Kendrick Lamar is one of the biggest rappers in the world and the most influential rapper known. Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was named after a couple of different people, one of them being the singer and his father whose name was Kenneth Duckworth. Kenneth “Kenny” grew up in certain areas that were more gang-involved than he wanted. He was involved in the notorious Gangster Disciples gang. Kendrick was born on June 17th, 1987 in Compton, California. While growing up, he had 3 younger siblings and lived in Section 8 housing with his family. He unfortunately had to experience homelessness for a little bit of his life during high school after incidents.
While growing up, Kendrick excelled in school almost immediately but was quieter than others because he sometimes struggled with a stutter. After a while, he decided to get into creative writing and poetry. After that, he was able to write plenty of poems with rhymes and even made that a way to release his trauma from the past of when he was a child. Later on in high school, Kendrick decided he would take the role and start performing with rapping. During that time he accidentally joined a bad group of kids who did really bad things even though he was never involved with a gang. Soon after this happened and they started getting reported, Kendrick’s parents found out by local town police and ended up just kicking him out.
At the age of 16, Kendrick made his first music tape under the name of K-Dot. This mixtape drew a lot of interest around the Southern California area which could lead to a record deal with the Independent label Top Dawg Entertainment. A couple of years later, he made another acclaimed mixtape called, “Training Day”. This came out in 2005 then after that, he started to steadily work up with other up-and-coming rappers and artists in the Western area. In 2007, he collaborated with an artist named Jay Rock who introduced a mixtape called No Sleep ‘Til NYC. A few years later in 2009, he produced another mixtape, then in 2010, he collaborated with the rapper Dr. Dre who ended up getting Kendrick to work on one of his unreleased albums called Detox. After those years moved on, he started to release and produce such inspirational rappers and became very successful in his rapping career.
After all of the years and time of rapping, Kendrick has a family of his own with 2 kids and a wife. His wife, Whitney Alford, has known Lamar and has been in a relationship with him since high school. They met at Centennial High School in Compton, California, and shortly after they became friends the two became a couple. After a few years of dating, they introduced their child Uzi in July 2019. The couple didn’t want to release the child’s name until Kendrick put out an album in May of 2022. Then a bit after that, they shared that Whitney had given birth to their second child named Enoch which led to a picture of his family on an album cover. After a long story and times of work, Kendrick’s net worth is $140 million and he now continues to work on new albums and songs with different artists while earning many Grammy’s in the 2025 awards.
