“To Pimp A Butterfly” is Kendrick Lamar’s 4th studio album, conceptually and artistically far ahead of it’s time.
“To Pimp A Butterfly” is often considered the greatest album of all time by critics and music lovers in the whole world. It has quite a few reasons for it being a musical masterpiece but I’d like to cover one thing that really makes the album very unique, the poem Kendrick pieces together in the whole album.
Kendrick recites the first line of the poem after the song “King Kunta” and he continues to carry out the same pattern in a few songs that follow “King Kunta” on the album. He continues to do so till the last song “Mortal Man” on which he recites the complete poem.
The poem starts out with
“I remember you was conflicted
Misusing your influence”
These lines serve as the outro for the song “King Kunta”, these tell the listener that Kendrick is contemplating about something that really bothers him. He also states that he’s been misusing his influence, being a successful rapper he hasn’t been influential in a positive way and worked only towards his own self serving cause.
“Sometimes I did the same
Abusin' my power, full of resentment
Resentment that turned into a deep depression
Found myself screamin' in a hotel room”
These next few lines act as an outro for the song “These Walls”. In this segment of the poem he seems to be resenting his actions for abusing the influence and power he holds. This resentment makes him feel guilty and leads him down to a deep depression.
He feels trapped in the hotel room he’s present in, he feels suffocated and so he cries and screams his frustration out.
“I didn’t wanna self-destruct
The evils of Lucy was all around me
So I went runnin' for answers”
Falling into this downward spiral and intensely breaking down mentally, he contemplates suicide but finally decides against it.
In the second line he mentions a girl named Lucy. He says her sinister presence was all around him. Lucy is a reference of Lucifer, another name for the Christian leader of devils, Satan. Lucy haunts him throughout the album manifesting in the forms of racism, the plight of America, greed, temptation but in this case it’s influence that he’s been not utilizing in an efficacious manner. It’s selfishness that’s eating him away.
The last line of the extract he writes that he’s running towards answers to resolve this predicament.
“Until I came home”
In the previous extract he’s running for answers. As he’s running, he reaches his home, his hood — Compton, where it all started. Compton is a city plagued with police brutality and gang violence and no place for a child but that’s always been his home, since Kendrick was born and he only ended up abandoning it because of the fame he procured due to his musical career.
“But that didn’t stop survivors guilt
Going back and forth
Trying to convince myself the stripes I earned
Or maybe how A-1 my foundation was
But while my loved ones was fighting
A continuous war back in the city
I was entering a new one”
The poem continues in the song “Hood Politics”. Continuing from the previous extract he runs towards seeking answers and reaching his home, Compton. But coming home isn’t any different for his mental health. In his mind, he’s still contemplating and wrestling with his inner demons.
He was trying to convince himself to look at the brighter side and regard that he made something of himself from dust but this mental picture seems very self centered.
In the fifth line of the extract, he stated his loved ones were fighting wars. By loved ones he meant all the black people in America and by wars he meant strifes of the black people against poverty, gang violence, police brutalities, drug abuse, oppression, racism and what not. This is why he was under this mental burden, he could have instilled change in the lives of the black men and women but he chose to be selfish, he chose to abandon his loved ones, he chose to flee from the wars of the hoods.
So while his loved ones were fighting wars, he was also fighting one but this war was of self realisation and guilt.
Kendrick completes the whole poem in the last song on the album, “Mortal Man”
“A war that was based on apartheid and discrimination
Made me wanna go back to the city and tell the homies what I learned
The word was respect
Just because you wore a different gang color than mine’s
Doesn’t mean I can’t respect you as a black man
Forgetting all the pain and hurt we caused each other in these streets
If I respect you, we unify and stop the enemy from killing us
But I don’t know, I’m no mortal man
Maybe I’m just another nigga”
Shit and that’s all I wrote
I was gonna call it "Another Nigga" but, it ain’t really a poem
I just felt like it’s something you probably could relate to
Other than that, now that I finally got a chance to holla at you
I always wanted to ask you about a certain situa-
About a metaphor actually, uh, you spoke on the ground
What you mean by that, what the ground represent?”
The war his loved ones were going through was one of oppression by the white powers in position and the police, pushing them to the brink of defeat because of the lack of solidarity between the black people themselves.
Kendrick wants to teach everyone what he has learned in all these years living outside Compton and growing as a rapper and as a person. Kendrick wants to tell his loved ones that respect is the only way they can unify and fight.
African-Americans are divided into two gangs in America. The Crips and the Bloods while the Crips don the colour blue, the Bloods don the colour red. So by a different colour he is referencing to these two gangs. Being at loggerheads, these two gangs never consort to mutualism. But Kendrick is stating that with respect this mutualism can be attained, to fight the common enemies which are analogous to both the contrasting groups. He states that even though there is conflict between these two gangs, he is ready to respect his contrasting counterparts for the greater good and he’s ready to forget the pain they have caused each other.
“But I don’t know, I’m no mortal man
Maybe I’m just another nigga”
The above lines seem important. He expresses his thoughts towards resolving the oppression black people go through in the previous extract but now he starts questioning his own identity. Who’s he to preach people? Who’s he to tell people what to do? He’s no mortal man and by mortal man he means the black greats namely Nelson Mandela, Tupac Shakur and Martin Luther King Jr. He scrutinizes his own status as a mortal man, he calls himself just another nigga, meaning just another person in this world.
The last line catches the eye of the listener
“About a metaphor actually, uh, you spoke on the ground
What you mean by that, what the ground represent?”
To Pimp A Butterfly is empathic story through Kendrick Lamar. The whole album is about a metaphoric caterpillar and a metaphoric butterfly, while they are considered two different organisms, they are one and the same. While the caterpillar is a prisoner to the streets that conceived it as Lamar states in Mortal Man, the butterfly is free independent thoughtfulness and talent.
A caterpillar is perceived as a disgusting creature that eats everything around it to survive, it destroys its surroundings and the society shuns its presence until after it undergoes metamorphosis and metamorphosis only occurs when it shuts itself in a cocoon which is a metaphor for institutionalization and in this world a person is either institutionalized by poverty, prison, racism or it is institutionalized by money and fear of losing the money. There is another meaning to an institution, it also means a mental institution where people again are institutionalized, it’s a place for the insane. After this metamorphosis, an elegant butterfly emerges. It is a metaphor for a person breaking through the shackles of institutionalization and becoming free of the concept of modern day life for a black man. So the whole album is based on these metaphors and after all the struggles, victories and sentiments which Kendrick has been throughout his life amount to just one question — What’s your perspective on that?
Are we the butterfly? Are we the caterpillar destroying our surroundings?
Link for the whole poem -
https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-another-nigga-to-pimp-a-butterfly-annotated
