Kendrick Lamar – ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’

It's full of demons and contradictions, but is the Compton rapper's latest a classic?

Kendrick Lamar might be the new king of west coast hip-hop, but don’t think it’s a crown he’s wearing lightly. Exploring the dangers of being a thoughtful youth forced to come up hard on the streets of Los Angeles’ gangster-rap capital, the Compton MC’s 2012 major label debut, ‘good kid, mAAd city’, told the story of a young man at war with himself, in a community at war with itself.

Fast-forward to the present, and that war has become endemic, the lie of a ‘post-racial society’ peddled in the wake of Obama’s first presidential win brutally exposed by the acquittal of 17-year-old Florida teenager Trayvon Martin’s killer, and nationwide unrest following police killings of African-American men in Ferguson and New York. It’s a grim reality that makes its presence felt on ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ – Lamar’s insanely sprawling, seething follow-up to ‘good kid…’ – though arguably it’s an even more personal work than its predecessor.

Let’s pause to consider some facts. ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ is 79 minutes long, prone to outbursts of jazz and spoken-word poetry, and its name is a loosely worded play on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Its most significant guest spot comes from a rapper who’s been dead nearly 20 years, in the form of an imagined conversation between Lamar and Tupac Shakur using a sample from a 1994 Swedish radio interview with Lamar’s voice pasted over journalist Mats Nileskär’s. And if you still somehow missed that Lamar is taking the whole voice-of-a-generation thing very seriously indeed, know this: before he started the record, he visited Robben Island in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was locked up during apartheid.

So what’s the 27-year-old got to say now that he’s off the streets? The Isley Brothers-sampling first single, ‘i’, was a joyous slice of self-affirmation that suggested this album might herald a hip-hop summer of love. But in truth, it’s dark second single ‘The Blacker The Berry’ (“Why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street? / when gangbanging make me kill a nigger blacker than me?“) that ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ more closely resembles, as Lamar attempts to square his “survivor’s guilt” with the impulse to use his platform as a pulpit.

Accusing fingers jab from all angles. On opener ‘Wesley’s Theory’, Lamar takes aim at the music industry’s exploitation of ghetto life over a prickly P-funk number assisted by genre originator George Clinton and some Bootsy-licious bass from Flying Lotus collaborator Thundercat (FlyLo co-produces). On ‘The Blacker The Berry’, he turns his ire on institutionalised racism (“It’s evident that I’m irrelevant to society / That’s what you’re telling me, penitentiary would only hire me“). And on ‘u’, he directs his rage back in on himself, spilling his guts in a drunken confessional: (“You even Facetimed instead of a hospital visit“).

Musically, Lamar’s ambition is every bit as wide-ranging, the line between arty self-indulgence and inspired invention frequently disappearing from view in among the madness. Nonetheless, certain cuts hum with realised potential: ‘King Kunta’, a stone-cold jam and undoubted highlight, is a crisp modern update of the G-funk sound, riffing on a little-known early ‘00s production from Compton’s DJ Quik and boasting some great disses (“Y’all share bars like you got the bottom bunk in a two man cell“). The beautiful ‘These Walls’ has the mellow sophistication of a ‘Thriller’ album cut, and ‘How Much A Dollar Cost?’, which relates an encounter with a tramp (who might really be God) in a garage forecourt, evokes the stately piano dirge of Radiohead’s ‘Pyramid Song’.

‘Mortal Man’ closes the record on a note of tentative hope, acknowledging the tragic fate of many leaders in the African American community before Lamar turns to his hero, Tupac, for illumination. It’s a grand, slightly unwieldy gesture on an album that, lacking the neatly redemptive arc of ‘good kid, mAAd city’, is also grand and slightly unwieldy. Has Lamar followed a classic with another classic? Not quite, but in laying his demons and his contradictions bare, he has stayed true to his formidable talent.

You May Also Like

Advertisement

TRENDING

Advertisement

More Stories