Lamar’s every bit as invested in the 11th-hour positivity anthem he’s elected to include here as a visceral live take (substantially upgrading the single version that leaned a bit too heavy on its highly recognizable Isley Brothers sample) as he is in the song that trumpets him as “the biggest hypocrite of 2015” and pivots on a third verse devoted to ruthless self-critique as invested in the disco-ish one that sexualizes the prison industrial complex as he is in the second song he devotes to the concept of fame being unable to save black men from themselves. The focused and fervent anger, politics, cosmic knowledge, and above all unshakable self-doubt is the point too. Tidy this album isn’t, but like There’s a Riot Goin’ On or the distended jams of One Nation Under a Groove, the uncompromising messiness is the point. It’s a song that unites Kanye West’s “New Slaves” theory with funk spirit, complete with funk founding father George Clinton intoning strange poetry over Thundercat’s wobbling, drunker-than-Dilla bass bleats. The same song formulates its title based on Wesley Snipes’s tax-evasion prison sentence, an analogue for the vices of black celebrity and the aggression of those institutions that prey on its failure. Opener “Wesley’s Theory” immediately establishes the black-power theme by throwing up a sample of Boris Gardiner’s “Every Nigger Is a Star,” and the album descends (or ascends, perhaps) through black culture from there. Where there were once big hooks, energetic rhyming in perfect lockstep with the beat, and a clear narrative thrust, there’s now an expansive morass of live music grooves, heady and sometimes contradictory stream-of-consciousness lyrics, and not so much as an overarching narrative as lots of fractured ones ducking in and out of obscurity. But coming from the artist behind misappropriated party jams like “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” and “Swimming Pools (Drank),” it’s a seismic departure. It’s not completely without precedent in rap, existing in the same general vicinity as OutKast’s Stankonia, or the Roots’ most ambitious work ( Things Fall Apart and Phrenology), and its jazzier passages find a kindred spirit in the ‘90s group Digable Planets’ Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space). Its sprawl and concerns conjure a new set of comparisons: G-Funk made nearly indistinguishable from its P-Funk antecedents, Sign ‘O’ the Times-era Prince, and maybe what Jimi Hendrix might’ve given us had he been around a little longer. On the album Lamar condemns police brutality and slights Obama he fears the government, recognizes an institutionalized incentive to ghetto life, and identifies with an 18th-century slave. To Pimp a Butterfly was born of this guilt, but it was emboldened by the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner-by the heightened awareness of what it means to be black in America.
The idea of “getting out of the ghetto,” a concept so many rappers strive for, left him with what he terms “survivor’s guilt.” It was an ambitious album that brought Lamar fame, but left him conflicted about its cost. He intimated the vices of this milieu to expose their appeal and identify the life choices that perpetuate them. Lamar took rap back to the streets with a knotty, Joycian account of a man in Compton navigating daily life’s travails.
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Former Canadian TV star Drake staked his claim to fame on the boast of pairing his rap talents with R&B-leaning vocals, and Kanye West was coming off an ostentatiously eclectic album that juxtaposed rap against every genre he could cram alongside it. Lamar’s ascension came at a time when the biggest names in rap tended not to fit the expectation of a rap icon.
Lamar earned that reputation by being an artist with that rarest of skill sets: technical mastery, narrative focus, and social consciousness, able to conjure up comparisons to 2Pac, Biggie, and Illmatic-era Nas. Which is to say, To Pimp a Butterfly will inevitably be held up against Lamar’s 2012 breakthrough, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, judged against that album’s status as a young classic of the hip-hop genre and the reputation the rapper built in its wake. In the thick of its release, the conversation surrounding Kendrick Lamar’s extraordinary new album is bound to be mired in debate about its proximity to, or more specifically the distance it keeps from, the rap genre.