The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  He was a student of the rappers who had come before him, and through his vocal nuances, one could hear links to Eazy-E, the fire-breathing cofounder of N.W.A, whose crass, autobiographical style of rap influenced a new generation of equally audacious lyricists. So Kendrick needed someone from that era, someone like Kid Capri, a legend who in the early nineties was the resident DJ for Russell Simmons’s Def Comedy Jam on the cable network HBO. “He called to ask me if I’d work with him,” Capri told the Recording Academy in 2017. “He told me the direction of the album being God and spirituality, but he already knew what he had in his head and he came up with a lot of what I needed to say.” Capri is the narrator of DAMN., his unmistakable voice making the record feel like an old-school mixtape. “I wanted it to feel like just the raw elements of hip-hop, whether I’m using 808s or boom-bap drums,” Kendrick told Beats 1 radio host Zane Lowe. “The initial thought was having [Kid Capri] on some real trap 808 shit. Something I’ve never heard from him.” Not only did DAMN. feel vintage, it felt intense, as it ran through various beats and ideas at a breakneck pace. On “LUST.,” the rapper once again treks through the recent election, as if to rationalize what he’d just seen: “We all woke up, tryna tune to the daily news / Lookin’ for confirmation, hopin’ election wasn’t true.” By saying that we were worried about what’s next, that we were saddened by the results, he was tapping into the very lifeline of Black America. That he was the voice of the people further amplified the message.

  For several months, Kendrick and Sounwave locked themselves in the studio, resting in sleeping bags until they had a fully formed album to put out. And when they thought the record was done, they’d go back in and fine-tune it some more, tweaking and bending the sound until it was perfect for them. Despite their success, or maybe because of their success, Kendrick and Sounwave still had the verve to literally sleep in the studio. The stakes were at their highest; the music world watched TDE closely. But this is how you become the greatest rapper ever, by putting in this kind of work when the cameras aren’t rolling and no one’s there to snap your picture for Instagram. Greatness is achieved in the trenches, when nothing but the will to be an icon is your creative fuel. The greats are all the same—Beyoncé, Serena Williams, LeBron, and the like: they’re never satisfied with where they are now. They’re always looking ahead, always looking to improve, always looking to break new ground. The will to transcend never leaves. When you’re Kendrick Lamar, and you’ve come from the city he did, and seen the things that he’s seen, there’s always this innate feeling of restlessness, that even though you’re a multi-time Grammy Award winner, you still have to work at being great. There’s always a new message to be told, a new wrinkle in the way you disseminate thoughts.

  At this point, Kendrick was a millionaire a few times over, but he still had something to say. For it to truly take shape, he and Sounwave had to become one again—just as they did for Butterfly. If the previous album was shepherded mostly by Terrace Martin, DAMN. was brought to life by Sounwave, who, along with Kendrick, was responsible for much of the album’s sonic direction. While much of To Pimp a Butterfly was written on the road and recorded in different studios, DAMN. was recorded in one studio, where Kendrick’s collaborating producers quite literally had to sleep in the studio as well. The requirement was intense, but Kendrick had the cachet to demand such a thing. “If you had a girlfriend, she had to come visit you at the studio. It was that environment,” Sounwave told GQ in 2017.

  Two months before the record was set to release, he and Kendrick put extra pressure on their collaborators to stay, and even forgo going to get food, so the record could get done on time. “You wanna go get something to eat? You’re not serious,” Sounwave told Fader. “You’re gonna be in this studio and you’re gonna starve with us until it’s perfect. Luckily, it’s everybody we love—it’s like having a sleepover with all your cousins.” They took every last second they could to finish DAMN., tweaking the sound—flipping and reversing beats, switching out beats, and changing the speed of Kendrick’s voice at the very last minute. Indeed, the sessions were moving quickly, and missing one meant missing a day’s worth of ideas, or having your idea scrapped for something totally different. So Kendrick’s collaborators almost had to be in the studio just to be seen. As they did with To Pimp a Butterfly, the creators communicated mainly by cell phone when they weren’t in the studio, trading files via text message and fleshing them out once they were all in the same place.

