set to make history as the first solo hip-hop artist to headline the Super Bowl halftime show tonight (February 9). The performance comes just days after he won a record five Grammy Awards for his hit single Not Like Us.

The 37-year-old's current success is a million miles from his troubled background which saw him witness his first murder at the tender age of five.

"It was outside my apartment unit. A guy was out there serving his narcotics and somebody rolled up with a shotgun and blew his chest out.

"Admittedly, it done something to me right then and there. It let me know that this is not only something that I’m looking at, but it’s something that maybe I have to get used to,” he said in a 2015 interview with interview NPR.

Just three years later, he would see his second murder at a burger restaurant just six blocks from where he grew up in Compton, made famous as the homeplace of Run DMC. "Eight years old, walking home from McNair Elementary. Dude was in the drive-thru ordering his food, and homey ran up, boom boom—smoked him," he said of the incident.

Kendrick's parents had moved to Compton from Chicago in an attempt to escape the city’s gang culture, where his father Kenny Duckworth had been associated with the notorious Gangster Disciples gang. He had a tough upbringing and the family were homeless for a time.

Despite the chaos in his young life he excelled academically but a stutter meant he was a quiet child who enjoyed writing and he credits his seventh grade teacher, Mr. Inge who is credited with giving the young Kendrick an interest in poetry and creative writing.

The Grammy winning star has admitted he processed the trauma he had suffered in his life by writing stories and poems before later turning to lyrics. “You could put all your feelings down on a sheet of paper, and they’d make sense to you,” he told Rolling Stone in a June 2015 interview. “I liked that.”

He adopted the moniker K-Dot and began performing as a rapper but finding his passion didn't prevent the teen from falling in with a bad crowd and getting into trouble. Although never part of a gang he hung out with a bad crowd who often robbed people’s homes.

This led to run-ins with the police and on occassion his parents kicked him out of the house for two days after police said he took part in a local incident.

However Kendrick turned his life around channeling his experiences into his music. "The more violence you're exposed to as a kid, the more it chips away at you. For the most part, the kids that I was around, it broke them... Before I let it chip away at me 100 per cent, I was making my transition into music," he has said.

With 22 Grammy Awards under his belt his transition is now complete and his Super Bowl LIX appearance has been hotly-anticipated since the NFL announced it in a video shared on X in September 2024. While he has been cagey about what people can expect from his performance he has teased it will involve "storytelling".

“(People should expect) storytelling, I think I’ve always been very open about storytelling through all my catalogue and my history of music, and I’ve always had a passion about bringing that on whatever stage I’m on.

“Whether it’s a world tour or whether it was 500 people at Key Club, I’ve always had a formula there, so a sense of making people listen, but also see and think a little,” he said