The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  6

  King Kendrick

  As Kendrick toured the U.S. with Kanye West in 2014, he started opening his mind to new forms of music. “You would have thought it was a tour bus for someone over the age of 55,” producer Sounwave once told Spin. Kendrick had grown up listening mostly to West Coast hip-hop, and by his own admission, he had missed out on transcendent rappers like Nas and the Notorious B.I.G. at the height of their respective powers. To find new inspiration, he went further into the pantheon of revolutionary black music, to iconic jazz trumpeters like Miles Davis and Donald Byrd, and funk legends like Sly Stone and George Clinton. Kendrick was exploring freedom in his life and in his music, and these creators personified that. Miles had changed the direction of jazz at least three times, first in 1959 with his breakthrough album, Kind of Blue, then in 1969 with In a Silent Way and in 1970 with Bitches Brew Blue is lauded for ushering a more modal sound into jazz; Silent Way and Brew marked the beginning of Miles’s electric period, where he broadened his music to include traces of funk and rock into the mix. Sly and George were outlandish at a time when America wasn’t open to such black artists. In the late 1960s, when mainstream music took a psychedelic, acid-fueled turn, they crafted sounds that were equally uplifting, acerbic, and iconoclastic.

  Miles, Donald, Sly, and George were all free black men, creatively and spiritually, who indirectly showed Kendrick that he could be the same type of musician. But such freedom is challenging to obtain in rap music, a genre indebted to bravado and street cred. Sure, he was more visible now, but he was still his own man, and TDE was more inclined to do their own thing, not what fans expected them to do. Kendrick wanted to innovate, but he had to do it within a genre among stars who’d rather rap about flashy cars and bedazzled jewelry instead of depression, Christianity, and the trappings of fame. Kendrick played this music so much that he started to become one with it. That, combined with the South Africa trip, made his soul even older and wiser.

  For his next album, Kendrick wanted to discuss these topics by using jazz, funk, and spoken word as the backdrop. Jazz and funk were forgotten genres that hadn’t been blended into mainstream hip-hop for at least fifteen years, when the rapper Common did so for his 2000 masterpiece, Like Water for Chocolate. Yet while Com’s blend felt brighter and more tethered to the jazz-rap hybrids of early nineties luminaries A Tribe Called Quest and Gang Starr, Kendrick envisioned something a little darker and more esoteric. “Tribe was the beginning of it, and they also changed the temperament of rap at the time. Rap was pretty aggressive and they took it back a little bit, and they created a wave of artists who were headed in that direction,” says Hank Shocklee, a Hall of Fame record producer who, in the 1980s and ’90s, was the main architect of Public Enemy’s bombastic sound. “I’ve always thought jazz was the next evolution for hip-hop. Before, it was more funk.” Shocklee had seen the blending of hip-hop and jazz firsthand. In the late eighties, the producer took A Tribe Called Quest’s first six-song demo to Def Jam Records creator Russell Simmons: “He didn’t get into it because it wasn’t aggressive and they weren’t yelling. The beats weren’t hard. There were those groups of people who didn’t understand it because it was a divergence from what they were listening to. That’s where music is always gonna go. It’s about moving things forward and not looking backwards, and those are the artists who tend to last throughout time. Those who are not afraid to push the envelope in areas where no one was willing to go.”

  Kendrick wanted an ambitious mix of bebop and psychedelic jazz, James Brown–centric funk, atmospheric soul, and off-centered beats. And most important, it had to be black—real black—from the music to the topics it addressed. Kendrick started brainstorming ideas for his next album right after he finished good kid, and knew immediately that it needed to address the black community as a whole. Our people needed healing; the rapper wanted “to help put a Band-Aid on the things that’s been going on in our communities,” collaborator Terrace Martin once told Revolt, “and just to do something legendary.” Kendrick wanted the album to be for all of us, though with his own personal awakening at the center. He was going to call it Tu Pimp a Caterpillar, or Tupac for short, as yet another way to honor a rapper who had such a profound effect on him. But he soon renamed it To Pimp a Butterfly to reflect the challenges of his newfound celebrity and the music industry’s stronghold on its artists. “The word ‘pimp’ has so much aggression, and that represents several things,” he told MTV News in 2015. “For me, [the album title] represents using my celebrity for good. Another reason is not being pimped by the industry through my celebrity.” In many ways, Kendrick was rejecting the very notion of fame, that because he had a little more money and greater recognition, he was supposed to submit to an industry—and a country—that would never have his best interest at heart. While he’d been grinding for twelve years to reach this moment, Kendrick still had challenges dealing with it.

