Kendrick Lamar exposes societal downfalls, shines on new album
By Yotam Bentov | March 26The best hip-hop record in recent memory opens with a simple sound bit, sampled off of the 1974 Boris Gardiner song, “Every N****r is a Star” [this song title was altered during the editing process]. Kendrick Lamar’s "To Pimp a Butterfly" (2015) goes on to reaffirm, reject, tear, mend and scream this simple message of racial self-love. This is the record Kendrick Lamar has been waiting his entire career to make. It stands as a culmination of ideas previously established in Kendrick's work and fleshed out in full here; ideas about society, music, duty, evil and the way all these trappings are intertwined and self-propagating within his psyche. "To Pimp a Butterfly" is introspective, but is also driven by a simple mission of spreading light in a space that is dark – whether that space is Kendrick’s own mind or the community that surrounds him.
