Review Summary: It will make you feel young, as when the funk was new.
Before I get into this review, I would like to address an issue first. I would never consider myself a Rap, Hip-hop, R&B connoisseur. I don't claim to know rap well enough to review this against the genre, but instead I'll review it as just a piece of music in itself. The genre as a whole has never had a wide appeal to me due to the fact that I was brought up in a classic rock home. However, there are always artist in any genre that, whether or not that style is "your thing", can thoroughly enjoyed or at least appreciated for the musicality of what is being presented. My sudden infatuation with Tech N9ne and Strange Music brought me to a very odd musical crossroads in late 2011 when I was graduating from school. The further I moved from the screaming and breakdowns of some of the more generic, or dare I say, guilty pleasure bands that filled my teen years, the better I was becoming at being able to put myself in the mindset of the artist in question allowing me to begin to branch out into many different genres. This is where Kendrick Lamar makes his appearance. With Section.80 blasting out of my car stereo for months on end, and the subsequent addiction to Good Kid, Maad City in 2012, Kendrick Lamar was beginning to make his mark on my figurative road of musical evolution.
Now, here we are in 2015, the hype for To Pimp a Butterfly is massive. Personally, I hadn't been so excited for a rap album since middle school with the release of The Eminem Show, the follow up of the highly praised MMLP. Unfortunately as we all know, The Eminem Show being a relatively good example, albums very rarely live up to their hype. Which begs the question, did To Pimp a Butterfly succeed where so many other albums have failed? Is it a confident, concise, and fitting follow up to arguably one of the best albums of the decade? Yes, yes it is.
The first thing to note about To Pimp A Butterfly is that this is quite a different Kendrick Lamar than we have heard before. On previous albums I've always had the feeling that Kendrick was very often writing his biography in music. Yes, he has always had a message to send, but his means of conveying that message were to show the perils of the lifestyle he was born into on his psyche through flashbacks and short skits with family members and friends alike. The new Kendrick is living much more in the present. There's a very clear message Kendrick would like to teach us, and it reads,
WE ARE LOST. Right before launching into
"The Blacker the Berry" one of the most scathing criticisms of the state of racial relations in America that has been heard in many years, he contemplates
Barefoot babies with no cares
Teenage gun toters that don’t play fair, should I get out the car?
I don’t see Compton, I see something much worse
The land of the landmines, the hell that’s on earth
The current view of his city, so highly praised by his younger self in GKMC, is presented to us in four simple lines.
Another major change in the Kendrick sound is the style of beats that Kendrick has chosen to use this time around. From the hard hitting previously mentioned "Blacker the Berry" to the playful, Ellington-esque, almost borderline sloppy, style of "(Interlude) For Free" there are an extremely wide range of musical influences that are brought in to this album to make it not only stand out from it's peers, but will in itself become an influence for artist for many years to come. Don't be surprised when funk takes over the mainstream rap industry for the next little while. While the lyrics are as hard hitting as ever, with one-liners a plenty, the level of musicality that it takes to execute the flows necessary to pull of these off-kilter beats is simply stunning. It is an album that is so ahead of its time in its ability to connect genres, some of which don't even seem like they would fit, but is also behind its time in the sense that it embodies everything that has been missed about music since the 70's and 80's ended and chorus-driven music became the norm. The amount of music theory and natural talent that it had to have taken to create this album is enough to give it a 5 in itself. I may be alone in this, but the backing tracks alone would be a killer listen, Kendrick's bars are almost just sprinkles at this point, albeit very delicious socially conscious sprinkles.
Before I ramble too much I'll close with one of the main arguments for the 5 rating, aside from the pure musicality of this album. My favorite trait in K Lamar as an artist has always been his ability to bring you into his world. This was one of the biggest draws to GKMC, and nothing has changed since then. It should be literally impossible to imagine growing up on the streets of Compton unless you have actually been there and done it. Although many have tried before, Kendrick was the first rap artist that has been able to make the me feel like I can comfortably say, "I feel like I've been there" and not just about living in Compton, but understanding the viewpoint of a culture group that is very different from the one I grew up in.
Listening to Kendrick is like reading a well written book. You get to watch the stories play out in your head, you feel pain, loss, and struggle. This album is a window to the soul of a conflicted man who, unlike many of us, is confident enough to bare his inner demons in an attempt to re-legitimize the importance of music in our modern culture as more than a passing fad or another banger to enjoy, but as a tool to be used to criticize the state of the world that we find ourselves living in, and to remove the blinders from many who believe that the issue of race has ended in America.
