Kendrick Lamar was just 6 years old when Dr. Dre released The Chronic in 1992. He was 8 when his father took him to watch Dre and Tupac Shakur film the first of two videos for Shakur’s "California Love" in his hometown of Compton, and 25 when he released his album good kid, m.A.A.d city through a deal with Dre’s Aftermath label, Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) and Interscope Records on Oct. 22, 2012.

In the 10 years since its release, the GRAMMY-nominated good kid, m.A.A.d city ushered in a new era for authentic storytelling in rap music. Lamar’s 12-track release — which captures a dramatized day in his life as a 17-year-old back in 2004 — is no focus group-engineered collection of heat-seeking singles. Instead, GKMC embraced the creation of an album as a whole conceptual body of work.

Yet in the years following The Chronic and leading up to good kid, m.A.A.d city (Lamar’s second album following 2011’s Section.80, though his first major project), Compton's rap output was squarely street-centric. Leading this wave of artists was The Game, whose double-platinum selling debut The Documentary was released in 2005. While Lamar raps about envying "Jayceon" (The Game’s given name) on good’s "Black Boy Fly," no major label artists at the time represented the perspective of the average Compton kid who didn’t gangbang.

"You don’t hear no artists from Compton showing vulnerability. You always hear about the person pulling the trigger. You never hear about the one in front of it. That’s the most interesting story to me," Lamar told The Guardian in 2012. "At first, I was scared to show fear because you can never be sure how people will perceive you. But I dared myself to do that, to stand out. Now I’ll talk about being beaten up or robbed or making a stupid decision because of a girl or whatever… At the end of the day [my success] is because people perceived me as a human being rather than an action figure that can't be touched."

The vulnerabilities expressed on good kid, m.A.A.d city's  songs and skits — which Lamar labeled "a short film" on the cover — changed not only the view of Compton, but what can be popular in mainstream rap music. While breakout songs such as "Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe" and "Swimming Pools (Drank)" took on lives of their own, fans were eager to hear and appreciate the entirety of Lamar's "my angry adolescence divided."

Listeners quickly get a vivid sense of how a "good kid" can get lost in a tug of war between the streets, family and the church. Lamar paints a vivid picture of how peer pressure works when it comes to drugs and dating, and what it feels like to not be the superhero of the story who gets the girl — but to instead be a guy who can still dream of such greatness.

"People know what's real and know what's fake," Lamar stressed in a 2012 interview with The Fader. "They know who really lived it and who's trying to live it. That's what I think people rock with me genuinely, because they know I'm not out here trying to glorify certain situations through these records or say I'm the biggest killer in the world. I don't believe in none of these rappers anyway. The real gangsters, you never really see their faces because they're either in the ground, in prison or behind the scenes."

A mere four days after Lamar released good kid, m.A.A.d city, Complex identified it as a potential classic. The publication wondered how much time was needed to make such a declaration in rap music: "Give it a decade. Are storyline-driven albums part of a regular rap repertoire? Has the range of off-kilter cadences narrowed or broadened?"

"It’s classic worthy," Lamar said in a separate Complex interview that week. "Once it gets a few years behind it they’ll be looking back saying ‘Yeah, Kendrick Lamar made a classic his first album."

Today, the 2012 album is much more than a rap classic. Rolling Stone recently named good kid, m.A.A.d city the best concept album of all time, putting it ahead of storytelling classics like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, the Who’s Tommy and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album has remained on the Billboard 200 chart for a decade.

"I think it changed albums in general," Sounwave, who produced "Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe" and other songs on good kid, m.A.A.d city, told Billboard this June. "For a long time, albums were made song for song, we brought it back to actual concepts where you have to listen to the full thing to understand it. So people can actually feel how you felt making the album. I think that was missing at that time."

"He always had the [good kid] concept in his head, that was always going to be his first major album," Sounwave added, revealing that he and Lamar recorded but didn’t finish ideas that were along the same lines in 2010. "After Section.80, we had a little bit of clout and more resources. So we were able to reach out to people like Pharrell, and of course, Dr. Dre. We could actually live out our musical fantasies, if you will, and explore."

