The song where the album’s narrative truly begins to set itself in motion, Kendrick takes you through a vivid story of how he learned ‘Peer Pressure’ the hard way.

This samples the song “Helt Alene” by the Danish group Suspekt.

The fact that their mission is to complete a robbery without getting caught is really bad. Kendrick thinks that he should never have to be in the position to have to complete this sort of mission, although he’s influenced by his peers to think that this sort of “mission” is necessary when you’re a teenage boy in Compton. Kendrick now sees how unnecessary this was, and how he fell into the traps of peer pressure, as opposed to staying strong and not follow through with these “missions”.

The title of the song is a play on the title of the popular treatise by Sun Tzu titled The Art of War. A lot of this album is a study of human conflict and the nature of violence.