At the Grammys in January, Lamar, dressed in all white, delivered what was considered by many to be the standout performance, an urgent, thrilling collaboration with the Las Vegas alternative rockers Imagine Dragons. Jay-Z was seen singing along, and Taylor Swift was in the front row demurely dancing. But Lamar got shut out. The sunny, politically correct Seattle duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis won Best Album, Song and Performance in the rap category. Macklemore instantly became a public target for outrage, the proverbial white carpetbagger rewarded for co-opting a traditionally black art form. It was such an obvious slight that Macklemore felt the need to apologize to Lamar. “You got robbed,” he wrote in a text message. “It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you.” He also felt the need to publicize that apology, posting the text to his Instagram shortly after sending it. Everyone from The Huffington Post to hip-hop blogs like 2dopeboyz covered the upset. Then they covered the fallout from Macklemore’s text. And then they covered the aftermath of both, in which assorted rap luminaries (Drake, Talib Kweli) weighed in with varying degrees of outrage. Lamar kept his head down. He said only that he thought Macklemore’s win was well deserved. The impressive commercial response to his major-label debut, its warm reception by the famously stuffy Grammy crowd and the drama surrounding the fact that he didn’t actually take any awards home has only ramped up the anticipation of Lamar’s follow-up album.

You could see the West tour as the first step in setting up Lamar’s second act. Often these high-profile tour pairings are politically motivated, planned by label executives and brokered by management teams. That wasn’t the case with West and Lamar. Backstage at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, West personally approached Lamar about joining him on the road. “It’s a different kind of thrill when an actual artist asks you, when Kanye asks you,” Lamar said, pronouncing West’s first name the way he always does, with the emphasis on the last syllable, kahn-YAY. “Now I know he’s really interested in what I do.” Lamar said it was easy to make that happen after the chat, but his team remembered a lot of back and forth. “Believe it or not, we were actually trying not to do the tour,” says Terrence Henderson, better known as Punch, the president of Top Dawg Entertainment, Lamar’s label. “We wanted Kendrick to be recording that whole time.”

By the middle of 2013, Lamar was already exhausted; he’d been on the road for the better part of two years. Remembering the first time he applied for a passport, in 2008, for a family wedding in Cancún, Lamar said: “I got it just for that trip. I didn’t know I’d be using it every day since.” And yet the benefit of joining the Yeezus tour was obvious: exposure to West’s enormous pop fan base — which Lamar will need if he wants a career on par with the icons he name-checked in “Control.” Not to mention that West’s team “wasn’t taking no for an answer,” Henderson says. They got Lamar a studio bus so he could record on the road and promised him a prominent role. “Kanye said he didn’t want to make it seem like we were just the opener,” Lamar remembered. “It was dope to have the actual headliner of the show want my show to be just as good as his.”

After Washington, the Yeezus tour returned to New York, to Madison Square Garden, where Lamar delivered an especially dynamic set. With his band and a backdrop of hazy video clips featuring young girls walking down apocalyptic city streets and menacing men inside grimy apartments mixed in with footage of the rapper’s Compton neighborhood, Lamar’s production is as steeped in realism as West’s is in fantasy. Six layers deep in a semicircle around the stage, everyone from well-heeled bohemian black couples in postwork attire to white teenage girls with glow-stick bracelets stacked from wrist to elbow bounced on command and sang along as Lamar strode across the stage, one hand manning the mike, the other waving in the air like a hip-hop conductor. He finished as he always did on this tour, crouching backward along the gangway that jutted out into the crowd, leading them through the chorus to “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”: “When the lights shut off/and it’s my turn to settle down/my main concern/promise that you will sing about me/promise that you will sing about me.”

Afterward he was settling in backstage, when the voice of a crew member crackled over several headsets that his team wears during a show. “They’re blocking us in so Jamie Foxx and all them can pull their [expletive] in,” he said. “[They] ain’t even part of the show.” Lamar was trying to get back to his hotel before he had to wake up at 4 a.m. to catch another flight to California, but West was about to go on, and the glitterati were in attendance: Leonardo DiCaprio and John McEnroe were inside, as well as such New York power players as the venture capitalist Joshua Kushner and his girlfriend, the model Karlie Kloss. Lamar had to wait until his team could get the vans out of the arena.

Lamar seemed unbothered. He typed on his phone and bantered with his girlfriend, Whitney Alford, who sat on a couch across from him in thigh-high brown suede boots, tights and jean shorts. Lamar tries to keep his relationship with Alford private, so I was surprised to find myself in the room with her. Lamar usually commands from others a low-key deference (I later asked him if he could recall the last time he wasn’t the alpha figure in the room, and he replied, smiling, “It’s been a while”), but Alford was so at ease sassing him that at first I thought she was his sister. When someone suggested that the group make a party stop in Miami after the tour headed south in a few days, Lamar said, “I just don’t think I could ever throw around money at the club.”