Section.80

Kendrick Lamar's debut studio album, Section.80, arrived on July 2, 2011, via Top Dawg Entertainment. After years of mixtapes as K.Dot, including 2010's Overly Dedicated, Lamar channeled his experiences into a concept album about the 1980s crack epidemic, racism, and the medication tolerance of his millennial generation. The production, mostly handled by TDE's in-house Digi+Phonics crew alongside contributors like THC, Tommy Black, Wyldfyer, Terrace Martin, and J. Cole, blends conscious and alternative hip-hop across 16 tracks. Guests include GLC, Colin Munroe, Ashtrobot, BJ the Chicago Kid, Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, and singer-songwriter Alori Joh.

The album's title combines Section 8 housing, the low-income developments where Lamar was raised, with the decade of his birth, framing the project as an exploration of a generation raised under the crack epidemic and the Reagan administration. Although marketed as a studio album, Lamar has consistently referred to Section.80 as a mixtape. The only single, HiiiPoWeR, dropped on April 12, 2011. Section.80 debuted at number 113 on the Billboard 200 and sold 130,000 copies domestically by February 2014. On January 20, 2026, the RIAA certified it platinum, nearly 15 years after release. [edit]