Anthony ‘Top Dawg’ Tiffith Launched The Careers of Kendrick, SZA and Doechii — And Wants TDE ‘To Last Generations’

When Kendrick Lamar released his sixth studio album, GNX, last November, it culminated the rapper’s biggest year yet. But on “heart pt. 6,” he showed he hadn’t forgotten where he came from.

“Top used to record me back when it was poor me/And now we at the round table for what ­assures me,” he rapped, later adding, “Now it’s about Kendrick, I wanna evolve, place my skill set as a Black exec.”

In 2022, Lamar had left his longtime label home, Top Dawg Entertainment, to continue building his own company, pgLang, alongside his business partner and former TDE president, Dave Free — and years of lessons from TDE CEO Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith have continued to guide Lamar, in both music and business.

“I told him to start his own label,” says Tiffith, 51. “Take everything you learned from me and do your s–t.” For Tiffith, who’d taken the teenage Lamar under his wing some 20 years ago, the rapper’s departure was bittersweet. But they still looked like family in Lamar’s Grammy Award-winning “Not Like Us” music video when it dropped in July 2024. They chuckled together — Tiffith in his trademark red TDE cap, Lamar sporting a black pgLang snapback — while standing with TDE executives and artists outside of the Nickerson Gardens housing projects in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood, where Tiffith was born and raised.

The legacies of Lamar and TDE are forever intertwined — and his ongoing victory lap has coincided with that of TDE’s current marquee act. He and SZA co-headlined their first stadium run, the Grand National Tour, this year, grossing $256.4 million across 23 North American shows from April to June, according to Billboard Boxscore, before they headed to Europe this summer; from its North American dates alone, it became the highest-grossing reported co-headlining tour ever. Lamar took an even bigger musical stage in February, when he headlined the Super Bowl LIX halftime show — and after SZA joined him to perform their swoon-worthy GNX collaboration “Luther,” the track topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 13 consecutive weeks. Meanwhile, bolstered by the late-2024 release of its deluxe LANA edition, SZA’s SOS reached 13 nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200 and has spent 100 nonconsecutive weeks in the chart’s top 10, making it the longest-running top 10 album by a Black artist and by a woman (surpassing Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Adele’s 21, respectively).

While Lamar, SZA and ScHoolboy Q formed TDE’s vanguard in the 2010s, Doechii, who’s managed by Tiffith’s son and TDE president Anthony “Moosa” Tiffith Jr., has recently led the label’s new crop of stars. The rapper earned her first Hot 100 top 10 in March with “Anxiety,” and in April, she scored her first top 10 on the Billboard 200 after the wider physical release of her 2024 mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal, which won the Grammy for best rap album. Come October, Doechii will embark on the sold-out Live From the Swamp Tour, and she and ScHoolboy Q will open for Lamar’s Australian stadium dates in December.

But her jam-packed schedule comes at a cost: Doechii’s long-awaited debut album might not arrive by year’s end, despite her previous statement that it would. “She’s working on it,” Tiffith assures. “She’s stacking up wins and getting her name out before the big drop.”

Before TDE established itself as an incubator for powerhouse talent, Tiffith broke into the music business as a 23-year-old trying to get kids out of the streets — including himself. “Doing what I was doing don’t last forever. Most folks end up dead or in jail,” he says. He found inspiration from his uncle, Crips leader-turned-anti-violence activist Michael Concepcion, who managed R&B singer Rome and produced the West Coast Rap All-Stars’ 1990 Grammy-nominated peace song, “We’re All in the Same Gang.” “That showed me music could be more than just a hustle — it could change lives, bring people together and feed my family,” Tiffith reflects.

In 1997, Tiffith built a studio in the back of his Carson, Calif., home that he dubbed the House of Pain. “It was like boot camp for MCs. On any given day, you might walk into the studio to your verse muted, ad-libs playing and n—as on the ground laughing at your record,” he says. “We called it House of Pain because you were going to leave better… [but] it might hurt a little in the process.” Much like those recording at his studio, Tiffith encountered his fair share of obstacles. In his 2017 Billboard cover story, he recalled buying studio equipment from a man who offered to set it up — and blindfolding the seller before driving him to the House of Pain so that he couldn’t return to steal anything. “I learned to operate it looking over the shoulder of this guy named CoT and anybody else willing to show me something, on top of a whole lot of trial and error,” he says.

