This is the answer.

Consistently making great project

This and F***in Problems introduced him to the mainstream and the rest is history tbh

Plant?

yup this is how i found out about him

this also, remember seeing Section.80 on Itunes had no idea who he was peeped it and was pleasantly surprised

Hiiipower and the drake co sign

He was doing tons of interviews back then, XXL in 2011, doing freestyles (radio freestyles too) and dropping loosies, a lot of shows, torch passing by the west coast, Dre & Paul Rosenberg cosigns, BET freestyles, Drake tour, doing around 30+ features a year, consistently dropping great projects, coachella performance with dre etc
He was basically all over the place

after Rigamortus

I remember going to $30 dollar shows and seeing Kendrick and Cole. That s*** was he best time.

Drake

I think the J. Cole co-sign helped also, people were going crazy over those unreleased songs and rumors of a collab project

I got every Kendrick album vinyl signed. Once his career is over I’m selling them for a million each. 😂😂

everyone in the industry was co-signing him tbh

Game & Dre co-sign

can't forget about the lady gaga cosign at the height of her career lol

You youngsters too young to know that Black Hippy was dropping daily/weekly on nahright and 2dopeboyz back in the day. Right when the hipster/blog rap took off Kendrick dropped Section 80

Yeah I remember those freestyles, the one when he rapped over the lupe beat was when I started paying attention to him.

Got damn I feel old

Catchy Singles + Great albums + Great Marketing

Man

TDE's come up was something else

ny stinks

Yea a big part of why they haven’t had any directions. The old heads still want to be the top dawgs.

it definitely was mostly due to Dre affiliation

he's obviously a plant bro. Who knew of this nigga before Damn

T minus blew him up fr