For To Pimp a Butterfly, Porter tells me, one of the main objectives was to get the 808 drums—bass-heavy percussion—out of the mix. “What made To Pimp a Butterfly so special is that we kinda walked away from that,” the trombonist remembers. “Once Terrace got into the studio and started hearing what they wanted to do, and how they wanted to piece it together with the live music, we got to bring what we do into it. Some of the music, we would play these tracks and get involved with them, and then, us being accustomed to playing with each other, we’d slip off and make a whole new song right then and there. There’s a whole orchestra in there for some cuts.” Porter, Martin, and Glasper describe frenzied scenes full of nonstop creativity. They’d be off playing somewhere, and in another part of the studio, Washington was writing out string arrangements and letting the producers hear what he’d drafted. There were nights where Kendrick would pop up to see how the live instrumentation was beginning to sound. “Once it got to the point where it was almost done and sounding good, that’s when Kendrick started coming in like, ‘I wanna hear how this track came out. Because I know it was hot before I left and I want to hear what these people did,’ ” Porter says. “He’d come in later and the energy would change. These instruments started giving these tracks a different spirit, a different energy, so he’d have to write according to that now. He started coming in and checking out the vibe of these songs, like, ‘Oh, he got Thundercat on this one!’ All these different things were adding all these different colors.”
While To Pimp a Butterfly was as much about the musicians as it was about Kendrick, everyone agrees that he deserves more credit as a producer. He had a very clear vision of what his music was supposed to sound like, and how to let air into his verses so the compositions could breathe on their own. Where some rappers tend to suffocate the beats with rapid-fire flows to demonstrate their vocal prowess, Kendrick has been called a jazz musician himself, or a spoken-word poet who approaches words with the same vigor as Martin and company did with their instruments.
For the musicians, it was never about playing all the notes; they were careful and measured, and played the best notes. Same thing with Kendrick. “He was just like one of us,” Porter says. “Everything doesn’t have to be written down and formatted. If we had to go with the unknown, and make something out of what’s happening right here, then we were all gonna be together and make something out of this situation. He wasn’t like, ‘Stop it, let me write something for this.’ Kendrick was going to talk about how he was feeling right now, and he’s such a good poet and storyteller that it worked.” By all accounts, Kendrick was very much involved with the beat construction of To Pimp a Butterfly and treated the music with the same vigor that he’d treat his rhymes. He’s very much a jazz musician who employs the same intricate technique to his vocal delivery that Miles Davis would to releasing notes from his trumpet. Kendrick was a scientist or a grand painter, and To Pimp a Butterfly was to be his masterpiece. The album had heavy themes within its bright, prismatic soundtrack, which wasn’t surprising for a Kendrick record. Much like “Swimming Pools” from good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick peppered his third album with personal narratives about coming home to tell his friends what he’d learned overseas. That explains the song “Momma,” a heartfelt tribute to the journey of going to South Africa and bringing lessons back to Compton for his friends and the younger generation. People from Kendrick’s side of town don’t often get to see the world outside of their immediate surroundings. But because he had seen how the world moves, and had actually set foot inside Nelson Mandela’s jail cell, his perspective broadened and he wanted to share the knowledge. He was thinking beyond the confines of Compton and bringing a new way of thinking back to the community. “The album means so much, not only to Compton, but to Los Angeles as a whole,” Lalah Hathaway tells me. Hathaway is a noted soul singer and daughter of soul music legend Donny Hathaway, whose voice is sampled on “Momma,” and was called in by Martin to add backup vocals to several songs on To Pimp a Butterfly. “Speaking as a person who lives in this community, it means so much for him to reach back and give these kids their dreams in the palms of their hands. It’s amazing that he’s still so in touch with his community because a lot of people are not. The fact that he’s so brilliant at making kids listen to what’s important, while also making it so they’re not even paying attention to what they’re listening to. It’s hard to get kids to listen to smart shit.”
