<\/a><\/p>\n Alex writes about Kendrick Lamar’s new record, failure, ‘journey’ movies, and Portuguese chicken.<\/em><\/p>\n There are (obviously) myriad ways to learn your lesson in life, but I tend to fixate on the way people react to two. The first is the most common, and the type people actively seek out: you experience something that is immediately enjoyable, and you like this experience so much that you choose to re-live it or think about it as frequently as possible. You eat a really delicious piece of poultry and you think, \u201cToday I learned I love the Portuguese method of chicken preparation,\u201d before going back to your local churrascaria. This applies to trying anything new: chicken, sex, or a piece of pop culture. This is a method that is very pleasant for you, if not necessarily those around you that truly don\u2019t care that you have finally cracked the code to how The Lizzie McGuire Movie might be about teenage schizophrenia. The second way to learn something is common as well, but in a way most people loathe, because it tends to involve a decent amount of self-hatred.<\/strong><\/p>\n When one thinks about all the things that really taught them something about their life, it\u2019s generally not a list of easily solvable mysteries. Nobody ever learned something profound by finding out that they dropped a set of keys in their left Air Max. In order to learn something worthwhile, there has to be some sort of struggle. You have to not know something in order to learn it, and not knowing something means you are temporarily confused by this absence of knowledge. The few truly valuable things I have learned came out of things I never wanted to have to experience in the first place. The most powerful realizations always come out of a desire to avoid failing again.\u00a0<\/strong>This is a thing I know to be certain about life. And I suspect everybody knows this, but nobody wants to admit it.<\/strong><\/p>\n I remember I was conflicted. \u2018This guy is rap\u2019s new hope? This record is kind of boring, and it is entirely too jumbled for me to ever love. Keisha\u2019s Song is intriguing, and a couple of the drum hits on HiiiPower sounded tremendous, but overall I am not particularly feeling this.\u2019 I listened to the album once, wrote it off soon after. \u2018I get it, I suppose, it\u2019s just not for me.\u2019 Yet.<\/em><\/p>\n There have been three really interesting hip-hop records released since 2010. That\u2019s not to say there haven\u2019t been a multitude of good records, merely that the gap between good and great is exceedingly difficult to overcome, and there are few exceedingly talented rappers. Records like Schoolboy Q\u2019s Oxymoron or Big KRIT\u2019s Cadillactica are very good, but there is something holding them back from being great. Songs like Q\u2019s Man of the Year, with its out-of-nowhere string epilogue, or the grandiosity of KRIT\u2019s Saturdays = Celebration are engaging, but there are also songs like Hell of a Night and Mo Better Cool on those same albums. They\u2019re good records – and often the detracting songs aren\u2019t necessarily bad on their own (although Hell of a Night is fucking terrible) – but parts stray from the tone and as such hurt the whole.<\/p>\n Of Kendrick Lamar\u2019s To Pimp a Butterfly, there are arguments to be made about the first half of that sentence, but certainly not the second.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n By the time Good Kid Maad City was about to be released in October 2012, I remained skeptical of the titularly not-problematic child. \u2018Swimming Pools is kind of a boring single,\u2019 I thought. It didn\u2019t make me less interested to hear his major label debut, as I was always going to feel obligated to take a gander at this piece of culture, but it also didn\u2019t make me more interested in the coming record. The lesson, as always: I am a dumb dumb.<\/em><\/p>\n Good Kid Maad City ended up being one of those aforementioned three really interesting modern hip-hop albums. Swimming Pools itself is a great song that I was wrong about; it\u2019s a party record about the ills of alcoholism, the type of abstract contradiction that will always please me greatly. I wrote about the album at length when it was released, and my thoughts remain (mostly) the same: it is a great album about somebody trying to break out of a cycle they feel trapped within. Lamar felt he was just circling life, and he made an album about the desire to change his geometrical outlook. That album was great, and a lot of people bought it. Somehow, Kendrick became the next hope for rap by simultaneously becoming exceptionally popular and exceptionally interesting.<\/em><\/p>\n To Pimp a Butterfly was released either by surprise or by accident at about midnight a couple Sundays ago, and critical opinion was speedy and unflinching, the way modern critical opinion apparently must be. Twitter exploded with the instant opinions, and the next day entertainment websites did the same. Lamar had made a really, really, really good album that is really, really, really odd. It seemed to take all the more experimental elements of Good Kid\u2019s construction and amplified those and only those. No more Backseat Freestyle, To Pimp a Butterfly is all Sing About Me. People that thought September\u2019s single i was to be indicative of the album\u2019s sound were profoundly incorrect, proven by the fact that the song appears on the album more as a piece of storytelling than a pop song. Like Good Kid, To Pimp a Butterfly is about a journey, but one made with the refined voice Kendrick was able to further develop in the time since the release of his major label debut.