  Though, if To Pimp a Butterfly was going to be Kendrick’s most ambitious work, the path to completion would be the most challenging. He wanted a fresh live sound with real instrumentation, so the musicians being brought in had to be experts. Kendrick had one rule for himself and the players: Don’t limit yourself conceptually. “Just create,” he said, “[and] not let no type of boundary stop me from doing what I was doing.” Where he had the concept of good kid, m.A.A.d city several years before its release, it took two years of writing, revising, traveling, and scrapping ideas for To Pimp a Butterfly to materialize.

  It had to be an L.A. record, with local players that captured the full breadth of the city’s jazz and funk scenes. That meant Terrace Martin, a producer and multi-instrumentalist with a deep affinity for those genres, had to be the go-to guy for this project. Terrace had been close to TDE’s orbit; he’d produced songs for Section.80 and good kid, m.A.A.d city, so the collective trusted him to bring the best musicians into the sessions. Terrace had graduated from Locke High School in South Los Angeles, a top-tier institution known for its world-class jazz program, helmed by Reggie Andrews, who in the 1960s and ’70s had been the bandleader of Reggie Andrews and the Fellowship, and a keyboardist for Karma, a soul, jazz, and funk group. Andrews was a legend, and he mentored some of the best jazz and funk musicians this world has ever seen: Terrace, bass virtuoso Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, funk and soul vocalist Patrice Rushen, and tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington. Terrace was a Cali guy who embodied the ethos of L.A. jazz: he was cool, unhurried, and incessantly creative. Like Kendrick, the art was paramount to Terrace; with each saxophone wail, modulated vocal and piano chord, the producer paid homage to the rich history of jazz in South Los Angeles. In the 1940s, Central Avenue became the epicenter of jazz in L.A., where local musicians Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus cut their teeth in venues like the Downbeat, Club Alabam, and the Dunbar Hotel.

  South L.A. has a rich, ancestral spirit that you feel as soon as you touch down. The souls of drummer Billy Higgins, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Horace Tapscott, and beatmaker Ras G loom heavily in the air, guiding your voyage through tiled concrete and black-owned businesses. The essence emanates from the World Stage, a performance art space co-owned by Higgins and Kamau Daáood, that once allowed up-and-coming musicians like Terrace and Kamasi to play. “Billy Higgins pretty much gave us a key,” says trombonist Ryan Porter, an L.A. native who was featured on To Pimp a Butterfly. “Me, Terrace, the Bruner brothers. I’m pretty sure that was everyone’s first gig. They put your name in the window, made you feel good. We were all teenagers, but as jazz musicians, it gave you a place to go.” Between riots, systemic racism, and police brutality, the city of L.A. had endured many cultural shifts over the years, but the Leimert Park neighborhood was a respite from all that. “It was kind of a cultural place where you just felt that harmony,” Porter says. “There’s people walking in dashikis. There’s brothers wanting to talk to you about books. There’s coffee shops where you can go, and barbershops where you can go and hear people talking about things in
the conscious community and what’s happening in your area. These were jazz musicians doing that.”

  Tapscott might have been the foremost purveyor of this: As leader of the Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra in the 1960s and ’70s, the pianist, teacher, and activist made it his mission to bring jazz and other forms of black music to children in Los Angeles. He put students in his band and gave them their first chance to play in a professional group. Indirectly, a new generation of L.A. jazz musicians came from that movement in the seventies, which created artists like Ryan Porter, Terrace, Kamasi, and Thundercat. Some of their parents studied with icons like Tapscott and Higgins, and passed what they learned down to their children. Those same children brought that energy to their respective music and To Pimp a Butterfly as a whole.