  As much as DAMN. is about Kendrick evaluating his relationship with God, he was also reconciling his relationship with himself, learning to accept his shortcomings—his fears, doubts, and pain en route to his own ultimate survival. Sans a few features—Rihanna on “LOYALTY.,” U2 on “XXX.,” Zacari on “LOVE.”—Kendrick goes at it alone, which makes the already-reserved rapper sound even more isolated. That’s what he was going for here; DAMN. plays like a series of diary entries. For the first time, it sounded like Kendrick was bending to the pressure of belonging to the world, and combined with the conflicts he faced at home and within his own psyche, DAMN. was the sound of Kendrick seeking help from a higher power. For the past few years, he belonged to and told everything for the culture, but who was praying for him? Who were the people helping him shoulder the pain? Kendrick had been living in a fishbowl; it was not like he could just go out for a walk, or even run down the street to the grocery store without causing a scene. So at home, or in the studio, Kendrick had nothing but time to think about his true allies and where the world was headed. That led to some of his most clear-eyed music ever, because it was so raw and of the moment, and at the end of DAMN., he left no mistake about how he felt as a man, a U.S. citizen, a brother, and an MC. That after everything he’s given to the culture—Section.80; good kid, m.A.A.d city; To Pimp a Butterfly—Kendrick still wrestles with his self-worth. He still wonders if he’s enough, or if after all that, if he’s even appreciated for what he’s given Black America; does it even matter in the long run? Did the community even care, and will they remember his intention? It’s the same question that Obama asked himself when leaving the White House, that despite the wave of goodwill that typified his years in office, he openly wondered if he miscalculated the entire thing. That nagging self-doubt never goes away—no matter if you’re a world-famous, Grammy Award–winning poet and rapper, or the outgoing president of the United States.

  On “FEAR.,” Kendrick reviews the fears of his life—from childhood through adulthood. Here, he breaks down his life in ten-year increments—when he was seven, seventeen, and twenty-seven. On the early part of the song, he unpacks the fear that his mother instilled as the disciplinarian of the house; then, as a teenager, he’s afraid of the cops in his neighborhood, and how back then, he thought he might’ve died at their hands. Then, as a grown man, around the time To Pimp a Butterfly was being recorded, Kendrick delves into the fear of no longer having privacy: “My newfound life made all of me magnified / How many accolades do I need to block denial? / The shock value of my success put bolts in me / All this money, is God playin’ a joke on me?”

  DAMN. was released on Good Friday, April 14, 2017, with a stark, no-frills cover that was in exact contrast to the rapper’s previous album sleeves. Compared with the Polaroid images of good kid, and the White House photoshop of To Pimp a Butterfly, the cover of DAMN. centered Kendrick against a red-brick wall and white T-shirt, his head cocked to the side and his eyes in a dead gaze. On purpose, the rapper looked tired and dejected. Released after Trump had already taken office, Kendrick’s face epitomized what the rest of us were feeling: we were all tired, scared, and fearful of what the world was going to look like soon. Yet when the cover was revealed, it caught a few fans off-guard. It wasn’t artful, and the title was perplexing. Perhaps DAMN. is an acronym for something? It must have some deeper meaning; it’s not just DAMN. is it? Kendrick’s graphic designer, Vlad Sepetov, wanted the DAMN. cover to be loud and abrasive, to start a conversation with a simple image. “I sort
of bucked a lot of what my teachers taught me,” Sepetov tweeted three days before the album dropped. “It’s not uber political like tpab but it has energy.”

  Then there was this conspiracy theory: the chatter that Kendrick was going to release a companion album that Sunday—Easter Sunday—called NATION., making his 2017 record a double disc ultimately called DAMN.NATION. Kendrick later laughed at that theory, saying that DAMN. was it (though a companion album released on Easter Sunday would’ve been amazing). But that spoke to the ravenous nature of Kendrick’s fan base and just how much they demanded of the rapper. To Pimp a Butterfly had made such an impact on culture that they wanted as much music as possible from him. Critics ate it up, too, pointing directly to the album’s concluding song, “DUCKWORTH.,” which unpacks a wild story about a chance encounter between Kendrick’s father, Kenny, and a guy named Anthony from Watts, who twenty years later would give Kenny’s son a record deal and shepherd him to the top of the music industry.

