He could have taken the best highlights of contemporary sounds, given them some personal form, and created a bomb album where each single would have been a turbo version of his ‘Swimming Pools’. He could have talked about the latest news of his personal life in the simplest format of “I was there, I saw that,” or even just talked for an hour about how great he is on the microphone, and still shaken up the industry. But he chose the hardest path, which, along with commercial success (or instead of it — we’ll know soon), could enter him into the pantheon of the great artists of his time, but only if the plan works a hundred percent. And it seems he succeeded.

The Backbone of ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’

The backbone of the album ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ consists of Kendrick‘s personal feelings related to his detachment from the circle of ordinary people from which he fell out, having become a world star. He finds a path to himself by reconnecting with his mother and close people from his hometown. The artist’s personal twists work as a reflection of the sores of his entire nation, and one can’t help but applaud that this album is made primarily for Black Americans. The rich aroma of Black music, brilliantly created by the album’s production group, is mixed with the finest examples of soul, jazz, and funk. It quenches the thirst of those nostalgic for a time when hip-hop was music for African Americans, not a global phenomenon, with its appropriate intimacy and warmth.

A separate book could be written about the merits of this super-album, so let’s point them out, starting from the claims of the impatient public. Some say Kendrick and his producers have gone backward in development. But no one back there knew how to create such full-bodied melodies from selected samples, turning hip-hop compositions into full orchestrations. Some say it’s uninteresting because it’s just G-funk. But nobody in the G-funk era used drum sounds like this, involved live musicians so actively, and the mood of the songs was diametrically opposite (and generally, make no laugh, Warren G‘s slippers). Some can’t find hit singles. This opinion can only arise with too hasty listening, when you hurry to scroll through all the tracks to quickly tweet any of your thoughts. Every second track of TPAB is a ready-made single, so melodic, brilliantly performed (check the first verse of ‘Momma’ — it’s a textbook on emceeing!), with creative, complex hooks (some just don’t know Bilal), and you certainly don’t have to learn English to enjoy them. Some lack a beat from Dr. Dre. Kendrick masterfully shows how a hot single can become a key album track by reworking his ‘i’, and similarly, almost any song, except perhaps its counterpoint ‘u’, could become a royal single if skits were cut, and some of them inevitably will.

The Album’s Artistic Seamlessness

Kendrick stitched the album into a single fabric with interesting techniques like a small poem running through the whole story, interrupting at the right places, and a conversation with his big brother 2Pac, surprising anyone who isn’t aware of this dialogue at the album’s end. Thus, it’s a seamless work, each of its links capable of being the strongest product on its own. It’s an intellectual narrative that forces you to turn off the fool in yourself, reflect on the texts, catch the general idea, praise serious emceeing skills, dive into the beauty of melodies and the richness of the drums. It’s a challenge to the industry, which now knows not all chart heroes are intentionally stupid and simple. The release of such a complex and insufficiently trendy product could have been an unnecessary risk, but the product is so professional that it will reshape all frameworks under itself. Then anyone who hastened to accuse Kendrick of ‘not being the cake’, will have to pretend he didn’t say so, because disliking such a thing would be unfashionable. Anyone who hurried to express outrage at the absence of ‘Backseat Freestyles’ might perhaps look like a carrier of the notorious old-school brain within a single discography. In the end, if Kendrick had repeated his past self, we would know his style for many years ahead. But with this poignant step to the side, his style is now any style, and none of us knows which shirt Kendrick will wear with the next release. He could have continued ‘pimping the butterfly’, imprisoning it within the ‘caterpillar’ of the previous album and the sound of neighbors by industry status, but he found the courage to liberate the butterfly. Thus, his career is more valuable and interesting to the entire culture, and this album is closer to the chance of being relevant five and ten years later, which within hip-hop is already close to eternity.