"I always knew my first album [would] be a concept simply because I looked at all the best albums that I grew up to," Lamar explained to DubCNN in March 2013, citing The Chronic and Tupac's Makaveli. "They always had their own identity in a certain era of music, especially now when everything is so different. So when you get a concept album from a new artist it shows that it still lives in the game."

Lamar explained in the same DubCNN interview that Dr. Dre told him to "do my own thing" when working on good kid, m.A.A.d city. Once he presented the music he had, Lamar was told that he had everything he needed to release the album without any additional beats by Dre.

"You have ‘Kill My Vibe,’ you have ‘Poetic Justice,’ you have ‘The Recipe,’ you have ‘Swimming Pools.’ That’s your four records right there. And you have a body of work that’s already done. Let’s put it out!’" Lamar said, recalling his conversation with Dr. Dre. "So that’s how it went, simple as that." Dr. Dre appears on the Just Blaze-produced "Compton" and on "The Recipe," a single that appears on the deluxe edition.

The industry took notice. Lamar received five GRAMMY Award nominations in 2014, including Album Of The Year for good kid, m.A.A.d city, Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance for "Swimming Pools (Drank)" and Best Rap/Sung Performance for "Now or Never," a duet with Mary J. Blige on the deluxe edition of the album. He was also nominated for Best R&B Performance for his appearance on Miguel’s "How Many Drinks?"

GKMC has since inspired a wide range of artists, and is studied for its influence on creating conceptual work over singles. In fall 2014, good kid, m.A.A.d city became the subject of a course at Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Georgia. The course explored the immediacy of the storytelling on Lamar’s album, alongside books by James Baldwin and James Joyce.

"With Kendrick’s album, you’ve got gang violence, you’ve got child-family development in the inner city, you’ve got drug use and the war on drugs, you’ve got sex slavery, human trafficking — a lot of the things that are hot-button issues for today are just inherent in the world of Compton, California," instructor Adam Diehl explained to USA Today. "What if people had said, 'we shouldn’t study Toni Morrison or Hemingway or Emily Dickinson because they’re too new?' Everything was new or too popular or too risqué at the time, but I just think that great stories last and the story of good kid, m.A.A.d city, is lasting."

The album’s impact also reverberated into the international pop world. A year before BTS’ 2014 debut album, the future K-Pop icons released "학교의눈물 (School of Tears)" — a cover of Lamar’s "Swimming Pools" in music and cadence, with new lyrics about bullying in schools. And in 2015, Lamar fan Taylor Swift invited him to guest star on a remix of "Bad Blood" that was released as a single. Lamar’s second verse on the song includes a nod to lyrics from GKMC's "Backseat Freestyle." In 2016, the collaboration received a GRAMMY Award for Best Music Video.

The album was still ripe for dissection years after its release. Okayplayer published The Encyclopedia of ‘good kid, m.A.A.d city’ to explain the album’s personnel, lyrical references; Genius released a video showing songs that sampled and interpolated elements of the album, including Machine Gun Kelly, Thundercat, Logic, Travis Scott and even Lamar himself. According to WhoSampled.com, dozens of artists have used remixed or covered elements of good kid, m.A.A.d city for rap, rock and dance music songs.

A decade on and it’s easy to answer the questions that the Complex pundits posed  in October 2012: Yes, albums with storylines have returned to the popular music canon (see Beyoncé’s Lemonade, for starters), and the "range of off-kilter cadences" became a standard-bearer rather than an exception in hip-hop on the West Coast and beyond, from Roddy Ricch to Lil Uzi Vert.

With good kid, m.A.A.d city, Lamar showed strength in vulnerability as well as the value in imbuing a feeling into a body of work. That legacy continues in his discography and in all the artistic brains he has sparked, some of whom likely haven’t even started making music yet.

"So many popular songs come out on the radio, and five years down the line, you forgot your favorite song that was out in 2005 or 2004," Lamar told Complex in 2012. "But for a kid in the 12th grade listening to Kendrick Lamar who knows the story, gets my album, and realizes the whole arc behind it, that’s something he’ll never forget. He might not remember the exact song he was in love with until he hears it again, but he’ll always remember how I stamped myself, and what it was about."

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