  Also in Leimert Park was an open mic called Project Blowed, where the city’s abstract lyricists convened every week to meet with like-minded wordsmiths to test new material or exude steam. It was a safe haven for esoteric poets like Aceyalone, Busdriver, and Myka 9; this wasn’t an open mic in the traditional sense, as the poets were somewhat left of center and eschewed the same ol’ gun-toting narratives deployed by street rappers. If you were performing at Project Blowed, you had to come with something lyrically dexterous. Whether directly or indirectly, Kendrick was a student of Project Blowed and its abstract lyricism; his creative aesthetic was more attuned to it than any other subset of L.A. underground rap. “Even if he wasn’t around that, Kendrick likely knew someone who was connected with it,” Porter says. “It was almost like a hip-hop support group. There was no way you could be in L.A. and not be affected by that vibe.”

  From all this history came To Pimp a Butterfly: the unapologetic blackness of a Tapscott record, the hard bop of a Mingus classic, the frenetic swing of a Higgins track, the offbeat flow of Aceyalone and Myka 9. Rappers tend to make music to sound good in the car: the bass has to rattle the trunk and shake the windows to the point of near breakage. But Kendrick had done all that before: his early mixtapes, along with Section.80 and good kid, m.A.A.d city, were hip-hop records for die-hard rap heads to drive to. For To Pimp a Butterfly, he wasn’t focused on making radio singles or festive songs for nightclubs. Hell, his listeners might not like or understand this album—because it was gonna be different. Kendrick’s work required patience and thoughtful ears, and To Pimp a Butterfly was no exception. He wanted listeners to be slowly drawn into the record, even if it took a few plays or even a few years for it to lock in.

  Behind those intentions, however, To Pimp a Butterfly was shaping up to be stellar or messy, grand or disappointing. Though Kendrick had a lot to say about his new life, about black pain, and what he had seen in South Africa, it was not entirely certain that the album would be a classic. In the months leading up to its release, Kendrick gave an interview to Billboard that didn’t do him any favors. The interviewer asked the rapper’s thoughts on the killings of unarmed black men by police—in Ferguson, specifically. And instead of showing sympathy for what had happened to Mike Brown, Kendrick’s answer made him sound like an “All Lives Matter” proponent who blamed the victim and not the aggressor. “I wish somebody would look in our neighborhood knowing that it’s already a situation, mentally, where it’s fucked up,” he said. “What happened to [Michael Brown] should’ve never happened. Never. But when we don’t have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us? It starts from within. Don’t start with just a rally, don’t start from looting—it starts from within.” The response spoke more to Kendrick’s own childhood as a traumatized black boy than the struggles happening in Ferguson. That he wasn’t far removed from his own upbringing in Compton and still grappling with trauma was the essence of his comment.

  The response ignited a small firestorm on social media, and triggered harsh criticism from fellow artists who wondered why, as a black man, Kendrick would say such a thing. On Twitter, rapper Azealia Banks said Kendrick’s comments were the “dumbest shit I’ve ever heard a black man say.” Then Kid Cudi, who’d been credited with ushering in a hazier, emo style of rap, criticized Kendrick indirectly with a subtweet asking black artists not to “talk down on the black community like you are Gods gift to niggaz everywhere.” Then there was the third verse of “The Blacker the Berry.” Now finished and released as the second single off To Pimp a Butterfly, it appeared to blame black people for their own mistreatment—the notion, on the surface, was that we couldn’t be upset with police shootings when black people in gangs shot and killed each other all the time. At the end of the song, Kendrick raps: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? / Hypocrite!” That, too, set off a firestorm of emotions from listeners online who lambasted the rapper for respectability politics.

  In an interview with journalist Rob Markman for MTV News, Kendrick said that he wasn’t trying to put down the black community. “These are my experiences,” Kendrick said. “This is my life that I’m talking ’bout. I’m not speaking to the community. I’m not speaking of the community. I am the community. It’s therapeutic for myself because I still feel that urge, and I still feel that anger and hatred for this man next door… that ill will to want to do something.” He had a history of such ambiguity, like these lines on “m.A.A.d city”: “If I told you I killed a nigga at sixteen, would you believe me? / Perceive me to be innocent Kendrick that you seen in the street.” And this one from “Hol’ Up”: “As a kid I killed two adults, I’m too advanced.” Then, on “Institutionalized,” from To Pimp a Butterfly: “I’m trapped inside the ghetto and I ain’t proud to admit it / Institutionalized, I could still kill me a nigga, so what?” There’d also been the question of whether or not he’d ever been in a gang. Kendrick grew up on the west side of Compton—Piru territory. Over the years, he’d denied being affiliated on songs and in interviews, but lyrics like “Step on my neck and get blood on your Nike checks”—which appeared on “good kid”—left the door open for such inquiry. The line could mean that he was indeed in a gang, or that the crew had his back because he was cool with them.

