#56: Kendrick Lamar — To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
California — TDE, Aftermath, Interscope
Not gonna lie, I was equally stoked and intimidated when this one came up: it’s one of the richest, densest albums I know of, and an incredible cultural product, and, for that exact reason, writing a review that’s up to its excellence seemed like quite the task. I’m not gonna go into a detailed exploration of every little detail and reference in here; there already are dozens of insufferable 1+ hour video essays on YouTube about it, dissecting TPaB in more detail than I’d ever care to, and you have probably already watched a couple of those — I know I have. So, I’m just gonna talk about what spontaneously catches my ear the most about this whole deal, and hope that I do justice to K-Dot’s masterpiece.
By 2015, Kendrick was already pretty much at the top of the world. His 2012 release, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, took the music world by storm, securing him four Grammy nominations, lasting fame and retroactive attention to his earlier projects and feature spots. This meteoric rise to fame and its subjective consequences is one of the main themes contained in TPaB, along with racism, black history and tradition, and how everything works off of each other in a contemporary setting. To me, thought, it’s not just about what Kendrick talks about: how he talks about that stuff is just as important, and that goes way beyond his choice of words and turns of phrase.
One thing I’m always yapping about is how important album building is to me. A collection of good tracks isn’t enough, they gotta be part of a bigger, overarching arc, they gotta flow and not just bump into each other, and TPaB is one of the best at that. It really does feel like one continuous thing; the transitions are just so absolutely natural and spontaneous, and even the moments where this continuity gets kind of interrupted (Alright and The Blacker The Berry immediately come to mind) do play a role in the big movie script that organizes this whole junt. Sonic coherence clearly plays a big role in that, and the production in here really is a thing to behold on its own.
Much like last week’s fiasco, the number of producers and featured artists in here looks almost too much, but in this case there’s good reason for that. Some of them are in there as regular ol’ beatmakers, such as Boi 1-da, Knxwledge, Flying Lotus and Pharrell, but there’s also a plethora of session musicians, and that is due to the fact that this album largely features fully-original instrumental pieces, as opposed to sample-based beats made by a small team. The instrumentals are lush, elegant, dynamic and complex, going into prog-like switchups and meanders in almost every song — simply put, they really do have a life of their own, and it’s obvious that no expense was spared to craft them as perfectly as possible. The credited features include colossal names such as George Clinton, Thundercat, Bilal, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Ronald Isley, but they all do stuff like choruses and hooks and interludes, always leaving the spotlight to Kenny himself; the only “real” feature in here, as in the guest verse type of feature, is by Rapsody on Complexion (A Zulu Love).
It’s really important to note how Kendrick pays homage to black tradition through his musical choices. I’m not gonna go into it in depth, but there’s this book I really like called The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop that’s composed of many essays about different aspects of hip-hop culture and practice, and one of my favorites is called Intertextuality, Sampling and Copyright, by Justin A. Williams. In it, Williams presents sampling as not just reusing a recording in a new way, but rather as a different way to practice something that’s been the norm in music for centuries: the celebrating and riffing upon an established idea, not as repetition or creation, but a sophisticated in-between, with different layers to it. He invokes Russel Potter’s concept of Signifyin(g):
“…repetition with a difference; the same and yet not the same. When, in a jazz riff, a horn player substitutes one arpeggio for a harmony note, or “cuts up” a well-known solo by altering its tempo, phrasing, or accents, s/he is Signifyin(g) on all previous version […] these musical forms were Signifyin(g) what came before them. Furthermore, musical texts Signify upon one another, troping and revising particular musical ideas. These musical “conversations” can therefore occur between the present and the past, or synchronically within a particular genre.”
When Kendrick raps over a Soul/Funk instrumental in Wesley’s Theory and King Kunta, when he spits Last Poets-style over free jazz on For Free? (Interlude), when he invokes the Soul Train live, hyped-up feeling on I, he’s also invoking a lineage that harkens back all the way to the colonial days. The intertextual part of it is especially interesting: hip-hop is always responding to others and itself, both discursively (disses, references) and musically (sampling, riffing, parodying). Kendrick absolutely did not invent or revolutionize this — I’d argue that it is as basic and essential to hip-hop as microphones and turntables — but what’s special about this is how consciously and reflexively he does it. The blessing and burden of heritage is a central theme of discussion in here, and one of TPaB’s main selling points, to me, is how K never simplifies, never takes a one-sided stance on anything; it’s almost overwhelming, how analytical he can be about stuff sometimes.
