On his game-changing debut album, Kendrick Lamar wrote vividly about the world he grew up in.
On his astonishingly accomplished new album, Lamar writes even more vividly about the world at large.
It’s in every way an expansion of Lamar’s vision, with far more exciting, funky and outgoing music to accompany it.
To make a leap of that magnitude cannot be underestimated.
When Lamar exploded onto the scene in 2012 with “good kid mAAd city,” the Compton-reared emcee re-wrote the rules of West Coast hip-hop. Instead of inhabiting the gangsta characters in the Death Row mold, he played the brainy observer. He was both a product of the area and an outsider — one armed with the skills, and will, to transcend any ghetto limitations.
No wonder the album earned comparisons to Nas’ “Illmatic,” the cinematic view of New York project life in the late 1980s and early ’90s. It also made Lamar so respected that when Macklemore and Ryan Lewis took best rap album over him at the 2013 Grammys, Macklemore wound publicly apologizing to Lamar.
On “To Pimp A Butterfly,” Lamar expands from regional concerns to address general issues of race, power, madness and desire. He kicks off the long album with songs such as “For Free” and “King Kunta” that reference slavery. But he hasn’t turned into a lecturer or a scold. In tracks like “U,” Lamar expresses his personal fears in a rush of rhymes so anxious, it sounds like he’s about to have a mental breakdown.
In all these songs, Lamar offers a far different sound than fired “mAAd city.” Where that album sounded methodical and internalized, with dreamy beats and supple bass lines, “Butterfly” feels manic and embracing. It’s faster, and more fully musical, with fresh forays into horn-driven, and playful, jazz. There are also snatches of Southern funk that may remind you of vintage OutKast. There’s even a Sufjan Stevens sample, along with a more expected one from the Isley Brothers.
The more animated music encourages a rash of new rap cadences from the emcee. On “mAAd city,” Lamar switched up his flow as easily, and cannily, as Eminem. Here he ups his game with a whole new clutch of flows. His spitting in “The Blacker The Berry” will make your head spin.
As on his debut, “Pimp” encodes the tracks with so much tricky word play, hip-hop scholars will have texts to pull apart and ponder. The winking references run all the way from the Beatles (“For Sale” subtly alludes to the druggy haze of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”) to Harper Lee (the album’s title is a play on “To Kill A Mockingbird”). It’s an album meant to be lived with for a long time, making it one of the few recent hip-hop that’s built to last.
