Album Anniversaries: Revisiting Kendrick Lamar’s 'To Pimp a Butterfly' in the Trump Era

Kendrick Lamar’s jazz-rap opus paints a candid portrait of an African American rapper who struggles with his identity and fame, and its cultural significance only grows in the Trump era.

In Album Anniversaries, writers honor their favorite aging albums and their subsequent legacies, revealing which projects have stood the test of time.

Written by C.S. Harper

Image courtesy of Top Dawg Entertainment

It is difficult to think about 2010s hip-hop without including Kendrick Lamar. The Pulitzer Prize and 13-time Grammy winner’s brand of conscious rap has left a lasting mark on the genre. In 2012, he released his major label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d. city. Receiving a triple platinum certification and four Grammy nominations, the album was the rapper’s breakthrough moment.

The years following this release brought challenges to Lamar’s life. His newfound fame led to mental health issues and identity struggles. Moreover, the type of violence that he witnessed during his childhood in Compton began to gain widespread attention. In 2013, the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman a year earlier sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. These protests continued in different cities around the country in response to incidents of police brutality that killed Eric Garner, John Crawford, Michael Brown, and others. 

Despite activism, police brutality against African Americans has not improved in recent years. Last year, a study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences using data from 2013 to 2018 found that about 1 in every 1,000 Black men are killed by police. Moreover, Black men and women are respectively 2.5 times and 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than white men and women are. To make matters worse, the government has abandoned measures that could mitigate this issue.

On To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar unleashes his anger toward this issue, among others. The concept album tells a two-part narrative about the African American experience, with half of its songs focusing on the rapper’s life and the other half on Black communities. To tell these diverse stories, the record takes inspiration from many Black-pioneered genres, including jazz, funk, and rock. The album features contributions from many artists from these genres, including veteran funk and soul musicians George Clinton and Ronald Isley.

Even though songs from To Pimp a Butterfly explore different facets of African American life, Lamar ties them together through recurring metaphors and themes. The rapper discusses fame, religion, depression, self-love, and race relations over 16 tracks. He conveys his experiences through the titular butterfly metaphor and personified versions of white America (Uncle Sam) and corporate greed (Lucifer). Lamar further connects the album’s narratives by reciting excerpts from a poem that narrates his emotional journey on several songs. 

The record opens with “Wesley’s Theory,” which samples Boris Gardiner’s “Every N----r Is a Star.” It introduces the metaphor of “pimping the butterfly,” describing how the entertainment industry takes advantage of Black artists. Trumpeter Josef Leimberg details how the butterfly (the artist) loses itself on the journey from the cocoon (the ghetto): “When the four corners of this cocoon collide / You’ll slip through the cracks hopin’ that you’ll survive.” Over the course of the track, Lamar’s relationship with rap becomes cynical, as he dreams of money, women, and luxury cars. The government, personified as Uncle Sam, encourages his consumerist mentality by making false promises to him: “What you want you? A house or a car? / Forty acres and a mule?”

In the jazzy spoken word interlude “For Free? (Interlude),” Lamar calls out Uncle Sam for his abuses. This assertiveness peaks on the funky “King Kunta,” in which Lamar claims the proverbial rap throne. At the end of the song, Lamar recites the beginning of the poem that he threads throughout the album: “I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence.”

“u” presents the lowest point in Lamar’s psyche. The rapper is at his most vulnerable in this song, discussing his depression, alcoholism, and loss of faith in God. In a tearful delivery, he laments his disconnect from Compton due to his indulgence in celebrity culture, which causes the city’s natives to shun him.

Photo courtesy of The Nation

“Momma” completes To Pimp a Butterfly’s first storyline as Lamar breaks free from his struggles with fame. The track sees Lamar “coming home to momma” in several ways: he returns to Compton, visits South Africa in 2014, and regains his humility as a result. He views his fame in a new light after a South African child suggests that he use it as a platform for change. At the end of the song, Lamar vows to advocate against injustice.

To Pimp a Butterfly’s second storyline explores the dualities of the Black experience. In “i,” Lamar encourages African Americans to feel pride in their identity. In contrast to the bleak tone of “u,” this track has an upbeat funk-rock sound. Near the end of the song, the music stops as Lamar delivers a monologue about the n-word. He argues that the slur has been wrongfully used as an expression of Black self-hatred when in Amharic, an Ethiopian language, the word “negus” denotes the opposite: “N-E-G-U-S description: black emperor.” Lamar urges African Americans to use this word in a positive context.

“The Blacker the Berry” contradicts “i” by delving into Black self-hatred. Lamar furiously spits bars about racism and Black violence over a boom-bap beat. In the chorus, he alludes to racial profiling by tweaking Wallace Thurman’s self-love phrase about blackness: “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice / The blacker the berry, the bigger I shoot.” He acknowledges that double consciousness complicates the issue of violence against African Americans, highlighting how they protest police brutality but ignore black-on-black homicide.

Despite To Pimp a Butterfly’s somber tone, the album has uplifting moments. Most notably, “Alright” brings a message of hope to African Americans in the face of police brutality. The song became regarded as a modern Black anthem after Black Lives Matter activists chanted its chorus in protests.

In the closing track, “Mortal Man,” Lamar recites the recurring poem in its entirety to tie each of the album’s songs together. At the end of the track, he consults with his idol Tupac on combating racism by interpolating snippets from an archival interview of the late rapper. Lamar explains that “the caterpillar is a prisoner to the streets that conceived it,” and it pimps the butterfly that represents the beauty within it. He argues that if the caterpillar used the cocoon to build a positive outlook on life, it would metamorphose into a butterfly and end its internal struggles. When Lamar asks Tupac what he thinks about this idea, his idol’s silence represents that there is no certain answer about how to achieve Black liberation in America.

To Pimp a Butterfly is one of the most thought-provoking albums from the past decade. Each song portrays a unique facet of African American issues through clever songwriting and production. As a result, the album is simultaneously a celebration of Black culture and a rallying cry for African American liberation. Its message is more significant than ever in Trump-era America, as police brutality has been steadily increasing. In a time when the President has implied support for police brutality and the government has ended an important police department reform program, it is imperative that we fight for justice and educate people about historical and present-day racism in America.