By the time Kendrick Lamar plays his poem for the ghost of Tupac Shakur at the end of “Mortal Man” — a poem he has been building, stanza by stanza, across the full 79 minutes of To Pimp a Butterfly — you understand what kind of record this is. Not an album. A reckoning.
It arrived in March 2015, leaked a week early, and immediately rewired the critical discourse around rap music. The album that everyone had been expecting, good kid, m.A.A.d city Part 2, did not show up. This did instead: a live-funk, jazz-rap, spoken word, protest record that wore its literary ambitions without apology.
The Architecture
Thundercat plays bass on this record like he is trying to dismantle the concept of the chord. Flying Lotus and Terrace Martin produced tracks that sound like they were recorded in a session that went wrong and came out better for it. The whole thing is built on grooves — the actual feel of Black American musical history, from James Brown to Parliament to Miles Davis — rather than samples of it.
Kendrick’s rapping is technically remarkable throughout, but the record is more interested in what the words mean than how fast they arrive. “u” is a six-minute self-flagellation that finds him drunk in a hotel room, and the performance is so raw it is uncomfortable to sit with. “The Blacker the Berry” is a political screed that ends with a punchline so devastating it reframes everything that came before it.
The Poem
The structural device — a poem addressed to a butterfly, read in fragments, only complete at the close — is the kind of move that should feel gimmicky and doesn’t. It works because the album earns it. By the time the full poem lands, Kendrick has already done the work of justifying every line.
The conversation with Tupac that follows is assembled from a 1994 interview. It should not work. It does.
To Pimp a Butterfly is the rare album that is exactly as important as people said it was when it came out. It has not aged. It will not age. It is describing something permanent.
10/10