“To Pimp a Butterfly” is a contrived album. Let’s begin there.
On his sophomore LP with a major label, Kendrick Lamar plunges his hands into the history of black music and pulls out heavy, ambitious themes of racial iniquity, cultural appropriation, Afrocentrism, and self-loathing in the African-American experience. As he stitches together fabric borrowed from funk and jazz, Parliament and Miles Davis, the seams remain visible. Each grizzled beat suggests Kendrick’s desperate wish that his audience understand the history of his craft. It’s difficult to think of a rap album more self-conscious or anachronistic in its aesthetic.
Here’s the important part, though: in Kendrick’s hands, the contrived nature of this album works. Rather than feeling forced, each warbling guitar, verbal invocation of the funk, and sampled background scream somehow feels authentic. With a guest list including George Clinton, Ronald Isley, Snoop Dogg, and Thundercat, “To Pimp a Butterfly” rumbles inexorably forward, freighted with decades of collective experience and some serious flavor. No, despite the contrivance, nothing seems cheap. K. Dot did his homework on this one.
“To Pimp a Butterfly” traces a general spiritual narrative of Kendrick descending into and emerging from temptation, and blends this anagogical story with the more literal story of Kendrick confronting the immoral tangle of racial consciousness, sexual politics, and race-associated poverty in America. Allegorical characters populate the album, reaching out to drag Kendrick back into the vortex from which he has climbed. The most memorable of these characters are his first girlfriend Lucy (Lucifer) and an uncle named Sam (white capitalistic America).
Kendrick also engages history with passion and perspicacity on “King Kunta,” a song which takes the story of an eighteenth century slave named Kunta Kinte (whose foot was chopped off as punishment for attempting to escape) and uses it as a vehicle for examining the politics of the rap game.
No song on the album boils down to a simple one-sentence summation. The precision and polyvalence of each line provides an incredible wealth of interpretive possibilities. For example, each mention of “the yams” in “King Kunta” may refer to African cuisine, drugs, power, money, or anger, or all these things at once. On “These Walls,” Kendrick raps about three separate locations simultaneously with élan and precision.
The sheer variety and ambition of the album cannot be overemphasized. Kendrick drops brief spoken-word bread crumbs throughout the album that comprise a poem that he recites to Tupac Shakur in the last song, “Mortal Man.” Beyond the fact that no other living rapper would dare to try something like this, he interview between Pac and Kendrick is riveting and nuanced. For listeners less interested in esoteric street scholarship, “King Kunta” and “Wesley’s Theory” offer the album’s most head-bobbing beats.
I think many hip-hop fans sighed in relief when they heard this album and recognized its quality because — let’s be honest — the manner in which Kendrick hyped this album threatened overconfidence and heavy-handedness. In an interview with Rolling Stone he declared (without irony): “This album will be taught in college courses someday. I genuinely believe that.” Even Lamar’s rival Drake predicted this album would be the “last great concept album” of hip-hop.
I have to admit, I remained skeptical of this album upon first listen until about three quarters of the way through “King Kunta,” when the beat dropped away and left in its wake a deep and anonymous voice. “By the time you hear the next pop,” it intoned, “the funk shall be within you.” Pop. A swaying female chorus floated in, uttering its desire for — what else — the funk. Kendrick was gone, vanished behind the fluttering veil of the chorus. His absence for the rest of the song didn’t matter. By then he had me.
Forester McClatchey is a junior from Atlanta, Georgia. He is double majoring in art and English. He is a painter and a rapper.