“I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.”
- John Coltrane
It’s been only six days since the surprising early release of Kendrick
Lamar’s highly anticipated third album, To Pimp A Butterfly. And in
that six days, the world has been flipped over on its natural behind.
Don’t believe me? Take a quick search in your Internet browser and
tell me how many results you get when you type the album title in.
Six days. You’d figure on day seven, you’d get a rest to fully digest
as the Good Book says. But, that’s not the times we live in. And the
album isn’t intended for you to slumber. Not at all. I’m going to give
you my take on this album, knowing that as time goes on, what we
all will get from it will shift like sand on the beach.
To Pimp A Butterfly, at an initial listen, is both cosmology and also
a chronological piece. You don’t really comprehend how much of both
it is, until your second or eighth spin. That’s how layered this album
truly is. It’s not the first album this year that has come to the public
with profound depth - that goes to Lupe Fiasco’s Tetsuo & Youth, which
was released in January and has its own striking appeal - but it is the
first rap album in a good while that has hit folks on so many levels in
so many different ways. K-Dot kicks off the journey right from the
opening of ‘Wesley’s Theory’, which begins with the sample of Jamaican
toaster Boris Gardiner. And if you even asked that of most music heads
in ‘Jeopardy’ format, there’d be a lot of blank faces. From there, you
are baptised in the journey. The track itself is a funk gospel spurred
on by the Funk God himself, George Clinton as well as a proverb of
just how hyper-materialism is both dream and curse. The money chase
gets likened to the pursuit of a lover, underscored by Dr. Dre’s guest
interlude that leads into Kendrick’s bars that take on a malevolent
but persuading tone. Mind you, this is the FIRST track on the album.
I had to pause for a minute to let all of that sit. That happened quite
a bit as I listened.
The soul singer Bilal, who turns in stellar work on this album, speaks of
it as jazz. It IS jazz, but it is also funk, soul - To Pimp A Butterfly is one
of the most comprehensive collages of the Black musical experience that’s
ever been released. Kendrick, through his artistry, shares everything that
has touched him and that has moved us. It’s not just the samples. The
MC as griot and trickster figure lives on this album. Br’er Rabbit bossin’ up
on the mic.(More on that later.)I mean, look at ‘For Free(Interlude)’. As
a standalone track, it smacks of Rudy Ray Moore mixed with The Last
Poets in terms of standing a conversation about a woman not digging
Kendrick because he’s not flush with cash on its head. If it was the
Brooklyn Moon Cafe, some fingers could be snapping heavily. To Pimp A
Butterfly does that vividly - you find yourself taking chunks from his lyrics
to the production that provoke memories of other efforts. Kendrick covers
as much of it as he can. Afrobeat for the very last stunner of a song,
‘Mortal Man’ which deftly uses the Fela Kuti sample and a piece of a famed
Tupac Shakur interview and in doing so, evokes how Fela further shaped
his incredible music during his time in Los Angeles jamming with fellow
musical expatriate Hugh Masakela. ‘Institutionalized’, one of my favorite
tracks on here, hits you with a drop not unlike those heard on Pharcyde
songs and even hints at some inspiration from Andre 3000’s cartoon series
‘Class Of 3000’. That’s part of the chronological journey - Kendrick not only
makes this album a look at his journey to this point, it’s a depiction of how
Los Angeles has influenced him. How Compton made him. Going back to
‘Institutionalized’, it’s remarkable how the song basically speaks about being
the struggle of fighting against what the ‘hood has instilled in him as he
navigates an awards show and his present superstar status. Bilal’s hook is
hypnotic AND true, and Snoop Dogg’s guest drop as seasoned narrator?
GENIUS. 
Photo Credit: EveryDejaVu.com
Remember what I said about Kendrick using this album to be an MC
in the role of Br’er Rabbit? Okay. Think of what Br’er Rabbit represents.
Strip away the Disney-fied feel-good ethos for a sec. Kendrick styles
himself as the trickster figure that has been a part us for centuries.
While it’s a confident stance, it’s not without its admission of vulnerability.
It differs from, say, how Drake expresses his vulnerabiity. Or J.Cole. It
doesn’t invalidate their expressions, it’s just that next step that they
are approaching in their own music. It’s also both unapologetic and raw.
One example? ‘u’. The dark, twisting track is like a stomach churning on
itself. It aint hard to tell that the attacks on him over comments that
led to him being covered in the air of touting ‘respectability politics’ in the
midst of the turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri after the murder of Mike
Brown hit him. And hard. But it’s also hard not to see how he also made
that another way to view himself in the prism. The result is an honest,
unfiltered look at all of his Blackness. And ours too. A Blackness that
always survives, by the smile and by guile when fists and bricks can’t
cut it. Br’er Rabbit always a step ahead of Br’er Fox, even when it seems
like it’s not the case. The story of us, in America. Another example? The
recent picture from a magazine story that seemingly has a white woman
braiding his hair. How many digital daggers were thrown at him then?
Then he goes and makes ‘Complexion’, a stirring song featuring Rapsody,
a seriously slept on woman MC who has the potential to eat him alive on
his own track. Think about how deep that song is. And she closes it out.
It brings home the point that sometimes gets lost in the overall discussion
of us that we have amongst us - we’re not a monolith, we are a diverse
and beautiful Black body of realness. So much so that it flusters the status
quo(looking at you, Slate).
Kendrick, if anything, has made this album a partial think-piece(ha)on
the fickleness we’ve gotten too used to overall, and not just in contemporary
rap. Ponder this: he smashed the Spotify streaming record not once, but
TWICE. On consecutive days, with a figure over nine million. Drake’s own
surprise album, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, which had everyone
buzzing once it dropped only four weeks ago? Barely getting a mention
except in memes evoking the cover art. That’s power. To Pimp A Butterfly
is going to be examined like newly-discovered mummies for quite some
time. It proves Kendrick has broken out of his platinum cocoon, more theW
wiser. Still complex. Still finding and expressing himself. And we’re all
the beneficiaries of the flight.