- #KENDRICK LAMAR PIMP A BUTTERFLY MUSIC MASTERPOST TUMBLR FULL#
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I understand the urge to defend such artwork on the strength of its social urgency alone. Would anyone sincerely regard Nina Simone or Public Enemy as critic-proof? Or Lauryn Hill, for instance: Her most insightful and challenging songs are generally enjoyable as fuck.įruitvale Station is An Important Film, and To Pimp a Butterfly is An Important Album. Much of the other black protest music that the writer Rembert Browne mentioned in his Grantland analysis of “The Blacker the Berry,” for instance, is simultaneously radical and enjoyable. As bloggers and critics and general spectators of the world around us, we assess messages that aren’t addressed to us all the time, be they in the form of "dog-whistle" political rhetoric or songs written for a core fanbase. "How do you assess something that is not addressed to you?" Kameir asked.īut that's the job. Upon the album's release, the music journalist Rawiya Kameir suggested that To Pimp a Butterfly is "critic-proof," throwing certain hurdles at white and middle-class listeners. Kendrick Lamar released the “must-read” album of 2015. At Rap Music Hysteria, the blogger's frustration with the massive, term-paper theorizing of To Pimp a Butterfly resembles the irritation I feel whenever someone shares a link to an article that they refuse to describe or characterize in any terms other than “must-read.” “Some very talented and ambitious people worked on this album for over a year,” homeboy wrote.” “A ‘this is gay’ Tweet would be more profound than some platitudes and reductive abstractions cobbled together over a 24-hour period.”
Two days after Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly, the blog Rap Music Hysteria published two posts and one particularly memorable assessment of all the fawning that followed.
#KENDRICK LAMAR PIMP A BUTTERFLY MUSIC MASTERPOST TUMBLR FULL#
Steiner panned Kendrick’s album (“that only intermittently succeeds”) and then suffered a ton of hate tweets for his disliking the musicianship of To Pimp a Butterfly, separating it from the record's importance to black people and to hip-hop culture. I’ll say: It’s strange watching people wholeheartedly defend a thing before they'd full known what to make of it.Īt Slate, the music critic Carl Wilson asked, “How should white listeners approach the ‘overwhelming blackness’ of Kendrick Lamar’s brilliant new album?” and that’s when I realized that To Pimp a Butterfly had instantly become the biggest paradox of 2015: This bizarre and supposedly “challenging” album was universally acclaimed and, apparently, unimpeachable.
#KENDRICK LAMAR PIMP A BUTTERFLY MUSIC MASTERPOST TUMBLR FREE#
So when Kendrick Lamar delivered his free jazz rap album that sounds like Freestyle Fellowship, Gift of Gab, the Native Tongues, Terence Blanchard, Bahamadia, and Suga Free-which is to say that it sounds nothing like contemporary hip-hop-I expected a second surge of dramatic praise given Kendrick Lamar's pronounced concern with "the Ferguson moment." In the months following the release of Kendrick's first couple singles, "i" and "The Blacker The Berry," Kendrick's music would become somewhat beside the point of our subsequent conversations about Kendrick's ideas and pop leadership potential.Īt Passion of the Weiss, the rap critic B.J. Why, in 2015, would a recently platinum-selling rapper make a jazz album with Lalah Hathaway, Ron Isley, and George Clinton? In that narrow band of time, I "got" the album's messages and themes but couldn’t grasp the motivations for the album’s sound. I reviewed To Pimp a Butterfly in about 72 hours. I think most fans and critics would agree that Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is, indeed, overwhelming. “This initial feeling is suffocating,” Hope wrote. With bits of personal and political context interspersed, Hope framed her review as a first-take impression of the “overwhelming blackness” of an album about funk and self-destruction. At Jezebel, Clover Hope just wrote the truth. On such an immediate deadline for filing a feature-length album review, it’s nearly impossible for a young critic to stunt. You’ll recall that To Pimp a Butterfly leaked just 24 hours before its official release date, March 15, and that most major music websites published their reviews of the album within three days of the leak.
In March, Jezebel published the very best and most immediately honest review of To Pimp a Butterfly, the album that Kendrick Lamar is now touring in his eight-city run of “Kunta's Groove Sessions.” Last night Lamar performed in New York.