The arc is a somersault through Hades into Valhalla.
The explosion of consciousness and message, splayed out so savagely that all Kendrick’s inner conflicts and wrongs and doubts and dreams are there, too, entwined in the guts for all to see. In this statement is To Pimp a Butterfly’s impetus, this overwhelming urgency. Pac’s ghost states that the black male in America only has about five years or so at their peak to make a difference, to exert full power, before their hearts are ripped out, before they’re neutered, neutralized. There is calculation only insomuch as Kendrick takes in the next cache of West Coast rap and sees Flying Lotus and so Flying Lotus’ opener provides the template and the template is fusion and the template is necessary and the template is the concept and the concept is the pit in Kendrick‘s chest. There is drama and narrative, but they are clutched in tight to the pit in Kendrick Lamar’s chest, thus infused into the spit your ears can see seething through his clenched teeth. There is craft here (and in fact this is the most musical mainstream rap record since Aquemini) but just enough room for it. Rather, it is not a rap album it is the absolute rap album. And it’s been turning ever since, through The Low-End Theory (1991) and Illmatic (1994) and Aquemini (1998), turning into now, this moment, the pimping of a butterfly. Rather, it is the spiritual recessor like a dead-eye bolt backwards through time, parting Rich Gang, Ying Yang, MC Hammer pants, ripping into the presence of that nascent moment when Gil Scott-Heron spoke, over soul music, that the “revolution will not be televised.” And music turned on its head.
Rather, it is the spiritual successor to the first part of Badu’s New Amerykah (2008).
Rather, it is a spoken word installation, gimmicks on gimmicks (“For Free?” and “For Sale?” and “u” and “i” and Momma and a recurring poem and a resurrected Tupac and every other stitch in this tapestry), gimmicks as motifs as blessings of art, art as self-expression demanding to be heard, to be pondered, inhaled-exhaled only when our minds or bodies complete their decay, and from that ruin to be exhumed. Rather, it is a packed, self-reflexive novel of a thesis statement, Kendrick Lamar proclaiming himself here a “literate writer,” this his sprawling opus that even rocks annotation (the echoing, hollowed-out footnote of “These Walls” unravels with Kendrick remarking after a pointed bar that “that sentence so important” and referencing us back to his first verse so that we can dig there is no metaphor present on To Pimp a Butterfly without at least two meanings). Rather, it is a funk manifesto, a screed that grooves in the same grooves that Sly and the Family Stone sparked on There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971) and Mayfield on Curtis (1970) it carries those grooves forward like torches into the post-millennial dusk.
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