Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly (2015)

Isn't it drawing on a caricature that is also addressed from a different direction in said long-running lineage of black female pop? It's the whole shared source material rather than direct influence thing again.

I mean I've lost count of the number of movies or TV shows I've seen with that specific caricature in them.

it's a long-running trope in depictions of black relationships & kendrick is underscoring what that trope is really about

xp!

do you guys think the woman in the track has an actual real life uncle named Sam or something

That's not the argument being made. The argument being made is that it is a subversion of expectation; the "black woman" you think is being disrespected on this song is not actually a black woman. The entire point is that America uses black men in the same manner typified by the "gold digger" stereotype, which is blatantly clear from even half-listening to the lyrics of the song and the final response from the hypothetical gold digger in the song "I'mma get my Uncle Sam to fuck you up. You ain't no king."

xposted into irrelevancy but dammit, I typed it so I'm hitting submit

But still. There are an awful lot of evil women amongst the symbols that Kendrick uses, right?

... No? Unless you think every female character on Section.80 is evil, which is a stretch. As far as I can tell, it's just Sherane (who isn't even actually evil but rather is as much a product of the environment as Kendick, his friends and their enemies are) and Lucy (who is literally The Devil and not actually a woman)

i dont think keisha, tammy and sherane (on section.80 and GKMC) are supposed to be "evil" in the least. i guess you could argue about whatever lucy represents on butterfly but i don't buy that even the latter is meant as any sort of blanket sexist statement

daaaaaamnit DJP shot first

Lucy (who is literally The Devil and not actually a woman)

this is sledgehammer obvious, no?

and DJP otm that the Uncle Sam crack makes it clear what's going on w that character/voice

ilxor: kendrick's got yams in the conference room
RT: Yeah, I'd like to bite on some of that!
ilx: o_O

<Tanuki goes to conference room, sees the yams are actually a metaphor derived from contemporary black culture and literature with direct political implications>

RT: Noooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!

There are a ton of things about this album that are sledgehammer obvious that people are hemming and hawing over being "difficult" and "dense" because it's a collection of (IMO intentionally) contradictory viewpoints coming from a black man about being a black man in America in 2015.

can someone explain the "yams are the powers that be" thing to me...? that's one that's gone by me

xp

Jesus Christ you guys

aint no fun if the homies cant have none was also a metaphor for institutional structures keeping black communities from accessing america's riches.

― StillAdvance, Thursday, March 26, 2015 11:44 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm boggling at this

go looking for a humorous yam image and you just come across yet another example of how crazy this country is...

http://www.antiquelabelcompany.com/store/secure/images/products/496.jpg

i had to order this cd on the internet. which i hate to do. but i don't know when i will ever get to a town with a store, so, you gotta do what you gotta do.

He's a great curator. The production is another level.

For Free is sadly iron age and undeniably misogynistic, just like RTJ.

Album will go down as canon.

https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/tumblr_nl94zbo1s31s2yegdo1_400.gif?w=388&h=260

Institutionalized sounds amazingly like a Quasimoto song. West Coast influences all over this album is fantastic. From Quas to Coup to Warren G to Quik to E40 to Pac, it's great. But unlike all those it has a more dark, claustrophobic feel to it.

xpost how did u find such a luducrously appropriate raccoon gif so quickly

idk i always felt Me Against The World was a pretty dark&claustrophobic record

yes but Pac had lots of well known undeniably open and bouncy songs (life goes on, changes, all eyez, ambitionz, i aint mad at cha, how do u want it etc)

this album gets better and better the more you listen to it. busdriver was otm, as far as it being what FF/myka 9 should have made, but i feel like its the album lupe fiasco has been wanting to make, but has been too disillusioned/cynical to actually do. me against the world had temptation and old school on it but it was largely still def, dark, cynical (i mean, it had the song 'fuck the world' on it). plus that whole era sounded like that.

2pac's Undeniably Open and Bouncy Mixtape

production wise the digi+phonics is reminding me a lot of the Organized Noize/Earthtone III production collective that seemed to also produce similarly successful cross-influenced results

also, emma bunton in a banana suit with nicky wire!

i guess i shouldnt be surprised that in 2015 it's just assumed that rappers are always spouting the literal thoughts on their minds in a given moment every time w/out any regard for bigger ideas or sense for irony or context

so no one's gonna explain the yams thing to me

nope

i don't know much about yams tbh

i like this album more and more, it's getting better to me, like i'm used to the flow of it now and am more comfortable w/the arc of it and (as a result) less concerned about whether i'm parsing the overall themes & more able to just enjoy the songs themselves

that one writer thinks that "suicidal thoughts" is more of a jam than "king kunta"? hmmmmm

king kunta is my favorite type of rap song, like certain ones you hear them the first time and you just KNOW, it's like he can drop this song 5-6 years from now in a live set and he'll grab the mic and yell "I GOTTA BONE TO PICK" and the beat will drop and the crowd will lose it, certain songs are just undeniable like that

this album is very 90s in a way i'm having trouble articulating, i mean it's very 90s in ways that are easy to articulate also, but the conceptual ambition of it is uncompromisingly broad in a way that feels very '90s, where people were reveling in the hip-hop's potential for grand possibilities....the breadth of it is very vast

i feel bad for "King Kunta" because a couple people who heard it last year went around hyping it to the media and it became this big deal everybody was speculating on before they heard it, then it leaked a few days before the album and felt really anticlimactic. but in the context of the album it sounds great and keeps sounding better every time i hear it.

