To Pimp a Butterfly

Kendrick Lamar

TDE, 2015

kendrick lamar had shown himself to be hip-hop’s boldest new visionary on his 2012 LP, good kid, m.A.A.d city [see No. 115]. So people expected greatness from his third album. But he topped himself with To Pimp a Butterfly — a sprawling, ambitious 78-minute portrait of America and his dangerous place in it, with a host of funk and jazz influences and collaborators. As Lamar said when the album was released, “I pride myself on writing now rather than rapping. My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work, rather than just a 16-bar verse.”

“Alright” became a Black Lives Matter anthem, with “The Blacker the Berry” as the flip side. “How Much a Dollar Cost” is a haunting meditation on mortality set to a Radiohead piano loop. And in “King Kunta,” K-Dot takes in the whole sweep of African American heartbreak, from the Middle Passage to the hood, from Richard Pryor to P-Funk. “You take a black kid out of Compton and put him in the limelight, and you find answers about yourself you never knew you were searching for,” Lamar said. “There’s some stuff in there, man. It’s a roller coaster. It builds.”