  “I’ve only been in this industry three or four years,” Kendrick told MTV News. “I can’t forget twenty years of me being in the city of Compton. When I say these things, [it’s reminding me] that I need to respect this man, because he’s a black man, not because of the color that he’s wearing. I did a lot to tear down my own community.”

  Kendrick had never been a leader before, at least not on this level. It was one thing to be revered in Compton, but to be admired throughout the country and the world was something else entirely. Nothing in the celebrity handbook can prepare you for the day when a teenage kid says that your music legit saved his life, and shows you the slits on his wrist to prove it. Then the parasites come, the newfound friends and hangers-on who simply want to be around someone famous, and they need “just a couple dollars” to get through. And you can’t mask the guilt of not being there physically for your family. Homesickness kicks in, and living out of a suitcase quickly loses luster. Before you know it, the home and the people you once knew have changed forever. Kendrick was torn between his new and old lives, and he wanted To Pimp a Butterfly to reflect this dichotomy. “It was me tackling my own insecurities, but also making it to where you can relate as well,” he once said. “The whole body of the story is me basically accepting my role as a leader, learning how to accept it, and appreciating it and not running away from it.… The main thing that we’re scared of as people is change—from a social standpoint [to] a day-to-day standpoint. I wanted to embody that in this record.” Indeed, Kendrick was becoming a new person, and so were the people around him.

  One day, producer Steven “Flying Lotus” Ellison was on the tour bus with Kendrick, running through instrumentals he’d been working on for his own project. Lotus was considered a pioneer in the famed L.A. beat scene, where like-minded producers like Tokimonsta, the Gaslamp Killer, Samiyam, and Ras G whipped funk, jazz, hip-hop, and electronica
into a cosmic blend of dance music. Lotus was a disciple of his great-aunt, Alice Coltrane, whose mix of spiritual jazz was meant to elevate the mind beyond the trappings of this planet. Lotus had been known to embody the same ethos. On albums like Los Angeles, Cosmogramma, Until the Quiet Comes, and You’re Dead! the producer piled all sorts of genres into one pot, leading to a kaleidoscopic blend still rooted in the astral jazz that Coltrane used to create. There was one track in particular that caught Kendrick’s attention, a driving funk loop with quick drums and a thick, wobbly bass line. It was a weird hybrid with the oversized knock of a Dr. Dre beat and the kind of spacey electronics you’d hear on an early seventies Funkadelic track. It was squarely within Lotus’s wheelhouse; Kendrick’s, not so much. “I asked him, ‘What is that?’ ” the rapper once told the Recording Academy. “He said, ‘You don’t know nothing about that. That’s real funk.… You’re not going to rap on that.’ It was like a dare.”

  The music was conceptualized by Lotus and frequent collaborator Thundercat, whose frenetic style of bass playing made him a go-to musician for rapper Mac Miller and singer Erykah Badu. Lotus and Thundercat were at the computer studying George Clinton. “He became the fuel for creating,” the bassist once recalled. “I was really blown away that Kendrick was so into that song.” Lotus and Thundercat were Clinton disciples, and in 2008, Lotus launched his own record label, called Brainfeeder. With artists like Thundercat on his roster, Lotus’s imprint became a go-to source for the same sort of esoteric funk that Clinton used to create. It also screamed L.A., just like Kendrick’s music, but it captured a side of the city with which many outside it were not familiar. Largely because of the gangsta rap movement of the eighties and nineties, and due to newer rappers like Kendrick, many outsiders viewed L.A. as a rap town, but Lotus’s and Thundercat’s style was tailored to urban alternative kids who listened to artists like Clinton but also metal, punk, and indie rock. So, on the surface, Lotus and Kendrick was an odd pairing, but that showed just how deep the rapper wanted to dig on his new work. In fact, Kendrick asked Lotus who he envisioned on the track he played on the tour bus. “I laughed and said George Clinton,” the producer said. “I never thought it would actually happen.”