  This is where Kendrick flexes his storytelling ability, and over a shape-shifting four minutes, he weaves in and out of producer 9th Wonder’s beats with keen precision. Long before Anthony Tiffith became “Top Dawg” the music mogul, he was in the streets. One day, he walks into a local Kentucky Fried Chicken, where he sees “a light-skinned nigga that talked a lot / With a curly top and a gap in his teeth.” That was Kendrick’s dad, Ducky; he was working the window at the KFC that day. Tiffith was planning to rob that KFC and stood in Ducky’s line to demand cash. Ducky knew that Tiffith had robbed and shot up this same KFC before (“back in ’84,” Kendrick rapped; Ducky gave him free chicken and two extra biscuits to stay on his good side. As the story goes, Tiffith liked him so much that he didn’t shoot him when he robbed the joint. Who knew that, years later, they’d be connected through Kendrick and laugh about the KFC incident in the studio. “My pops came to the studio after I’d been locked in with him for a minute,” Kendrick told Beats 1 DJ Zane Lowe. “He heard I was dealing with Top Dawg, but my pops personally don’t know him as ‘Top Dawg,’ so when he walked in that room and he seen that Top Dawg was this guy, he flipped. Still till this day they laugh… and they trip out and they tell the same story over and over to each other.”

  As a whole, DAMN. outlined the personal battle between Kendrick’s id, ego, and superego, and how the real strife he’d been facing was within this entire time. It wasn’t that the world wasn’t praying for him or that people were out to get him, it’s that he still had work to do on himself as a man. He was still fighting to stay righteous, struggling to balance the trappings of fame with an enlightened path away from the spotlight. Over its fourteen songs, Kendrick pivoted between darkness and light, wrestled with the end of the world as he saw it, and the urgency to make amends with himself and God before it was too late. In many ways, DAMN. was the culmination of Section.80, good kid, m.A.A.d city, and To Pimp a Butterfly, and was the most fully realized dissection of spirituality that he’d released. Before DAMN., Kendrick was still in the world, still very much a rap star forging his path. With this album, he became something else, almost a mythical being or a supernova. No, he wasn’t perfect and, yes, he was still very much a flawed human being. But he radiated a different energy. It was almost regal.

  DAMN. marked the first time that Kendrick introduced an alter ego for his music. Kung Fu Kenny was based on actor Don Cheadle’s character in the action comedy film Rush Hour 2; there, Cheadle’s character studies martial arts and owns a Chinese restaurant. The two starred together in Kendrick’s “DNA.” video, and afterward, the rapper invited Cheadle to Coachella, where he was debuting a short kung fu movie starring himself. Later that night, Cheadle logged into Twitter and saw that somebody had written, “Don Cheadle, the original Kung Fu Kenny” on his timeline and posted a picture of him in Rush Hour 2. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute.’ So I texted [Kendrick]. I said, ‘Is Kung Fu Kenny me?’ ” he told Entertainment Weekly. “He’s like, ‘That’s what the surprise was. Damn.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t get it at all.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah that’s what the surprise was, so… surprise.’ ” Not surprisingly, the Grammy nominations followed: Best Rap Album, Album of the Year, Best Music Video, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance and Record of the Year for “HUMBLE.,” and Best Rap/Sung Performance for “LOYALTY.”

  This time, Kendrick was on the East Coast, in the world-famous Madison Square Garden for the 60th Annual Grammy Awards, which had now become a second home for him. This time he opened the show as a massive, digitally imposed American flag wafted swiftly on a screen behind him. Soldiers marched in formation as the guitar chords of “LUST.” billowed throughout the arena. Given the time and tenor of America, the performance took not-so-subtle jabs at U.S. politics in an era still raw from Trump’s election and the racism that showed itself. The set transitioned to “DNA.” Three minutes in, the lights dropped out to the sound of a gunshot, and the camera cut to comedian Dave Chappelle, who could either have been the show’s host or a sign that something had gone terribly wrong with Kendrick’s set. As viewers, we didn’t know what the hell was going on.

