I’ve already confessed it earlier along this musical adventure, but hip-hop wasn’t a genre I encountered often in my youth. Sure I heard songs at high school dances or college parties, but it wasn’t until after college that I really ventured it into a genre. My education really began when I started frequenting music forums and engaging in the online music community. I saw my interactions with this community as a way to expand my musical palette, and it was in the year 2015 that I listened to my first hip-hop album.
That album was Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly”, possibly the worst album to introduce someone to hip-hop with.
I say that with all the compliments in the world. This album is absolutely phenomenal, but I didn’t GET it at the time. I wasn’t ready for the political and social commentary, the self-reflection, the depth of musical knowledge that Kendrick portrayed across this album’s mammoth hour and eighteen minute run time. I distinctly remember turning it on, seeing the George Clinton and Thundercat credit on the first song and thinking “what the hell are these two doing on a hip-hop album?” Subsequently I was even more thrown for a loop when I reached the second track, a skit/poem that relates a couple’s argument about materialism and the complicated role it can play in the relationships of a successful artist’s life. Was this album taking itself seriously? Was I supposed to laugh or was I supposed to THINK when I heard this interlude? But that’s one of the reasons why I WOULD recommend someone who has never listened to hip-hop check this album. In many ways it’s a love letter to the genre and the communities that helped build it, an album that incorporates funk, soul, R&B, jazz, and even elements of Blaxploitation. Much like Kendrick’s other album on this list, “Good Kid, m.a.a.d. City”, this album feels like a score, a composition that tells a complex story of what happens to a young black artist when they’ve made it out.
Between the release of his previous album and the writing of material for this album, Kendrick traveled to South Africa where he witnessed the many horrors of Apartheid, the historical places that played roles in the war to abolish it, and found himself reflecting on how the experience of black people in Africa related to those in the United States. This led him to write an album that truly is about the black experience (one that, yes, I am very aware I am not a part of). This is an honest album about empowerment, self-love (and, tragically, hate), about culture, and about the path forward. If “Good Kid m.a.a.d. City” is a cautionary tale with a happy ending, this album is the sequel of what happens after that. When you have all the money in the world, when you can have any woman you want, when you can drink or smoke or do whatever your appetite desires, when record label executives are telling you what to do or say, what do you decide to do with your life? How can you empower those you left behind? How can you provide hope for those who are hopeless? How can you challenge the powers that have, for so long, kept your community down? That’s what this album is about.
Kendrick is brilliant as always on this, his flow unparalleled by any of the greats in the game, his story-telling even more urgent with his newly acquired worldview. Over a slew of jazz and funk beats he relates what fame has done to him, and the journey he has gone on to retain his sanity in an industry that only gives a shit about the next single, the next dollar. There are times where the album almost veers into the experimental, as Kendrick pulls beats from jazz legends Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. But at its heart this is a hip-hop album that covers all ranges of the spectrum, from the R&B heavy “These Walls”, the gospel infused “Alright”, and the violent, boom bap beat of “The Blacker the Berry”.
It’s fun to return to this album after having spent seven years exploring all sorts of hip-hop and educating myself on the culture that is heavily infused with the genre. There are times when the album loses steam towards the end, and even a song or two trimmed might aid in this. But Kendrick’s third album truly is a testament to his love for music and his community. This album will continue to go down in history as one of the greatest pieces of art and hip-hop of all time. So if you’ve never listened to hip-hop, and you want to understand what the CULTURE of it is about… this just might be the craziest, and realest, place to start.
My Rating: 4.5/5
The Word and The Song 