What’s the yams? The yams is coldcocking hip-hop, critics and fans alike, challenging the state and direction of the genre head-on and — oh yeah — validating a certain Isley Brothers-sampling single out of left field in the process.
Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, the Compton MC’s follow-up to his 2012 masterwork, good kid, m.A.A.d city, unceremoniously hit iTunes a week early thanks to a label gaffe — hardly the nail in the coffin for official release dates, but a profitable mix-up nonetheless.
More ambitious in scope than its precursor while retaining that release’s (at times painful) intimacy, To Pimp a Butterfly delivers the narrative of a rap king beset by the world’s evils. A slice of street poetry winds throughout the record, laying out the bildungsroman of Lamar’s rise: the son of a former gangbanger cutting his teeth in a tough neighborhood, making it big through music and dealing with the trappings of fame and acclaim.
“Lucy,” the female manifestation of Satan (Lucifer), tantalizes him with vices and material wealth, a temptation Lamar admits he’s succumbed to at times during his stardom. As with good kid, the narrative is remarkably cohesive; unlike Lamar’s breakthrough album, though, it’s less insular, reaching outside his Compton hood to pontificate on a rogues’ gallery of societal ills across the nation at large.
Despite the jump from his m.A.A.d city to a madder world, Lamar never comes off as guilty of overreaching. He’s tormented by a succubus, communes with a homeless man who, not unsurprisingly, turns out to be the physical incarnation of God and closes out the album by interviewing Tupac Shakur — presumably the ghost, not the hologram.
Camp from concentrate, maybe, but it comes off as earned and insightful. “I know street s—; I know s— that’s conscious; I know everything,” Lamar raps, and on To Pimp a Butterfly, that message of omniscience isn’t easily shrugged off. It’s a sprawling yet dense homily from one of hip-hop’s most inventive and articulate voices, one driven by worldliness and righteous fury but not controlled by it.
It’s clear Lamar fancies himself something of a savior, though of what in particular — Hip-hop? Black America? Both? — and to what degree, it’s never quite certain. He name-drops Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Jackie Robinson, Michael Jackson — a dizzying array of black leaders across politics and entertainment. “How many leaders you said you needed then left ’em for dead?” he raps on “Mortal Man.”
However, prone to the sort of intense self-scrutiny his peers typically eschew — just try to imagine Kanye or Drake channeling the tearful self-immolation of “u” — Lamar stops short of a full-on messianic complex. He recognizes the platform he’s been afforded and brings a powerfully simple message to the table: “respect.”
Many have thrown about the phrase “unapologetically black” when championing the album, an assessment that’s certainly accurate but somewhat puzzling. The album is undeniably unapologetic. Tracks like “King Kunta” and “The Blacker the Berry” celebrate Lamar’s gifts while clotheslining racist invective, while “i,” freshly outfitted in a faux-live album mix, preaches unity and self-love.
It’s also undeniably black. Beyond the race-focused lyricism, To Pimp a Butterfly largely abandons the electronic influences of good kid, simultaneously rewinding to the jazz, soul and funk eras and further rooting Lamar’s aesthetic in West Coast classicism. Snoop Dogg pops up unexpectedly for a star turn on “Institutionalized”; bass maestro Thundercat keeps things bumping along smoothly on the low end; actual session players, not samples, drive the record’s throwback sound.
Those praising To Pimp a Butterfly as “unapologetically black” surely don’t mean to suggest that the best hip-hop and R&B albums in recent memory — channel ORANGE, Yeezus, Take Care, Beyoncé’s self-titled record, even good kid, m.a.a.d city — were somehow apologetically black. Lamar’s latest, though, is perhaps the loudest and furthest-reaching of the lot, which might explain its proponents’ choice of phrasing.
With this album, then, Lamar moves even further away from rap as either mere entertainment or storytelling. To Pimp a Butterfly is rap as a pillar to heaven, a path to the Promised Land, a vibrant message of love and respect in the face of overwhelming despair and oppression. “In my opinion, only hope that we kinda have left is music and vibrations,” Lamar confides to Shakur’s ghost. The mantle of great black hope weighs heavily on Kendrick Lamar; misguided or not, it’s a role that could prove little more than an exercise in futility — but so far it’s produced little short of pure, resilient beauty.