But change is difficult—Kendrick said that a few times himself during To Pimp a Butterfly’s press run—and one man can’t change an entire gang culture with one album. Red and blue is ingrained through the city, and it’s tough to convey the wonders of the Motherland to people who can’t see beyond their own blocks, and can’t fathom life in Africa beyond what they’ve seen on the news. American media likes to portray Africa as poor and downtrodden, the so-called “Dark Continent,” a place that’s scary and where you couldn’t possibly live. Of course, race has a lot to do with that, but Africa is full of beautiful black people on the cutting edge of literature, art, business, and technology. They are proud, and whether it’s Lagos, Nigeria; Johannesburg, South Africa; or Nairobi, Kenya, Africa is a bustling continent with people just as ambitious and creative as Kendrick. “Momma,” with its silky bass line and woozy, off-kilter drums (courtesy of J Dilla disciple Knxwledge), is an ode to blackness and a celebration of his own ascendance. On this track and others throughout Butterfly, Kendrick toes the line between reality and surrealism, wrestling with his own disbelief at just how far he’s come in such a short period of time. For years, Kendrick toiled away in the TDE studio—working, grinding out mixtape after mixtape, album after album—sharpening his writing ability to the point of near mastery. Now suddenly he was there, far removed from the high school cyphers in 2003 and the sidewalk freestyles with Matt Jeezy. Now he could pack basketball arenas, though he had a much different struggle to conquer: the battle to stay true and to keep his sanity intact. And while the journey to South Africa helped Kendrick realign his spirit, he still had to come home to old problems that plagued him, his friends, and Compton as a whole. On “Momma,” Kendrick sees himself in the face of a young boy in South Africa, and tries to reconcile his own challenges as a youth with the ones faced by his reflection. It was time for Kendrick to unlearn all the bullshit about Africa that was taught to him in school, and to implore his friends to come home.
Living in Africa as a Black American is something entirely different; you don’t realize just how traumatized you are until you move to the continent. The idea of even visiting Africa is presented as a vague notion that would be cool to realize one day, but to actually go is incomprehensible. Through public schooling and propaganda, the United States teaches you that it’s the land of opportunity and everything else is inferior. They tell you, indirectly, that black is lesser than, while ignoring the brutal history of slavery that brought our ancestors to these shores in the first place. But once you’re in Africa, you instantly feel connected with your heritage. There’s an innate sense that this is where you belong, followed by the anger of not knowing your true lineage, and realizing that the public school system doesn’t care to teach the full scope of black history. Sure, we’re taught the usual names—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey—but there’s no comprehending the full beauty of Africa until you set foot on the soil. As a Black American, and as an American in general, you’re trained to be on guard at all times, to duck when you hear loud popping noises, and to always assume the worst in people. You’re trained to believe that the man walking toward you is going to ask for something, that there’s no way he merely wants to wish you a prosperous day, to ease the worry on your face. We’re trained to look for the catch, and to be surprised when it isn’t there. We shouldn’t be so shocked by acts of goodwill, but we are. “Momma” perfectly encapsulates the moment when Kendrick—through a chance encounter with a little boy in town—realized he wasn’t so far removed from the Motherland, at lea
st not as much as he thought. You also don’t realize the economic disparities within Africa until you’ve lived with them for a while. It’s one thing to live in, or walk past, public housing in places like New York City, but nothing can prepare you for the so-called “slums,” where millions of people live without regular access to food and clean water. It makes you realize that our problems are insignificant in the bigger picture. Kendrick realized this, too, during his time in Africa. He realized that his views of the continent were skewed, and that his being there was a dream he didn’t know needed to be realized.
