MUSIC

KENDRICK LAMAR'S INCREDIBLE COUSIOUSNESS

the many doubled voices of To Pimp A Butterfly

By Yoon Shin

This is how you pimp a butterfly

Kendrick Lamar’s best-selling, award-winning album To Pimp a Butterfly is one of the most commented upon albums of the last decade. Everyone has an opinion and everyone cares. Instead of offering my opinion to the vast swamp of commentary already out there, I want to look at the commentary itself and see what it says about Lamar’s tremendous achievement and perhaps, quite specifically, the state of America itself. We’ll find that although what critics say about the album is plentiful, they do tend to return to a similar set of themes: the notion of contradiction; the belief that community matters, both African-American and American, and the sense that TPAB is a difficult work, although what people mean by difficult is up for grabs.

Let’s start with the idea that TPAB is a contradictory work. What does that even mean? According to Forrest Caradameneis in No Ripcord, “To Pimp A Butterfly is an album of racial contradiction. The album is about contradictions of fame and artistry, of escape and home, of Kendrick Lamar himself, and the schizophrenic condition that W.E.B Du Bois’ termed ‘double consciousness’ in The Souls of Black Folk.”

DuBois came up with the theory of double consciousness

Before we move on, what does Cardameneis mean by Du Bois’ double-consciousness? As he mentions, double consciousness describes the psychological condition of African Americans, how black identity has split into multiple facets as a result of the disparity between African heritage and an enslaved upbringing in White America. On TPAB, there’s a track called "Blacker the Berry" that clearly reflects Lamar’s awareness of the effects of double-consciousness on contemporary African-American life.

In the first verse, Lamar says “I’m African-American, I’m African, I’m black as the moon, heritage of a small village.” In Just Random Thoughts, Adam McDonald claims, “In the track, Lamar says… that he is African American, on paper. But truly he is only African and he feels no part of him is an American.” The track points out the contradictions and pain that African-Americans have experienced in their lives, the history passed from generation to generation, and the still disastrous reality of being black in the 21st century America.

But as others have noted Lamar does not spare himself from criticism. The track also mentions many of the problems endemic to black community and is also unsparing of their faults, too. This implies a comprehensive view of American society, the people who live in it, and the way they conduct themselves.

In Drowned in Sound, Jude Clarke points out “’The Blacker the Berry’” starts out [with Lamar] promising to expose himself as “the biggest hypocrite of 2015," and ends with the confession that, despite his virtuous, politically-conscious stance on many issues and justified anger at police violence, he is also a contributing and culpable player. Almost every review of the album picks up on some version of this idea: that Lamar himself is just as guilty as the institutions and the people he critiques.

Celebrity Institution

He wants to be and seem politically-conscious and he’s recognized for being so, yet his political enlightenment comes with a price. He is a celebrity institution and necessarily part of the system he critiques. Lamar seems to suggest that some kind of hypocrisy is the price for his success and critics praising the album have picked up on this idea. So, one of the ideas that is central to the reception of TPAB is a kind of structural hypocrisy.

Another form of contradiction that people have commented on is the multi-vocal or schizophrenic nature of the album. On its simplest level, Lamar is almost always playing characters rather than rapping as himself. This gives the album a breadth and scope that is unprecedented in pop music. As the album progresses, we experience more and more of Lamar’s cast of loonies, as if he were writing a Russian novel instead of producing a rap album. For instance, the opening track “Wesley’s Theory,” Lamar raps from the perspective of Uncle Sam, clearly a stand-in for the American government.

And so does Kendrick Lamar

In the second verse Lamar raps, “What you want you? A House? A Car? Forty acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar? Anything see, my name is Uncle Sam, I’m your dog.” According to Ryan Bassil in Vice, “Uncle Sam represents capitalist America, which shows how the caterpillar succumbs to American society’s pimping of Butterfly.” It describes how the government manipulates Lamar’s wealth, while failing to provide resources to poor African-Americans who dream of houses, cars, and jewelry. Lamar may have become wealthy, but he suggests the government will come after him with a sniper rifle called tax.

Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic points out, “Uncle Sam entices Lamar to use his new cash to go on a shopping spree—and then promises to hit Lamar with tax-evasion charges like those that derailed Wesley Snipes's career.” Rarely does a major pop star imagine himself to be the victim of tax fraud. But given Lamar’s concerns with what the government doesn’t give and does to the African-American community, you can understand the sense of his critique.

Another aspect of the album that almost all the critics agree on is the notion that TPAB is a kind of encapsulation or re-reading of American popular music, which you might say is the same thing as African-American music. According to Steven Lewis in Smithsonian, “People of African descendants settled in the United States, and the rich African musical heritage that they carried with them was part of the foundation of a new American musical culture that mixed African traditions with those of Europe and the Americas.” As African music sped into America, it became a source of inspiration for the whole country. TPAB is an album that treats that history as the basic truth of American life. In doing so, Lamar treats “funk” not so much as a musical genre, but as a way of life.

George Clinton, Spiritual Father of us All

In a Rolling Stone interview, Lamar mentions how 1970’s funk music influenced TPAB. “The album’s opening track is sampled from Jamaican soul singer Boris Gardiner’s song 'Every Nigger is a Star,' as well as James Brown’s 'Hit me!'" But it is the presence of George Clinton that really signals Lamar’s intentions. As Joe McCasey says, “Funk music’s roots in African American pride reveal why George Clinton’s feature on the track is so significant. Therefore, it’s clear that the presence of funk on the record emphasizes the importance of African-American Pride.” No critic misses the importance of Lamar’s homage to older artists and their role in shaping his album and the country.

Another musical influence is Jazz. That’s significant. Gerald Early in Teacherserve says “Jazz was, in this respect, a prototype for both rock and roll and hip hop because it was so viscerally hated by the bourgeoisie and the musical establishment of the day.” Furthermore, writers, visual artists and filmmakers were also influenced by Jazz music. According to Early, “Jazz broke on the scene at the same time as the arrival of the New Negro Renaissance, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, a period covering from 1919 to 1939.”

The Man of the Moment

In addition, Chris Robinson points out in The Medium that “Jazz has a long and rich tradition of calling out racism, working for social justice, and celebrating black culture in the face of oppression.” In this way Jazz is more than just a music for African-Americans, but for all Americans and the same can be said of rap and Lamar’s album, which is a tremendous achievement.

©Yoon Shin and the CCA Arts Review