<\/p>\n Over the past year, I have found myself fascinated with what I like to call journey movies, where the film follows a singular character, features minimal plot, and shows us this person experiencing their life before leaving us to decide where the journey actually takes them. Frequently this character ends up back at a similar version of the same place he left at the beginning of the film, and they are mildly repetitive by design. These are films that are impossible to pull off if the filmmaker is not a master craftsman, and nobody really tries to pull them off in the earliest part of their career. Of the journey style, Raging Bull is likely the forefather, but it was perfected in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s best film, Eyes Wide Shut. More recently, Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s The Master and Inherent Vice are both like this, as is the Coen Brothers\u2019 Inside Llewyn Davis. All of these movies show you what this character experiences, but they leave the why up to the viewer, assuming they will be able to figure it out for themselves. When I\u2019m experiencing a piece of art, I don\u2019t need clear answers so much as I need interesting obfuscation, my love of journey cinema being a prime example of such. And To Pimp A Butterfly is the auditory equivalent to that style.<\/p>\n In the meantime between albums, the most notable public moment Lamar had was his lengthy featured verse on Big Sean\u2019s Control. The appearance was K.Dot making a straight-ahead acknowledgement that – while other rappers may in fact exist – few concern him. The song had its own brief moment in the music news cycle, the type that only a specific type of cultural sensation can inspire. Rappers mentioned in the lengthy verse felt compelled to tweet about going to the studio immediately \u2013 a confused Fabolous took offence, and the normally offensively bad Mac Miller joked about writing a song exclusively using adjectives – and responses were soon everywhere. Phil Jackson even tweeted about his mention in it*.<\/em><\/p>\n *The idea of Phil Jackson and Kendrick Lamar being friends is not only enjoyable to imagine, but it actually seems like they would get along. In their best work, each man\u2019s goal is to confuse their audience into agreeing with them.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Lamar\u2019s verse was initially perceived as a diss by most, as people can only talk about rap in the ways we have all previously talked about it, but it was more of Lamar challenging everybody around him to not be shitty. He was saying he\u2019s the best, sure, but you can be better too, you just aren\u2019t trying hard enough. He\u2019s not concerned with other modern rappers, but his quandary is that he would like to be. Lamar is an eternally hopeful man; he sees the ills of the world and tries to right them by assuming his audience is intelligent enough to understand what he\u2019s saying. As most artists get more and more concerned with a race to include everybody, somebody willing to exclude those that aren\u2019t interested in what he\u2019s doing grows more charming by the day.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n On To Pimp a Butterfly, we are shown Kendrick Lamar as a man who achieved more than it seems reasonable for anybody to expect out of him, and now that man is looking at the various aspects he maybe failed to take into consideration. The beginning of this album makes that all abundantly clear, as we hear Kendrick actively worrying about treating his success poorly, and going from living that Snipes life to failing to pay his taxes and eventually being the best part of pieces of shit like The Expendables 3. Lamar knows he has reached an unlikely place in life, and he values his time accordingly, always hoping to maintain the value of his words. He positions himself as a leader of sorts because we did collectively, by choosing to listen to his records and hype them up to others. Throughout To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar is a man out front of the movement he supposedly leads simply by virtue of being the one to speak up, and this movement may or may not eventually tear him to pieces. Kendrick is the leader because nobody else is quite up to the task.<\/p>\n This is (obviously) all very interesting, thoughtful stuff, and track four hasn\u2019t even started yet. In contrast to most rappers blindly wishing for things they will never have, or rapping about the physical things they now do have – be they Beamers, Benzes, or Bentleys – Lamar looks back at where he used to be, desiring such things, and then looks to the present where he is forced to deal with these things, wondering aloud if he has the emotional make up to pull it off.