The song “How Much a Dollar Cost,” a deep cut featuring celebrated soul singer Ronald Isley, was conceived after a chance encounter with a homeless man at a Cape Town gas station. Kendrick assumed the man wanted money and nothing else. According to the song, Kendrick reacted like many people would, by saying he didn’t have the cash while quickly brushing the man off. Kendrick thought the man was addicted to drugs; he asked for ten rand—or roughly sixty-seven U.S. cents—for what the rapper assumed would be used to achieve some sort of high. After staring at each other for what seemed like forever, it turned out the man simply wanted to put Kendrick on game. This song, like others on To Pimp a Butterfly, has dual themes working at the same time. On one end, you have Kendrick fighting against his own ego; he’s Kendrick Lamar now, and with burgeoning fame comes the tendency to recoil. “I know when niggas hustlin’,” he raps at one point in the song. Turns out the man is actually a reflection of God, and his appearance saves the rapper from descending toward a life of despair. In that way, “How Much a Dollar Cost” draws a direct line to “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” on good kid, m.A.A.d city. Also situated near the end of the album, “How Much a Dollar Cost” is almost the exact same story: Kendrick is near the end of his rope and headed for a spiritual demise when he meets a divine being right at the time he needs it most. In this instance, the man warns him to not be so consumed with money, that it could make him hollow, and that the life he fought so hard to achieve isn’t everything. Sensing Kendrick’s fatigue, he puts a word on the rapper’s heart, encouraging him to reconnect with the higher power he discovered as a teenager.
On “I’m Dying of Thirst,” the enlightenment arrived in the form of a religious woman who stopped Kendrick and his friends from killing the guys who killed their friend. At this point, a decade removed from the incident that changed his life as a teen, Kendrick recenters his divinity, which led to the unclouded reflection of “i,” which found new life on the LP as a makeshift live performance that’s interrupted by a physical altercation in the crowd. Once again channeling James Brown, the track’s scene is eerily similar to a show on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, in which the soul icon had to calm down an audience in the Boston Garden that openly grieved the assassination of its beloved civil rights leader. Brown famously waved off security and calmed down the crowd himself. “We are black!” he declared at the show. “Don’t make us all look bad. You’re not being fair to yourself or me or your race. Now, I asked the police to step back because I felt I could get some respect from my own people.”
In Kendrick’s scene, he’d just returned from a world tour and was performing a small show in Compton. As he performs “i” onstage, this time with live drums and backup singers, a fight breaks out in the audience, causing Kendrick to halt the song halfway through. Where Brown was trying to soothe the loss of a global leader, Kendrick kept it local, tempering a crowd presumably divided over gang colors and city blocks. He was also concerned with loss—the loss of his friends in the community. “How many niggas we done lost, bro?” Kendrick asks off mic. “This year alone! We ain’t got time to waste, my nigga!” If the rapper wanted Butterfly to heal his community and black people throughout the world, the speech and spoken-word freestyle given here crystallizes that theme. As he unpacks the speech, the fight slowly dissipates and the patrons hang on Kendrick’s every word: “N-E-G-U-S description: black emperor, king, ruler, now let me finish / The history books overlook the word and hide it / America tried to make it to a house divided.”
Kendrick was trying to flip the narrative surrounding the N-word while refuting the notion that people in the inner city are destined to fail. Though Kendrick’s friends hadn’t yet seen the world, To Pimp a Butterfly allowed the rapper to bring the world back to them. He was letting them know it wasn’t too late to change the tale, but he was also telling the public that his people weren’t just “thugs” and “gangsters” with no redeeming qualities. They were not trash; they simply hadn’t been given the same chances to succeed that their white counterparts had. So the fact that they gangbanged was a direct result of their living in a country where blacks were seen as inferior. By and large, they were not afforded the best education and told of their true royal lineage. They were not N-words (with the hard -er), they were Negus—supreme rulers, black kings and queens, who were simply far away from home, their true home, Africa. Kendrick discovered this during his journey and, ultimately, To Pimp a Butterfly was a therapeutic release.
