So what would the late Tupac Shakur and the very much living Kendrick Lamar talk about if they were ever to meet face to face in the next life? According to Lamar, they’d dish on economic inequality, revolution and racial metaphors about caterpillars and butterflies.
The imaginary conversation, audacious in the way it digitally melds two of hip-hop’s leading voices from different eras, takes place during the 12-minute “Mortal Man,” as much philosophy treatise as song, and one of several flights into the surreal on Lamar’s second album, “To Pimp a Butterfly” (Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope).
Lamar’s 2012 growing-up-in-Compton coming-of-age concept album, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” set a new standard for contemporary hip-hop, and “To Pimp a Butterfly” does not shy from those ambitions. Though not quite as instantly catchy as its predecessor, it expands on its widescreen musical reach and introspective intensity, and sharpens the political perspective until it draws blood. What’s lacking, if anything, is the potential bounty of singles yielded by “good kid,” but “To Pimp …” is designed more as a one-sit continuous listen than a collection of radio-ready hits.
In the soul-searing-spirit of D’Angelo’s recent “Black Messiah,” it’s populated by ghosts: Tupac, Marcus Garvey, 18th Century slave Kunta Kinte, slain Ferguson resident Michael Brown and chokehold victim Eric Garner. The 27-year-old Lamar has said for the first two decades of his life that he never traveled beyond the streets of Compton while growing up in the notorious Los Angeles ghetto, and “good kid, m.A.A.d city” dug deep into that claustrophobic and dangerous world. “To Pimp a Butterfly” looks beyond those geographic and psychic boundaries, and finds a different sort of prison without bars.
“I don’t see Compton, I see something much worse/The land of the landmines, the hell that’s on earth,” he raps on “Complexion (Zulu Love).”
At least this hell on earth has a great soundtrack. The album teases out its scope from the get-go: The rubbery P-Funk groove sprayed with Dr. Dre-style gangsta-rap synths in the Flying Lotus-produced “Wesley’s Theory,” the free-jazz improvising of “For Free,” and the James Brown bass and gruff vocals of the defiant “Roots” homage “King Kunta.” “Now if I give you the funk, you gon’ take it?” Lamar demands. With an array of producers, guests and collaborators, including Pharrell Williams, Sufjan Stevens, Snoop Dogg, Ronald Isley and George Clinton, “To Pimp a Butterfly” ranges across decades and continents to loosely chronicle the black musical diaspora, from West Africa to Los Angeles.
Lamar takes familiar musical tropes into new territory, as when he tranforms the g-funk between-the-sheets murmurs of “These Walls” into a layered commentary on the prison system and racial inequality. “Walls feeling like they ready to close in,” he raps as though he’s become numb to his fate. “U” opens with a scream, and Lamar’s voice changes shape and tone every few bars in a track that sounds like it’s coming unglued, mirroring the narrator’s psychodrama. He stitches the album’s narrative together with a six-part poem — one of the few risks that Lamar takes that doesn’t quite pay off.
The music brims with frayed edges and conflicted characters who try to parse the meaning of black empowerment. The world is divided into camps: black vs. white, rich against poor, and the struggle is further corrupted by institutions that act no more responsibly than street gangs (“From Compton to Congress … ain’t nothin’ but a flow of new DemoCrips and ReBloodlicans,” he raps on “Hood Politics”) Another recurring theme: black-on-black crime (the flame-throwing “Blacker the Berry”) and punishment (“How Much a Dollar Cost”). In the former, Lamar calls himself out as a “hypocrite,” living large but at the same time guilt-ridden by what he has left behind, and in “How Much a Dollar Cost” a panhandler schools the new aristocrat in just how little can be bought with a fat bank account. Against this backdrop, “i” acts as a temporary salve, a proclamation of hard-earned self-love set against the ebullient guitar lick from the Isley Brothers’ “Who’s That Lady?”
With its boyz-in-the-hood memories bathed in nostalgia, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” found the soul and the warmth beneath the mayhem in the streets, the introspective youth making his way through a vividly painted if circumscribed world. “Pimp the Butterfly” no longer has that naive innocence as a shield. It deals head on with a planet seething with divisions that have become so ingrained by history that they feel insurmountable. No wonder the rap star somehow feels more powerless in this environment than he did as a poor kid scraping by in the streets with his homies. At least the good kid still had his dreams ahead of him. As a grown-up, he realizes his dream, he escapes the ghetto, only to find he feels as trapped as ever.
Kendrick Lamar
“To Pimp a Butterfly”
4 stars (out of 4)
greg@gregkot.com
