To Pimp A Butterfly
The date is Mar. 16, 2015. You wake up and immediately check Facebook and are shocked to read that your favorite rapper Kendrick Lamar has apparently released his third studio album “To Pimp a Butterfly” a full week before its expected release date. Your hands tremble as you check Spotify to verify the news. Full of anticipation, you start the first track…
Review:
“To Pimp a Butterfly” is an incredible album from start to finish. It is a monumental achievement for hip-hop and a testament to the genre’s musicality, with its beats drawing on inspiration from jazz and funk music yet still remaining fundamentally hip-hop at their core. Its lyrics are poetic, inspired and loaded with meaning, prompting pages and pages of interpretation by music critics, both professional and self-proclaimed.
Kendrick has always had a pension for pushing boundaries, and on “To Pimp a Butterfly,” this is more present than ever, sonically, lyrically and thematically. But one particular instance of this sticks out as one of the aspects that makes this album special and unique amongst other albums of its kind: the poem.
At the end of the third track, “King Kunta,” the music cuts out, and Kendrick recites the first two lines of a poem that he wrote: “I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence.” Throughout the rest of the album, at the beginning or end of certain songs, Kendrick repeats those lines, along with whatever else he has read up to that point, each time adding a couple more lines, until the poem is revealed in its entirety on the final track “Mortal Man.”
The poem follows the storyline on the album, and each time he reads a segment, the newly added section foreshadows the subject matter of the song that follows it. And when the poem is read in full, what follows it in the last six minutes of “Mortal Man” shocks listeners worldwide. I won’t spoil it; you’ll have to listen to the album yourself to find out.
There’s so much I could say about each individual track on the album, but there are other articles in the Life section too. So, as much as it pains me to pick from a list so stacked with incredible, outstanding songs, I’ll just talk about two of them before I end this review.
“How Much A Dollar Cost” is the most storyline-heavy song on the album, and Kendrick’s lyricism and creativity shine on this track in particular. Kendrick meets a man at a gas station who appears to be homeless, asking for money. He initially refuses, but he is struck by something in the man’s words and mannerisms that causes him to briefly reconsider his decision. Still, Kendrick eventually decides against giving him even so much as the single dollar that he is asking for, and at the end of the song, it is dramatically revealed that the man was actually a personification of God.
Possibly my favorite song on the album is “u,” a two-part song that explores themes of depression and self-hate, the first part more angry and the second more emotional. Kendrick experiments a lot on this track with his vocal cadences, and it works beautifully, adding layers to the emotional effect of the song. The lyrics cut deep, particularly in the second part, and both beats are superb, the second among the best on the album.
“To Pimp a Butterfly” is a milestone for hip-hop. The album solidifies Kendrick Lamar’s position as the best rapper on the scene right now and justifies his status amongst the all-time greats. Five stars. Ten out of ten. King Kendrick has done it again.