Once “the music coming out [of the House of Pain] was too good to keep in the backyard,” he says, Tiffith founded TDE in 2004. He heard a verse from fellow Watts local Jay Rock and chased him down — in 2017, Tiffith said that Rock had been hiding from him because he thought he was in trouble — finally catching the rapper while he got a haircut on a porch. Tiffith told Rock to pull up to the studio, and in 2005, he became TDE’s first signee. Tiffith signed Lamar (who went by K.Dot at the time) a few weeks later; Tiffith had hired Free, then a computer technician, for help; Free seized the opportunity to play his high school friend Lamar’s mixtape off his computer. As Ab-Soul and ScHoolboy Q came into the fold in 2007 and 2009, respectively, and formed the rap supergroup Black Hippy with Rock and Lamar, the TDE top brass outlined the five tenets for success in the rap game on the studio’s front door: charisma, personality, swagger; substance; lyrics; uniqueness; and work ethic.

“Walking in the studio, seeing them sleep on the floor, couches and in the booth, record[ing] all night, clown[ing] each other in between takes — we didn’t even know we was making history,” Tiffith says.

Meanwhile, TDE’s triumvirate of Tiffith and co-presidents Terrence “Punch” Henderson and Free “locked in on the vision — I handled the big-picture business moves, they helped shape the creative direction and the artist development,” he explains. “Between the three of us, having the dopest MCs on the [West] Coast and the rest of the team, we built a system where we could move in the industry like a major but stay true to ourselves like the House of Pain days.” And while TDE has since strategically partnered with majors like RCA, Interscope and Capitol, maintaining its ownership and brand identity empowers the label to grow on its own terms.

After celebrating TDE’s 20th anniversary last year, Tiffith now has his sights set on the silver screen. In March, the label launched TDE Films and announced the new division is co-producing the urban action horror film The Zone with former Lionsgate co-chair Rob Friedman, which 20th Century Studios acquired. Infiltrating Hollywood allows TDE to continue affecting and driving culture across various mediums outside of music. “If you only play in one lane, you can get boxed in,” Tiffith says. Besides, TDE has forayed into film before: Tiffith and Lamar curated the Grammy-nominated, Billboard 200-topping soundtrack to 2018’s Black Panther, which heavily featured Lamar and the majority of the label’s roster, and SZA made her film debut earlier this year alongside Keke Palmer in the buddy comedy One of Them Days.

Still, even as it expands its portfolio, TDE is also growing its roster. Long Beach rapper Ray Vaughn, who released his debut mixtape, The Good The Bad The Dollar Menu, in April and was included in the 2025 XXL Freshman Class, is the label’s newest rising rap star. And Ethiopian Sudanese pop-rocker Alemeda’s 2024 debut EP, FK IT, broadened the scope of the kind of act TDE is looking to sign. “I have my eyes on a couple of things as we speak,” teases Tiffith, who adds that he’s interested in artists in the “alternative, Afrobeats, Latin, country” spaces.

Even SZA and Doechii have gone beyond TDE’s rap and R&B foundation: SOS incorporated gospel, folk and punk rock and helped the former become a mainstream pop star, while the latter counts Katy Perry and Jennie as collaborators. While Alligator Bites Never Heal positioned Doechii as rap’s “it” girl, “she’s still giving y’all the full range,” Tiffith says. “We’re letting her show everything she can do.”

Doechii’s wide-ranging success also speaks to Moosa’s artist development skills, assuring the elder Tiffith that his son can take TDE to the next level in the future. “This is a family business. My sons Moosa and Brandon [TDE’s chief marketing officer] are already holding it down, preparing to take it even further. Punch is my blood cousin, and he’s been here from day one helping build this foundation,” Tiffith says. “I want this to last generations, with each era adding to what I started, keeping the same values we built TDE on.”

This story appears in the Aug. 30, 2025, issue of Billboard.