The Small Fries

To Pimp a Butterfly, the third studio album by Kendrick Lamar, is representative of many things. It’s a concept album about the state of black America, but it also reveals Kendrick’s personal struggle with his newfound fame and the identity crisis that goes along with it. The record is filled with many contradictions going on in Lamar’s head, but it’s not messy in doing so.

On Butterfly, Kendrick utilizes the historical imagery of slavery and the civil rights movement to shed light on what is happening in present-day America. He struggles with the fact that he is now the voice of his hometown of Compton while people are dying of gang violence and he is accepting awards. Kendrick draws comparisons of himself to great leaders like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., but there is simultaneously a feeling of self-loathing, especially demonstrated on the track “u”. Throughout the album, the confusion and reluctance of being a voice of power gives way to a begrudging acceptance of his new responsibility and a call for action. Lamar was inspired by a trip to South Africa as evidenced by many of the songs on the record. He draws parallels between the ghetto and a post-apartheid Johannesburg, showing that they are extremely different and similar at the same time.

Lamar does not want to be a puppet of the entertainment industry, a sentiment he expresses through his lyrics many times throughout the album. Perhaps an even more telling example of this is that none of the tracks sound like radio-friendly singles. This was definitely a strategy on his part, a challenge to the mainstream media to see if they will play these songs with messages that it is trying desperately to avoid. Not only is Kendrick criticizing racism in media, but also the standards of the hip-hop industry itself. Lamar finishes what he started on his controversial “Control” verse on this album, lamenting about the lowered standards of rap and the bling culture surrounding it.

With so many different ideas and concepts going into a 16-track album, one would think that the result would be muddled and hard to follow. However, Lamar avoids this by tying a large percentage of the tracks together by reciting sections of an original poem at the end, of which he reads the entirety of on the closing track “Mortal Man” in a fictional interview he has with deceased rapper Tupac Shakur. Clips from a 1994 radio interview with Tupac are expertly weaved in with Kendrick asking the rap legend questions about what he thinks of the state of today’s society. It’s haunting how much light Shakur sheds on the topic of racism in America and it shows just how little things have changed even twenty-two years after the Rodney King riots. In the era of Ferguson and Trayvon Martin, To Pimp a Butterfly is the thought-provoking album we need.

A portrayal of Tupac Shakur and Kendrick Lamar

--Julie