10 years ago today: Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly

Originally published in Hot Press in March 2015:

Kendrick Lamar’s latest album is a beautiful and brilliant attempt to distill and re-contextualise 100 years of African-American musical history, with references to funk, blues, disco, protest-poetry and, most prominently, free-jazz.

Equally, this is an LP hopped up on righteous indignation. The sentiment is made explicit via the cover image of a gang-banger posse camped out on the White House lawn, literally flicking two fingers at the establishment.

As with D’Angelo’s astonishing Black Messiah, To Pimp a Butterfly is preoccupied with the race debate with which America has been freshly obsessed ever since the fatal shooting in February 2012 of innocent black teenager Trayvon Martin and which appeared to reach an apotheosis late last year with the Ferguson riots, sparked by police brutality against African-Americans in suburban Missouri.

That’s a lot to bite off. However, Kendrick Lamar confirms that he is up to the task. For a start, his wordplay is ferociously articulate, as made clear on the jabbing, frenetic ‘The Blacker The Berry’.

“The plot is bigger than me/ It’s generational hatred/ It’s genocism/ It’s grimy, little justification/ I’m African-American, I’m African/Black as the heart of a f**kin’ Aryan/ I’m black as the name Tyrone and Darius.”

Along with its thematic heft, the album is tremendously ambitious musically. When Hot Press met Lamar for his first ever Irish interview in 2013, we were struck by his humility. In the studio, however, his swagger is palpable and intoxicating. Who else could carry off a back-from-the-grave team-up with Tupac as he does here, much less sample both Michael Jackson and Sufjan Stevens without it feeling like a stoop to cheap gimmickry?

The esteem in which the Compton, LA native is held within the hip-hop community is also apparent. Dr Dre pops up to reminisce about a younger Lamar’s drive to succeed; elsewhere, Pharrell and Flying Lotus bassist Thundercat contributes parping horns and gut-bucket beats, while Snoop Dogg throws down a tangled rhyme on ‘Institutionalized’.

Clearly they know a genius when they hear one. Butterfly is a once-in-a-generation gut-check, a tour de force that’s dazzling in its ambition yet incredibly specific in its sense of time and place. Let’s hear it for the first truly great album of 2015.

Revisit To Pimp a Butterfly below: