Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly Earns 9.6 of 10 — an Album That Condemns, Grieves, and Preaches in One Breath

There are works of art that arrive like a fever, and there are works that arrive like a verdict pronounced upon an entire nation’s conscience. To Pimp a Butterfly belongs to the latter and dreadful company — an endeavour so singular in its design, so darkened with sorrow and yet so luminous with defiance, that one scarcely knows whether to weep or to rejoice upon hearing it.

Wind Instruments and Low Murmuring

The sounds gathered for To Pimp a Butterfly are a whole gathering of wind instruments, low murmuring tones, and voices that seem to rise from some deep and forgotten chamber of memory. It recalls the old jazz halls, yet it is haunted throughout by a modern anguish that no antique melody could contain. Each track mounts upon the last like rooms in a vast and shaking house, every passage leading toward some new horror or some new gladness.

Kendrick Lamar’s Testimony

Kendrick Lamar’s voice, in To Pimp a Butterfly, is an instrument of many tones — now a whisper of admission, now a cry of accusation, now a solemn declaring repeated until it becomes prophecy. He does not merely speak; he testifies. One feels, in listening, that he has been condemned to carry some terrible knowledge, and that the album is his only means of pecuniary and spiritual settlement with it.

Sorrow Made Palpable

There is a melancholy that runs beneath every measure of To Pimp a Butterfly, a melancholy not of despair alone but of a fierce and burning hope struggling against it. The poem recited across its final passages — that strange exchange conducted, at the last, with a ghost — is among the most extraordinary conclusions ever fashioned for a work of this kind.

It chills. It does not console.

What Ambition Dares

Few albums attempt so much: to condemn, to grieve, to dance, to preach, all within the same singular breath. To Pimp a Butterfly succeeds where lesser endeavours would surely fail, for its sorrow is disciplined by extraordinary skill, and its fury is tempered by an almost sacred patience.

Judgment Rendered

One approaches To Pimp a Butterfly expecting little, and departs instead troubled, as though one had read some dreadful and true account of the human soul under duress. It is not comfortable. It is not meant to be. It is, in the truest sense, a monument.

To Pimp a Butterfly stands among the very finest achievements of its age, and I render my judgment upon it thus: 9.6 of 10.

album review · concept album · hip-hop · jazz influence · Kendrick Lamar