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For a major modern rap album, Kendrick has few peers who can match the fury of his mission statement. Narrating personal tales of institutional prejudice, entertainment industry disrespect and defiant black pride, Lamar confronts those internecine problems. At a time when institutional racism is being challenged in the streets of Ferguson, Cleveland, and NYC, with often bloody results, Lamar compiles disparate sounds rooted in the historical black tradition: jazz, neo-soul, scat, spoken word, slam poetry, and G-funk. To Pimp A Butterfly is a sprawling meditation on race. Unfortunately, it’s also an album that only intermittently succeeds. To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick’s sophomore effort, is an album that goes left and aspires towards the avant-garde. It’s a difficult task for anyone to follow an album as accomplished as good kid, but Kendrick did what many artists have done before him: he’s sought refuge in the willfully difficult. The themes of teenage alienation, peer pressure, love, sex and family had a universal resonance and signaled that Lamar had become his generation’s next big voice. It’s the rare great album that was instantly hailed by fans, critics and commercial interests. Going “avant-garde” allows artists to escape expectations by shirking them. If you can’t top your classic, do the opposite, and nobody can say shit when it doesn’t work. Hell, Nas flipped the entire script on It Was Written - rejecting the thoughtful, teenage project monk of Illmatic in favor of a proto-jiggy Scarface in pink leisure suits. Mos Def went from the b-boy traditionalist on Black On Both Sides to ferocious adversarial member of a neo-Bad Brains cover band (with actual members of Bad Brains) on The New Danger. OutKast morphed from country fried super pimps to super heroic extraterrestrials on ATLiens. How do you follow a masterpiece? It’s a question that humans have asked since Homer wallowed in an Athenian bathhouse and drunkenly panicked: “How do you top the fucking Illiad?” What do you do after you’ve stretched each sinewy fiber towards grabbing the brass ring and you actually catch it?įor many artists, the answer is veer left.