Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 jazz-inspired masterpiece, To Pimp a Butterfly, has in just three years already become a defining album of our time. The fearlessly political nature of the album  Throughout the album, Lamar attacks what he perceives to be the decadence of American society and the contorted view of success that the ‘American Dream’ promotes. On the opening track, Wesley’s Theory, a reference to Wesley Snipes, the black 90’s actor whose conviction for tax fraud in 2008 sparked debate over a perceived ‘double standard’ in treatment between blacks and whites, Kendrick begins his first verse in the character of a young, recently monied black man, saying that “when I get signed, homie, I’mma act a fool” and that he’ll “buy a brand new Caddy on fours”. Immediately, Lamar underlines the endemic problem in the United States that when people from underprivileged backgrounds achieve success, that the financial benefits won as a result of their talents are squandered on material and carnal pleasures, such as the “brand new Caddy”. This message, of avoiding wasting your potential, is present within the album’s apocryphal title: once an artist breaks out of their cocoon, and becomes a butterfly, they must avoid becoming ‘pimped out’ by the establishment around them. This is not a problem with the individuals themselves, but rather within the society in which they live. At the end of the first verse, Lamar talks about how being “uneducated but with a million dollar check”, and later on in the song about how “you ain’t pass economics in school”, showing how America fundamentally fails to prepare poor, specifically black, children for success in life, and as such they become ‘pimped’ and fritter away their talent.

This idea of American society as a whole being to blame for this issue is explored in the second verse, where Lamar takes on the character of ‘Uncle Sam’, asking the artist “what you [they] want, a house or a car? Forty acres and a mule? A piano, a guitar?”. We can split these demands into three distinct groups: material purchases, such as the house and the car, which are seen as the bedrock of American life and prosperity that is commonly purported, but can lead to you drifting away from your original background and, ultimately, yourself. The enquiry into the “forty acres and a mule” has its origins in some of the darkest times in American history: the Civil War and Field Order 15, where every slave was promised this land once the South was defeated. It has been used in the past to represent black self-sufficiency, which is what Lamar seems to promote, but given the voice of ‘Uncle Sam’ in this verse it seems that Lamar is referring to the false promises and duplicity of the central government, and how their promises of equality and fairness, much like the ‘forty acres and a mule’, are in fact just empty words. The references to that field order are made multiple times throughout the album: on For Free?, Lamar says that he “needs forty acres and a mule, not a forty ounce and a pitbull”, showing that what he, and all those like him where he grew up, desire is the chance to build something for themselves on their “forty acres”, but instead are disappointed and turn to alcohol (a forty ounce is a large bottle of high alcohol beer, commonly associated with binge drinking and street alcoholism) and criminal activity (pitbulls are a favoured dog of drug dealers), and the same refrain heard on Wesley’s Theory is heard on Alright (a song to which we will return later). What is abundantly clear from this opening song alone, and then echoed throughout the album, is Lamar’s deep frustration at how African-Americans, due to their lower socio-economic status, are not given any instruction and how to deal with success, and so if that success does come, it is often transient and the cycle of poverty remains intact.

However, a work with as wide as scope as To Pimp a Butterfly is not just railing against the establishment: Lamar saves some of his fiercest anger for people in his own community. In The Blacker The Berry, Kendrick takes on yet another character, this time America’s black community as a whole, and says that “I’m the biggest hypocrite in 2015”, showing his belief that the desire for change shown by the reactions to the incidents of police brutality towards blacks in the United States in 2015 must be preceded by a desire to fix the problem of violence within black communities themselves. This is expanded upon with the last lines of the song, “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street, when gangbanging made me kill a nigger blacker than me?” (Trayvon Martin was a 17 year old African-American fatally shot in Florida in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer). This mixture of righteous indignation and deep introspection is at its most raw and potent on songs like u, where we see Lamar in a state of intense self-loathing and doubt about his career path, due to his absence from key events in his community, where the “corners still cryin’ out” due to gang violence, but Lamar is “on the road, bottles and bitches”, enjoying the pleasures that his new found fame has given him, but at the cost of closeness with his family and the community that formed his personality. As much as Lamar is frustrated with the hypocrisy shown in his community, he is agonising about his own apparent abandonment of that same community to pursue fame, and by making that choice he has not been there to help his closest friends and family when tragedy struck.

On the other hand, there are powerful messages of self-love throughout the album, which has the idea of ‘Black Excellence’. The album begins with a sample of “Every Nigger is a Star”, a song written by Boris Gardiner as the opening soundtrack on a film of the same name. The film was created to try and seize control of that word, which had (and still is) used in a derogatory context, and give it a positive connotation. Thus, by opening the whole album with that particular sample, Lamar is clearly showing a strong allegiance to this movement, and his belief that, despite the many problems that black communities in America are facing, this self-belief will help them rise above these issues. Where the album totally changes tone, however, is the anthemic Alright. After being transported to Lamar’s lowest ebb in u, the shift of style and mood into Alright is dramatic, with its upbeat refrain of “we gon be alright”. The song is not naïve and ignorant of the problems facing society, with its pointed references to police brutality (“and we hate po-po, wanna kill us in the street for sure”) and escapism via substance abuse (“drown inside my vices all day”) but its optimism that “we gon be alright” despite these problems instils a message of hope and self-belief for American society. On the first single released from the album, I, the messages of Black Excellence and self-love intertwine, with the repeat of “I love myself” urging people to not wallow in self-pity and self-loathing, as without respect for yourself it will be impossible to make others respect you. Then, much like how Boris Gardiner attempted to change the connotations of the word ‘nigger’ in his song that Lamar sampled on Wesley’s Theory, Lamar announces his new term, “straight from Ethiopia”: Negus, “description: black emperor, king, ruler…the history books overlook the word and hide it”. By substituting negus, which represents power and self-rule, in for the far more derogatory nigger, Lamar seems to be suggesting that the time where each black man can be their own ‘negus’, and ruler of themselves, is close, and that the main change required to achieve this is a change of mindset.

To Pimp a Butterfly is truly a work unlike any other. Bold and avant-garde in its experimenting with jazz and funk music, as well as spoken word, it is equally unafraid in its depiction of American, specifically black American, society. Given the political climate in which it was made and released, when race relations in the United States were arguably at their most fraught in a half-century, it would have been easy for Lamar to have created a record ferocious in its attack on those in power and leave his own community blameless. But that is not what was made. As introspective as it is indignant, To Pimp a Butterfly pulls no punches when discussing a raft of problems in American society, from lack of financial education to gang violence to stereotypes of black success, but it is the message of self-love that provides hope and is ultimately the most powerful theme of the album. The fact that, despite all of the genuine problems that communities like his own in Compton face, Lamar believes a change in attitude from self-pity to pride will be the catalyst for this change means that, ultimately, we can see this album as an unbashful, yet hopeful portrayal of American life.