Kendrick lamar pimp a butterfly album download
As it winds uninterruptedly through Lamar’s troubled consciousness, To Pimp a Butterfly doesn’t remind me of any recent rap record so much as it reminds me of Birdman, a formally innovative depiction of the angels and devils perched on a popular artist’s shoulders.
Can he still speak for Compton now that he’s hobnobbing with celebs at the BET Awards? Or, more important, can he in good conscience be the musical darling of a country that enslaved his ancestors and continues to shoot down his people in the street unarmed? What does it mean to acquire wealth in a country that less than two centuries ago would have denied him the right to own property? These are the kinds of questions that have kept Kendrick Lamar up at night since he’s become famous, and we learn on Butterfly that his success rekindled a depression that he’d been battling since his teens. (“Kendrick, this is your conscience,” an alien voice beamed down in “Swimming Pools,” in a flow now so iconic, it’s since been imitated by the likes of Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé.) This multiplicity of persona is used to great - but often anxiety-inducing - effect on Butterfly, as many Kendricks give voice to the many conflicts in his soul. Lamar crafts different flows and personae for the many voices in his head, and on Butterfly, there are enough of them to sound like an entire (one-man) rap crew. Or maybe beginning as Method Man and ending as ODB. Lamar’s signature trick is to deliver a verse - like the scene-stealer he spit while guesting with alt-rock Stomp production Imagine Dragons at the 2014 Grammys - that gradually builds in intensity, beginning as a soft-spoken Jekyll and ending a wild-eyed Hyde. Deftly weaving together dual narratives of Lamar’s distrust of fame and his country’s historical distrust of black people, Butterfly is as much about the war on the streets as it is the war within. Though it addresses recent American unrest, To Pimp a Butterfly is something more complex than a rallying cry it is a depiction of the internal struggle to believe in anything deeply enough to shout it. “Why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street?” Lamar raps on the spitfire single “The Blacker the Berry,” which is not a call to arms so much as an urgent and scathing exploration of the artist’s self-perceived hypocrisy.
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You can tell that Lamar does not consider it a pop record so much as a work of revisionist American history: It begins with a sample of Boris Gardiner’s dreamy and uplifting soul curio “Every Nigger is a Star,” and its finale is a spoken-word torrent reminding us of the N-word’s etymological roots as a synonym for royalty. It is a work of focused intensity - one of the most incisive and imperatively timed records about race in recent musical memory. “Like Barack Obama,” a Billboard writer remarked a little while later, in a recent cover story, “Lamar is an introvert with an extrovert’s job.”īut judging by his staggering and incendiary sophomore album, To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar is done conforming to anybody else’s job description. That was definitely what he projected that night at the planetarium as people lifted their glasses to the repeated word “ DRANK,” Lamar seemed a little puzzled and radiated this sense that he did not really know what to do with himself now that he was a superstar. And like many who claim that particular mantle, Lamar often wears a spacey, inwardly focused expression and oscillates between a vibe of jumpy anxiety and near-monastic calm. He doesn’t even consider himself a rapper, really he told Stephen Colbert in an interview late last year that he prefers the term writer. These are the kinds of scenes some aspiring rappers dream of inhabiting, but Kendrick Lamar has never been that kind of rapper. While he played, people in rented astronaut suits traversed the floor with trays of Champagne a rumor circulated that the company was raffling off a trip to space. Lamar’s set was short and, presumably, generously compensated.
It was called “Swimming Pools (Drank),” and I saw him play it the first time I was sent to cover his live show, at an absurdly lavish party thrown in the lobby of a planetarium to celebrate the cosmically named new scent of a popular-selling body spray.
It was a misunderstanding - almost a clerical error - the way the gifted Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar got to be famous in the first place: He made a very incisive song about inner-city alcoholism that a lot of people mistook for a party anthem.