BY JUSTIN CHARITY Staff Writer. @ Brother Numpsa In March, Jezebel published the very best and most immediately honest review of To Pimp a Butterfly, the album that Kendrick Lamar is now touring in his eight-city run of “ Kunta's Groove Sessions.” Last night Lamar performed in New York. You’ll recall that To Pimp a Butterfly leaked just 24 hours before its official release date, March 15, and that most major music websites published their reviews of the album within three days of the leak. On such an immediate deadline for filing a feature-length album review, it’s nearly impossible for a young critic to stunt. At Jezebel, Clover Hope just wrote the truth. With bits of personal and political context interspersed, Hope framed her review as a first-take impression of the “overwhelming blackness” of an album about funk and self-destruction. “ This initial feeling is suffocating,” Hope wrote. “ It’s the essence of Dis Tew Much.” I think most fans and critics would agree that Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is, indeed, overwhelming. I reviewed To Pimp a Butterfly in about 72 hours. In that narrow band of time, I got the album's messages and themes but couldn’t grasp the motivations for the album’s sound. Why, in 2015, would a recently platinum-selling rapper make a jazz album with Lalah Hathaway, Ron Isley, and George Clinton? In its entirety, To Pimp a Butterfly isn't a conventionally enjoyable record; it is, essentially, the screams of an agonized man performing open-heart surgery on himself. But if Kendrick's mission was to make his listeners publicly uncomfortable and exceptionally thoughtful, then To Pimp a Butterfly seems to have backfired: We offered nothing but applause. To Pimp a Butterfly is, undeniably, an important album. It's also frustrating, painful, chaotic, and wildly derivative of so many black musical influences that Kendrick Lamar barely elevates. Songs.
Kendrick Lamar's Surprise Album Transforms Polished Scraps Into Magic In the opening stretch of track seven on Untitled Unmastered, Kendrick Lamar runs down what sounds like a list of things that can’t quite elevate you like his music can. It’s mostly a series of nouns, a catalog of positive and negative forces. Love, drugs, fame, chains, juice, crew, hate, life, He, She. They all Here Are All Your 58th Annual Grammy Award Winners It might’ve felt endless but the Grammy Awards broadcast eventually drew to a close. And amid performances good ( Alabama Shakes) and bad (that Lionel Richie tribute, good God) and just WTF (the Hollywood Vampires? they did hand out some awards. Kendrick Lamar Bowls Over the Grammy Awards With Unapologetic Blackness On Monday night, Kendrick Lamar performed a medley from his Grammy Award winning album To Pimp A Butterfly, including “ Blacker The Berry” and “ Alright,” demonstrating what a show from an artist with vision should look like. Kanye West— And Kylie Jenner— Released the Swish Album Tracklist Following the release of songs like “ Real Friends” and “ No More Parties in LA,” Kanye West, according to Kanye West, has completed “the best album of all time.” Do you believe him? You want to, right? Listen to ' No More Parties in L. A. Kanye's New, Great Song with Kendrick Lamar “ Pink fur got Nori dressing like Cam” is obviously the best line of this track on listens 1-10, and despite it, Kanye sounds less like a dad here than on any other tracks he’s teased from SWISH, out February 11, so far. “ No More Parties in L. A.” is the fruit of a My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy-era session, and Yes, Holy Shit, a New Kendrick Lamar Song Kendrick Lamar, with the live backing of the Roots, performed about five minutes of straight mellifluous bliss, while debuting a new untitled song on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday. Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd by Monday afternoon, i Tunes had both frantically pulled it back down and just as abruptly put it back up again. His management at Top Dawg Entertainment protested loudly that Interscope was fucking up the release, but given that the well-timed leak triggered the inevitable breathless Twitter freakout and merrily coincided with a Rolling Stone cover story, one can safely assume that the world heard Kendrick's fourth full-length project as planned. A few days later, it's clear that Kendrick's newest Great American Hip- Hop Novel resists quick absorption. To Pimp a Butterfly has been celebrated as a meditation on blackness as both pigmentation and mind state, and honored as a parable of celebrity sin and spiritual renewal. It has been dissected into helpful track-by-track guides and sample breakdowns, virtual Cliff Notes for an album with the density of Ulysses and the verbal intensity of Shakespeare. He sounds preternaturally calm and intensely neurotic. His rap technique is imperious, shifting from the funk smoothness of These Walls to the angry growl of The Blacker the Berry to the agitated stop-start fast-rap of Alright. He challenges everything, including (especially) himself. On Momma, in fact, he encounters a mirror image of himself, a black boy he meets in the crowd at a concert who tells him, I know your life is full of turmoil. He sounds frenzied, and intent on pouring out his mind lest he lose it entirely. That virtuosity slices through To Pimp a Butterfly's prog-rap cornucopia, the mumbo jumbo of sonic styles that flips from the jazz-oetry of For Free? ( Interlude) to the Take 6-styled R Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Tink, J. Cole and others have released songs that reflect our current moment. So, to help me explore the state of black liberation music released in the last year, I reached out to Gawker contributing editor Kiese Laymon, Jezebel's Julianne Escobedo Shepherd and Clover Hope, and The New Yorker's Matthew Mc Knight. Our conversation appears below. Jason Parham: Since To Pimp a Butterfly is the most present in our minds (well, at least in mine I think it's as good a place to begin as any. The album's intro is as defiant as it is unexpected. The Flying Lotus-produced track ( Wesley's Theory ) samples the classic Boris Gardiner tune and proclaims: Every nigga is star. EVERY. NIGGA. IS. A. STAR. Those are literally the first words you're greeted with on the album. It's easily one of the most self-affirming.
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