<\/p>\n What the Control verse cemented was Lamar\u2019s unquestionable hold over the youth, and hip-hop culture as a whole. He\u2019s right alongside J. Cole as a rapper the kids love, but Lamar\u2019s notable moments long overshadow even Cole\u2019s on the list of trending topics. The G.O.M.D. video release barely made a dent, something Cole is likely penning overly emotional verses about right now. Not only was King Kendrick saying he was the best rapper with Control, but the media was interested in that statement because it was true, and the kids were echoing that statement so much that it became obvious that Lamar was an Important Rapper. Leading into his eventual album\u2019s release, there were murmurs throughout the Internet that he was doing something, and we\u2019d get it soon, but not yet. This remains all noise, the kid on the tweet replacing the man on the street, but the fact that the noise existed at all mattered. It\u2019s not surprising that Kanye West chose to have Lamar be a part of his most recent tour, as Kanye is somebody that understands that what\u2019s current in rap is rap currency. On the day To Pimp a Butterfly hit the digital streets, Kanye released a video for All Day and tweeted about being in the studio, trying his best not to get left behind. Even Yeezus understands the kids have a new messiah.<\/em><\/p>\n The only three other rappers that appear on this album \u2013 despite none of them actually rapping – are the trifecta of west coast hip-hop, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and 2Pac. Instead of wishing to be in the same ranks as these men, Kendrick actually places himself in the same song as each of their voices. Regardless of whether or not this trio are the best Los Angeles has ever offered the genre, the perception will forever be that these three men were the most important; when the average person is asked to think of a rapper from the sunshine state, they are likely not saying Ice Cube, even though O\u2019Shea Jackson\u2019s best record is better than anything by Dre, Snoop, or 2Pac. They are picking one of the people from the Death Row era, the most popular era of West Coast rap music. That Vibe cover is forever burned into the cultural consciousness**, even among those that never actually saw it.<\/p>\n **Just like Suge Knight has been removed from it in our memories.<\/em><\/p>\n With all of this comes pressure; it is unsurprising that Snoop\u2019s voice is used to sing an origin story of sorts about a young rapper, newly a cultural sensation but originally from west Compton. When Doggystyle was released, Snoop was in the same place, and he was assisted in getting there by Dr. Dre, as Kendrick was himself with Good Kid. It is equally unsurprising that Dre and 2Pac\u2019s appearances on the album both come in the voice of mentor to Kendrick\u2019s manatee. Dre gives unsolicited advice on Wesley\u2019s Theory, and the thoughts Kendrick poses to 2Pac on Mortal Man are punctuated with question marks.<\/p>\n Kendrick Lamar is certainly on his way to this sort of rarefied air. It\u2019s unlikely he\u2019ll become as immortal as 2Pac\u2019s murder allowed Shakur to be, but if nothing else, Lamar is in a similar place Shakur was before he was killed. Kendrick knows this, and the second and final thirds of To Pimp a Butterfly are about this; K.Dot is talking to people he knew before he was famous, he\u2019s talking to himself, and he\u2019s talking to us. In all of this, he\u2019s figuring out what he\u2019s supposed to do next. He doesn\u2019t want to misuse his influence. As he always does, Lamar sees the flaws of the world and wants to improve upon them within himself.<\/p>\n By September 2014, Lamar was finally ready to drop a single, a single we all presumed would quickly morph into an album, as this is how most modern blockbuster record releases work now. That song was i, a not-wholly-beloved-but-still-absolutely-really-good song that remains the most traditional single Lamar has released on a major label. Unlike Swimming Pools, I was immediately a huge fan of i. It was all I wanted to listen to for a week. And despite the auditory message of its chorus, it was obvious that K.Dot was putting something more than the fluffy ideas of a traditional single into its lyrics. He loved himself because he had to in order to put up with the world around him. The single is a dance song about what people always talk about why they like dancing, to escape the various sadnesses of human existence. But for once that single was explicitly about a method of escapism: accepting that you are a fan of yourself, and hoping everything else eventually falls into place.<\/em><\/p>\n To Pimp a Butterfly is a journey, and i is that journey\u2019s end. Kendrick returns to where he was at the beginning and tries to make a pleasant anthem about all that he has learned. Everything he learned in the time from Wesley\u2019s Theory to now taught him the lessons of i, and now he wants to pass those along to the people that have committed to listening to him. He even trusts his audience to already know the lyrics; at least half of them are eliminated within the performance aspect present on the album. Let alone Lamar\u2019s journey, he let his single have its own journey before it would wind up drastically altered on his album. On i, all of Kendrick\u2019s thoughts dovetail into one pointed idea: he went through all of these thoughts so you wouldn\u2019t have to. He could just pass along his thoughts on the matter to you.<\/p>\n