[Bitflakes]

Personally as a big hiphop fan and also a Kendrick Lamar fan, I'd like to talk about To Pimp A Butterfly.

I was really excited about the release of this album having discovered him back in 2012 when Good Kid came out. Hiphop was having an explosion of really exciting new acts and Kendrick was featured on the front cover of XXL as Dre's new prodige. Good Kid Mad City was an awesome album in my opinion, probably the best release that year, and Lamar was tipped as being the biggest hiphop star since Eminem.

Kendrick Lamar owes much of his hereditary style to acts like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, the 'conscientious' hiphop style that was pretty much stamped out in the early nineties by gangsta rap. What I personally found interesting about Good Kid was that he was making what was essentially a conscientious rap record in the style of a gangsta rap one. It was released on Aftermath (Dre's record label), partly produced by Just Blaze (the producer that seems to have taken Dre's thumpin' banger production style and run with it) and set in Compton (the home of gansta rap). You'd think that any up and coming rapper taken in by Dre's crew would want to toughen up their delivery (Tupac definitely did on All Eyez On Me) and Lamar does to an extent, he still uses battle lyrics and he still says 'bitch' every chance he gets, but he intersperses his album with acted recordings of his loving parents and is consistently conscientiously looking at his situation as a young teenager growing up in Compton. He was saying I've got a conscience but I'm not a pussy.

On To Pimp a Butterfly I can find no single simple idea that runs through the entire record. Instead there's a range of unfinished ones, tracks often last for way too long, there's this annoying poem he recites over and over in between songs and the music style is extremely jazzy and...yep I'm gonna say it... pretentious. As well as all that the directness has gone, everything feels ambiguous and undefined. There's a sense that Lamar is trying to re-invent the hiphop record, what a hiphop album can be, which is a pretty admirable and brave thing to do, but in my opinion it doesn't work. Hiphop isn't about musical style, it never has been, it's about lyrics and all the mess in To Pimp A Butterfly's music is distracting and ultimately detracts from what Kendrick Lamar was actually trying to say.

Thoughts?

[WindowAbove]

[babyBlueSedan]

Well, first off, I'd argue that hip hip is just as much about musical style as lyrics. Good or bad lyrics can certainly make an average hip hop album good or bad, but average production and cookie cutter song structure is just as damning to an album as bad lyrics. I'd argue that without their jazzy production, A Tribe Called Quest wouldn't be nearly as good. The emcees are playful and have great chemistry but for their time their lyrics really don't do much for me. I'm sure I could come up with other examples from that era as well. And as a Kanye fan, I have to mention Yeezus, which is a really adventurous album with questionable lyrics throughout.

Now, regarding TPAB: I love this album pretty unconditionally so I'm going to try to be as unbiased as possible. I always felt GKMC was great in spite of its production - it's not bad by any means, in fact it's quite good, but it was all over the board and didn't flow as well as the narrative did. On Butterfly, the production is way more cohesive, not to mention adventurous. Which brings me to your point about the album having no idea that runs throughout, which I just cannot agree with. GKMC was the story of life in Compton, and TPAB is the story of life outside it. He talks often about "escaping" the city and how this affects him. How his friends judge him for leaving them behind. How he feels he abandoned his real home. How depressed he feels despite his new found fame. And how despite his raising awareness of the gang violence that still plagues the city, it has only gotten worse. It's interesting to me that as big of a hit as GKMC was to both hip hop and non hip hop fans (and across all races, and in the mainstream to a limited extent), racism has only seemingly gotten worse in the past few years. Kendrick mentions Trayvon Martin specifically, but the larger issue of police violence is mentioned all across the record. It's both a personal story and one that deals with larger social issues. And get out of here with that pretentious talk - the poem he recites is beautiful, and the way it builds gives the album a sense of suspense. Not to mention cohesion that you claim is missing. Now, if you were expecting GKMC 2, I can see why you'd be disappointed. But this is a much richer experience.

Now, the album is by no means perfect. The Tupac interview is heavy handed and some songs, like How Much A Dollar Cost, are a little ridiculous. But to claim it's a complete miss just feels wrong to me.
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And it's hard to be a human being. And it's harder as anything else.

[RoundTheBend]

I have nothing to contribute, but find this thread interesting.

[Norman Bates]

[Rhett]

Man, I'm lucky if understand one word in ten in most hip hop songs, so I assumed it was all about the 808, the bass, and the samples.

[Lachapelle]

[undefined]

There's nothing wrong with criticizing TPAB for any number of flaws, but a lot of OP's premises about hip-hip in general are uh interesting...


Ugh I'd rather not get into this. Have fun guys.

[Applerill]

[Sometype]