That was most evident at the end of the album. After the notes fade on “Mortal Man” and Kendrick finishes the poem he’d been unpacking the entire LP, he starts talking to someone off mic. It’s his hero Tupac Shakur, not the actual Tupac, of course—he’d been dead almost nineteen years—but a repurposed version of him. The music journalist Mats Nileskär had conducted a chat with Tupac in 1994 and shared the audio with TDE for their own usage. Here, the conversation is edited to make it seem like Kendrick and Pac are in the same room. For those who’d listened to the full album, the inclusion of an unheard Tupac interview was a shock. Listeners weren’t expecting to hear his voice, and to hear it come out of nowhere—at the end of such a transcendent record—was truly a jaw-dropping moment. Yet this wasn’t just a chat for shock value; Kendrick had finally come back home—back to L.A., back to the one person who could understand his emotional plight. Tupac was also a Gemini, so he could too fathom the struggle of feeling like two different people, and struggling through growing pains in the public eye. Kendrick sought advice on how to deal with being rich, and how to stay prudent as a famous person. How did Tupac do it? “By my faith in God, by my faith in the game,” he told Kendrick, “and by my faith in ‘all good things come to those who stay true.’ ”
7
“We Gon’ Be Alright”
Midway through To Pimp a Butterfly is a song that would become the anthem for protests throughout the country, although Kendrick and Sounwave had no idea the track would hit in such a manner. It was called “Alright,” the beat for it composed by Pharrell Williams, the revered Grammy Award–winning producer whose credits include everyone from Justin Timberlake to Beyoncé. He had made the beat as his own version of “trap music,” the popular blend of trunk-thumping bass drums and street raps that became the most popular subgenre of hip-hop in the 2010s. Pharrell said he wanted something that sounded like trap, yet more “colorful,” like the music he’d been known to create as one-third of N.E.R.D. in the late nineties and as a solo artist. He wanted the beat for “Alright” to have the hard knock of a trap song, but with live instruments to give it a soulful essence. “I kind of had my Tribe Called Quest hat on that day,” Pharrell once said in 2015. He’d already worked with Kendrick, producing and singing backup on “good kid” from good kid, m.A.A.d city. Before then, Pharrell and his assistant played one of Kendrick’s mixtapes during a drive through Tokyo. That’s when he knew that Kendrick was a singular talent and wanted to work with him one day.
“Alright” as we know it almost didn’t happen. “That beat… I don’t think Pharrell was even going to play it for us, but one of his close friends, [who is also one] of our close friends who set up the session, was like, ‘Pharrell, you gotta play them that beat,’ ” Sounwave once told Spin. “And he played it for Kendrick, and it was there, but it was not all there, vibe-wise, so that was my job to layer in the drums, get Terrace [Martin] to throw some
sax riffs on it, and make it us. It’s a completely different song than the original.… You’d understand if you were able to compare them, but that’s probably never gonna happen. You just have to have your ears open for every little sound that has potential.” The instrumental was infectious, from the stuttering vocal loop announcing its arrival, to the light synth chords bathing the track in bright shades. Pharrell had been known for his stammering intros, but unlike songs of his like “Frontin’ ” or “Happy,” where ticking drums intensified the pending beat drop, the opening vocal loop made “Alright” feel exultant—like a psalm for street corners, or aliens coming down to Earth.
Kendrick sat on the instrumental for six months before he knew what to say on it. The track sounds joyous, like it should be a party record. But because the album’s theme was so serious, the rapper saw something dark within the track, something that called for unifying words. “I knew it was a great record—I just was trying to find the space to approach it,” Kendrick told producer Rick Rubin for a GQ feature in 2015. “I mean, the beat sounds fun, but there’s something else inside of them chords that Pharrell put down that feels like—it can be more of a statement rather than a tune. Eventually, I found the right words.… And I wanted to approach it as more uplifting—but aggressive. Not playing the victim, but still having that We strong, you know?” Kendrick said he faced pressure from Pharrell and Sam Taylor, a professional dot-connector in the music industry, to write something monumental, or at least finish the damn thing. “I didn’t have any words,” Kendrick continued. “P knew that that record was special. Sam knew that the record was special. They probably knew it before I even had a clue. So I’m glad that they put that pressure on me to challenge myself. ’Cause sometimes, as a writer, you can have that writer’s block. And when you like a sound or an instrumental, you want to approach it the right way. So you sit on it.” Six months later, the rapper started toying with different cadences.
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