  “Hi,” Chappelle said in his usual nasal tone. “I’m Dave Chappelle, and I just wanted to remind the audience that the only thing more frightening than watching a black man be honest in America, is being an honest black man in America. Sorry for the interruption, please continue.” On cue, the camera cut back to the stage. Fire erupted from it. Kendrick was in his Kung Fu Kenny garb as he spit an unheard-before rap, and a stage companion beat a drum in the middle of the platform. There was another gunshot and the lights dropped out again. This time Dave Chappelle looked puzzled. “Is this on cable?” he asked. “This CBS? ’Cause it looks like he’s singing and dancing, but this brother is taking enormous chances. Rumble, young man, rumble!”

  By this point, it was clear that Dave was part of the set, egging Kendrick on. For the last section of the rapper’s performance, he dropped out the beat as his dancers, clad in red, fell one by one by assassins’ bullets, sending yet another message to the powers that be that the United States was in peril by its own doing. Kendrick was simulating a mass shooting; with each verbal shot, his company all dropped down until he was the only one left standing. As the song ended, he paced in the middle of the stage, stone-faced and resolute. The crowd, which included Miley Cyrus, Bruno Mars, and Lorde, gave him a standing ovation.

  These kinds of performances now had become commonplace for Kendrick Lamar, who went home with five Grammy awards that night—for Best Rap Performance, Best Rap/Sung Performance, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Album, and Best Music Video. Though winning awards had also become commonplace for him, he still looked like that grateful Compton kid on the stage. “Hip-hop, man,” he said through a huge smile, peering gleefully at his Best Rap Album Grammy. “This the thing that got me on the stage, this the thing that got me to tour all around the world, support my family and all that. Most importantly, it showed me a true definition of what being an artist was. From the jump, I thought it was about the accolades and the cars and the clothes, but it’s really about expressing yourself and putting that paint on a canvas for the world to evolve for the next listener and the next generation after that. This trophy for hip-hop.” Kendrick was half right. Yeah, it was a win for hip-hop, but there in that moment, he was no longer just creating and winning for himself. A win for DAMN. felt like a win for the very culture that was still climbing out of a dark place socially. His wins became our wins, they were wins for everything right and good in hip-hop and creativity, and for people approaching their lives with the same kind of positive intention. As it turns out, those Grammy wins were just the beginning, and pretty soon he’d have a more prestigious award on his shelf: the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

  Rappers don’t win that award. There was still a large contingent of listeners and academics who didn’t think hip-hop was a viable art form. Forget the global impact, nevermind the way it shifted fashion, speech, and music overall, some in the older guard heard only
the vulgarity and wrote it off as low-scale black music that didn’t deserve shine. Since the Pulitzer board first instituted an award for music in 1943, each winner has been a jazz or classical project. That all changed in 2018 when DAMN. broke the mold and was deemed the following by the Pulitzer board: “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” That Kendrick was awarded such a prize spoke to his crossover ability and the depth of his music. His life and art had evolved greatly—from in a garage with Dave Free in Compton, to the now-legendary TDE studio, to now one of the most prestigious awards in history. Kendrick was selected unanimously for the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and that was after a group of jurors openly wondered why hip-hop wasn’t being considered for such a grand prize.

  “At one point they said, ‘Look, we’re considering work that has hip-hop influences, why aren’t we considering hip-hop itself?’ ” Pulitzer Prize administrator Dana Canedy tells me. “And one of the jurors said we should think about Kendrick Lamar. They, right there in real time, decided to download the album and listen to it, and thought that it was technically so brilliant, and that it was such an important piece of work, they decided to make that a nomination.” Though DAMN. was a critical darling and a sonic marvel, some critics wondered why the Pulitzer board didn’t give the award to To Pimp a Butterfly, which had strong jazz elements and had made a massive cultural splash, two years earlier. Nonetheless, Kendrick had at least three albums that could’ve won the Pulitzer, so this was a pronounced achievement for hip-hop either way. The rapper wrote a personal letter to Dana Canedy, thanking her for recognizing his art. “He said when he got word that he won that he thought it was a joke,” she says. “He is such a kind, gracious, humble, spiritual young man. I kept saying to myself, ‘I can’t imagine this young man on a stage rapping, it seems like he ought to be in a choir.’ He was so humble and sweet, but when he turns it on, on the stage, he takes on a completely different persona and it’s completely fascinating.”