To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar (2015), № 28 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Hip-hop's first jazz record on its own terms. Kamasi Washington blows horn for forty-six minutes; the album doesn't apologize for it.
Kendrick Lamar at twenty-seven, three years past his Compton-as-fiction debut, made a 79-minute album in collaboration with Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, and Robert Glasper. The record that brought jazz back into hip-hop as primary structural language. Released March 15, 2015. Reached #1 in the US in its first week.
Kendrick Lamar's third album, recorded over nearly two years across multiple Los Angeles studios with a rotating cast of jazz and hip-hop collaborators. A 79-minute meditation on race, fame, depression, ancestral memory, and the survival of Black artistry. The album that made the academy take hip-hop seriously.
Kendrick Lamar Duckworth had been the most-praised young rapper in the world since the 2012 release of good kid, m.A.A.d city. That album had introduced him as a narrative master, a 22-year-old from Compton telling the story of his teenage years with cinematic precision. By the spring of 2014, when he began recording the follow-up, he had won a Grammy nomination, toured the world, and become the subject of intense industry attention. He had also been deeply uncomfortable with his sudden visibility. The album he was about to make was, in his own description, 'about the discomfort.'
Recording took place across approximately eighteen months at studios in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York. The album's primary producer was Sounwave (Mark Spears), with significant contributions from Terrace Martin (saxophone and production), Flying Lotus (production), Boi-1da, Pharrell, Knxwledge, Tae Beast, and others. The album also incorporates significant live-musician contributions: Thundercat plays bass on the majority of tracks (his bass on 'These Walls' is one of the most-cited basslines in 2010s music), Kamasi Washington plays saxophone, Robert Glasper plays piano, Bilal contributes vocals. Lamar himself contributed extensive lyrical, conceptual, and arrangement work.
What the album does, sonically, is bring jazz back into hip-hop as primary structural language. The Tribe Called Quest / De La Soul / Pete Rock generation had used jazz samples; To Pimp a Butterfly uses live jazz performance. Thundercat's bass, Kamasi Washington's saxophone, Robert Glasper's piano, these are live instrumental performances, not samples.
The album's 16 tracks are a survey of Lamar's range. 'Wesley's Theory' opens with a Boris Gardner soul sample. 'For Free? (Interlude)' is a free-jazz spoken-word piece. 'King Kunta' is the album's funkiest. 'Institutionalized' features Bilal. 'These Walls' features Thundercat. 'u' is the album's emotional centerpiece, Lamar in tearful self-recrimination. 'Alright' is the song that would become the BLM movement's anthem. 'For Sale? (Interlude)' is another interlude. 'Momma' is a tribute. 'Hood Politics' is the album's most-aggressive track. 'How Much a Dollar Cost' is the album's most-narrative song. 'Complexion (A Zulu Love)' features Rapsody. 'The Blacker the Berry' is Lamar's most-direct racial statement. 'You Ain't Gotta Lie (Momma Said)' is an interlude. 'I' is the album's most-positive moment. 'Mortal Man' closes the album with a fictional conversation between Lamar and the late Tupac Shakur (assembled from a 1994 Tupac interview).
To Pimp a Butterfly belongs at number twenty-eight because it is the album on which a 27-year-old American rapper produced what is widely considered the most-ambitious hip-hop album ever made. The album reached #1 in the US, #1 in the UK, won Best Rap Album at the 2016 Grammys, was nominated for Album of the Year (it lost to Taylor Swift's 1989), and entered the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2020. Lamar's subsequent DAMN. (2017) won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2018, the first non-classical/non-jazz work to receive the prize, and the Pulitzer was widely understood as the institution's response to To Pimp a Butterfly's prior canonization. The album opened the door to a level of academic and critical seriousness around hip-hop that had not previously been possible.
Original 2015 US pressing, Top Dawg Entertainment / Aftermath / Interscope, catalogue B0023464-01, a 2-LP gatefold (with a known printing error swapping the 'Momma' and 'Hood Politics' titles on the inner gatefold). Mastered at Bernie Grundman Mastering, cover photograph by Denis Rouvre. This was pressed in quantity and repressed continuously, so originals are common: VG+/NM copies sit around £25-30, with sealed examples roughly £40-70. The genuinely expensive item is the unrelated 2023 Lauren Halsey Gallery limited edition, not this standard pressing.
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