Album Review: To Pimp A Butterfly - Kendrick Lamar

It starts with a spoken-word excerpt from funkateer, George Clinton, segues into a jazz riff by bassist Thundercat, then explodes into a retro-future soundscape that may formally qualify as ‘rap’, but is so gloriously wonky that putting it in a box feels entirely futile.

Rather than dropping from the clear blue sky, To Pimp A Butterfly is a continuation of Lamar’s debut, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, in which he reflected on his life in Compton, Los Angeles and the poverty-fuelled crime that formed part of daily existence (several uncles were sent to prison, many school friends died in gang conflicts before graduation).

Here, Lamar takes a wider focus, on a record that is part of a new willingness by hip-hop artists to speak explicitly about race (see also D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, which was rush-released after the upheaval in Ferguson Missouri).

Lamar is plainly aghast that, decades after the civil rights moment, African-Americans still have to march in the streets in pursuit of equality.

But his outrage is deftly swaddled in songs of enormous ambition and complexity. His pugilistic bursts of wordplay are framed by dense, sinuous compositions, which borrow from experimental jazz in their endless tempo-shifts and from 1970s funk in their fealty to the grooves that bang and burble in the background.

At first (or even third of fourth) pass, To Pimp A Butterfly can make for a confounding experience, melodies lurching and shape-shifting, lyrics tensed up with furious zeal. But the sheer ambition of Lamar’s song-craft transcends the project’s surface oddness.

It isn’t alway clear what you are listening to — nonetheless, its power is undeniable. Here is one of the strangest mainstream LPs released in recent memory — and one sure to stay with you long after the event.