Kendrick Lamar: Persona & Beyond

I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly since it came out earlier this year. After playing the CD three or four more times last week, I’m certain that this release will be somewhere in my top three for the year, and felt compelled to share a few thoughts:

The cult of personality isn’t new to rap; it’s integral to the genre, practically even synonymous with it. To some extent, this is the case with all art; content and voice are necessarily interwoven, at times it seems inextricably, though I’d venture that the assertion of persona is epitomized in rap. In To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar embraces this tradition, expanding and rebranding it with his own sublime beats, lyrics, grief, and outrage. He is at once hustler, mystic, quester, maverick, and truth-teller, as well as musical and social historian. He tells us in “Momma”:

I know everything, I know Compton
I know street shit, I know shit that’s conscious
I know everything, I know lawyers, advertisement, and sponsors
I know wisdom, I know bad religion, I know good karma
I know everything, I know history
I know the universe works mentally
 

The CD progresses with Lamar exploring the heights and depths of vulnerability and aggression, from his optimistic proclamations in “u,” including Kamasi Washington’s textural offerings on tenor sax; to his vitriolic commentary on the shadows of capitalism, as voiced in “King Kunta,” replete with what might be the most compelling groove on the CD and a tension-busting reference to Parliament; to the confrontational tone and content spewed in “The Blacker the Berry,” initially inspired by the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Lamar has woven his own Iliad and Odyssey, crafting a storyline delivered cumulatively throughout the album, as if by a Greek chorus, starting with the line: “I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence.” At different points during the CD, subsequent lines are added, building on what has already been offered, including references to “resentment,” “depression,” “self-destruction,” “the evils of Lucy” (specifically Lucifer, generally the perils and snares of success), “survivor’s guilt,” and “the wars of apartheid and discrimination.” In this way, the CD is given a narrative framework, becoming an archetypal quest-and-return, a journey culminating with Lamar’s call to unity:

Made me wanna go back to the city and tell the homies what I learned
The word was respect
Just because you wore a different gang color than mine
Doesn’t mean I can’t respect you as a black man
Forgetting all the pain and hurt we caused each other in these streets
If I respect you, we unify and stop the enemy from killing us
But I don’t know, I’m no mortal man, maybe I’m just another nigga

The final track of the CD, “Mortal Man,” shows Lamar contemplating black history, as well as his role in it, meditating on the gifts and challenges of fame and wealth. While these reflections reaffirm Lamar’s persona as the underdog who has overcome social, economic, and existential adversities to emerge as both hero and antihero, the wounded victor and king-pariah, “Mortal Man” is characterized by a level of sincere inquiry and revelation that transcend mere scripting:

Do you believe in me? Are you deceiving me?
Could I let you down easily, is your heart where it need to be?
Is your smile on permanent? Is your vow on lifetime?
Would you know where the sermon is if I died in this next line?
If I’m tried in a court of law, if the industry cut me off
If the government want me dead, plant cocaine in my car
Would you judge me a drug-head or see me as K. Lamar?

At the end of this track, Lamar samples Mats Nileskär’s 1994 interview with Tupac Shakur and splices his own questions into the dialogue, staging a makeshift conversation with one of his mentors. Near the conclusion of this exchange, Lamar asks Shakur to respond to a poem he (Lamar) has just shared. Shakur is profoundly absent. Lamar repeats, “Pac? Pac?” to no answer, the palpable silence marking the end of both the track and the CD. This haunting truncation creates a memorable rupture, evoking the death of Shakur and the universality of loss. In addition, Lamar is prompted, as possible spokesman for a new generation of artists and African-American men, to find and trust his own sense of direction—in music and life.

I’d be remiss not to mention that this album is flat-out entertaining to listen to, replete with undeniable melodic, rhythmic, and lyrical hooks. Vital art, along with its challenging notions, is often most successful when it assumes a palatable form, appealing to deliverable expectations while concurrently pointing towards a higher reality—emotions, thoughts, states that can never be entirely explicated. This is the case with To Pimp a Butterfly: we’re seduced by its immediacy, altered by its sophistication.