This album, more than most I’m familiar with, is also an examination of rapping and rap culture in itself, and that shows through in almost every track here. Everything harkens back to it as a driving force: his newfound celebrity status, the angst and survivor’s guilt that come with it, his contempt and resentment towards the White America that shunned him for centuries, living black, dying black; it all ties in to rapping, to standing on the shoulders of giants while trying to be a giant himself. He claims to be a king and a slave at the same time, a king and a slave to the meatgrinder that is the music industry, a king of his own life and a slave to his own addictions, traumas and whimsies.
Speaking of which, I think it’s time we finally got into his rapping proper. The fact that Kendrick has been duly canonized into the all-time greatest rhymers hall of fame is old news, and his wordplay is of nigh-unparalleled sophistication and wits. One thing he does really well is shift between different personas and perspectives, something that is almost never explicit, but is readily noticeable to the attentive listener (a mechanism K definitely knows how to utilize for his own benefit is pitch-shifting and voice manipulation in general, definitely a welcome changeup to his sometimes grating voice).
There really is something about Kendrick’s rapping, not just in here, I don’t think I’d ever noticed it before, but it does sound like he’s talking to himself — not in a weird way, though, but in a philosopher or novelist way. He’s angsty, he’s self-centered, he’s unhinged, and it can get a little too self-indulgent at times for my taste (the seven-minute section in Mortal Man where he self-inserts into a 2pac interview is by far the most egregious example of this), but he almost never really drops the ball and retreat into full navel gazing, instead turning it relevant and relatable by expertly tying it up with the whole historical and social context that produced those feelings — and, by extension, produced himself as an artist.
A release as ambitious as TPaB does run the risk of getting too big for its breeches, and that’s a liability that needs to be fully considered by those who set out to craft a full-fledged concept album such as this. I’d be lying if I said it’s an easy album: it’s not difficult per se, and you can get through it without much hassle, but it also does not do handouts, does not dumb itself down at any given moment. The production and performances are enough that you can honestly get through the whole, almost excessive 1h18m runtime ignoring every word he says and still be positively impressed, and that’s a plus in my book, but it’s very worth it to fight to taste every single morsel in this buffet. No matter how good the individual songs are, you absolutely need the full album effect to really get the full TPaB experience — the tracks work off of each other in an almost magical way, and the only one that really has that lead single energy is Alright, which is also the biggest stand-out and honestly sounds more like a GKMC song.
To Pimp a Butterfly is considered an instant classic and one of the best of all time for good reason. Kendrick didn’t set out to really invent or revolutionize anything, but rather to reflect upon how we got to where we are as a culture, and in the process ended up creating one of hip-hop’s most crucial touchstones. A masterful novel, a bona fide epic (down to the plethora of little recurring characters) was crafted by one of hip-hop’s most prominent sons, it will forever stand the test of time, and I’m glad I get to experience this.
Favorite tracks
King Kunta: delicious funk grooves, energetic, sassy performance and lyricism, proggy breakdowns and a “fuck y’all, I’mma take what’s mine” attitude. What’s not to love? Might be getting ahead of myself a little bit, but it might just be my favorite Kendrick track ever. “Bitch, where you when I was walkin’?/ Now I run the game, got the whole world talkin’/ King Kunta, everybody wanna cut the legs off him/ When you got the yams — What’s the yams?/ The yam is the power that be/ You can smell it when I’m walkin’ down the street”
Institutionalized: the first frankly heavy, fucked-up, angsty track we come across, I particularly like the dramatic quality it has to it. I always loved the little Greek choir parts by Snoop Dogg before some of the verses. It’s a great example of how to write about feelings and trauma without painting yourself as a poor little victim and nothing more, and many rappers could take a page out of K’s book. “The last remainder of real shit, you know the obvious/ Me, scholarship? No, streets put me through colleges/ Be all you can be, true, but the problem is/ Dream only a dream if work don’t follow it”
The Blacker The Berry: I’m gonna excuse myself and have me a boss baby moment: this gives me strong Paris vibes, with the angry yet surgically precise politically-charged bars that hit you as hard as his flow and beat. It really is one of the strongest tracks in here in my opinion, and the Jamaican ass chorus by Assassin is just the perfect complement to this. “I want you to recognize that I’m a proud monkey/ You vandalize my perception but can’t take style from me/ […] I’m guardin’ my feelings, I know that you feel it/ You sabotage my community, makin’ a killin’/ You made me a killer, emancipation of a real nigga”
