Kendrick Lamar, “To Pimp a Butterfly”
Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope Records
Art Direction: Kendrick Lamar, Dave Free, Vlad Sepetov
Photographers: Denis Rouvre (Cover), Diego Cambiaso (White House)
Kendrick Lamar’s third album, To Pimp a Butterfly, was released in a time of renewed black activism, following the murder of Trayvon Martin and the birth of the Black Lives Matters movement. The album’s artwork was just as politically charged as the music, and the statement was the boldest thing he has done in his short career so far.
On the cover, a group of black men, including Lamar, are standing in front of the White House with a bottle of champagne, seemingly celebrating the white judge that’s knocked out, or dead, on the ground in front of them. There have been many critics analyzing the artwork to discover the hidden messages or meanings behind it.
The album title is a play on To Kill a Mockingbird, a book about a black man being arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. The judge is a clear nod to racial bias, which has been something that Kendrick Lamar has been vocal about since Ferguson took place. Another point that critics have made about the artwork is the idea of celebrating violence versus reassessing values before hoping to end institutionalized racism. This is also evident on the album’s track “The Blacker the Berry,” which condemns black on black violence.
In 2014, Lamar told Billboard:
“I wish somebody would look in our neighborhood knowing that it’s already a situation, mentally, where it’s fucked up. What happened to [Michael Brown] should’ve never happened. Never. But when we don’t have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us? It starts from within. Don’t start with just a rally, don’t start from looting — it starts from within.”
The album cover is said to be an illustration of hypocrisy between the two ideas, and Lamar is calling attention to it. Mic notes that it is a “seething criticism of the structural racism endemic in this country and of the culturalist argument Lamar believes, too.”
The interior booklet includes braille that Lamar says reveals the full name of the album. It translates to “A Blank Letter by Kendrick Lamar”