"if you care about it this much please feel free to email all our editors"

i actually fault the record label more than the editors or writers.

― scott seward, Thursday, March 26, 2015 12:15 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really? the sneak attack release is so much better than the protracted rollout. i know writers aren't to blame but editors can't wait a week?

i blame SEO

is there a single media outlet that wouldn't be improved by its editors not knowing what got the most clicks

i feel like this conversation is actually not as pertinent to one of the few albums released this year that people will be talking about and writing about for the entire year whereas it's everything else that will be discarded and deemed not worth publishing anything about after the initial hype cycle

king kunta is my favorite type of rap song, like certain ones you hear them the first time and you just KNOW, it's like he can drop this song 5-6 years from now in a live set and he'll grab the mic and yell "I GOTTA BONE TO PICK" and the beat will drop and the crowd will lose it, certain songs are just undeniable like that

― kurt kobaïan (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, March 26, 2015 2:53 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

OTMFM

i feel bad for "King Kunta" because a couple people who heard it last year went around hyping it to the media and it became this big deal everybody was speculating on before they heard it, then it leaked a few days before the album and felt really anticlimactic. but in the context of the album it sounds great and keeps sounding better every time i hear it.

― some dude, Thursday, March 26, 2015 1:55 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this otm as well

king kunta is my favorite type of rap song, like certain ones you hear them the first time and you just KNOW, it's like he can drop this song 5-6 years from now in a live set and he'll grab the mic and yell "I GOTTA BONE TO PICK" and the beat will drop and the crowd will lose it, certain songs are just undeniable like that

― kurt kobaïan (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, March 26, 2015 2:53 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah definitely

house parties too

just still catching up to how hard this album is hitting me

I'm letting the lyrics settle in slowly, remembering how some of the crazier things on the Public Enemy or Paris albums went over my head or even lost me (i.e. a major label album with a sample suggesting the U.S. government invented AIDS as a weapon was a lot to take in at the time). The fact that I'm having the same reactions to this, I'm just grateful, this record is trusting that the audience is as sharp as he is

The production is what's killing me though, for whatever insane reason, this feels completely free of any self-consciously retro aesthetic. Tons of references to history, lots of love letters & consolidation, but the way this balances live performances with anything-can-happen-at-any-moment studio decisions is so gratifying I can't even sum it up. One of my favorite records is 'The Faust Tapes', which was straight up experimental, but... this is close, and it's a mainstream pop record that millions of people are going to let sink in

@ Outic: I read somewhere that Yams is a symbol of status in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart.

ah! I haven't read that book since college

oh wow that's a cool reference (i also haven't read that since college)

I mean, the claim is that Yams were statussymbols in Ibo societies in Nigeria, it's not something the novel makes up. Just in case that was unclear.

it's a long-running trope in depictions of black relationships & kendrick is underscoring what that trope is really about

xp!

― swae lee is the sremmurd for rae dad (crüt), Thursday, 26 March 2015 16:57 (2 hours ago) Permalink

do you guys think the woman in the track has an actual real life uncle named Sam or something

― some dude, Thursday, 26 March 2015 17:01 (2 hours ago) Permalink

That's not the argument being made. The argument being made is that it is a subversion of expectation; the "black woman" you think is being disrespected on this song is not actually a black woman. The entire point is that America uses black men in the same manner typified by the "gold digger" stereotype, which is blatantly clear from even half-listening to the lyrics of the song and the final response from the hypothetical gold digger in the song "I'mma get my Uncle Sam to fuck you up. You ain't no king."

xposted into irrelevancy but dammit, I typed it so I'm hitting submit

― DJP, Thursday, 26 March 2015 17:01 (2 hours ago) Permalink

I read this track as "rap fandom's" relationship with KDot, but I can see how silly that seems in retrospect.

i feel bad for "King Kunta" because a couple people who heard it last year went around hyping it to the media and it became this big deal everybody was speculating on before they heard it, then it leaked a few days before the album and felt really anticlimactic. but in the context of the album it sounds great and keeps sounding better every time i hear it.

― some dude, Thursday, March 26, 2015 2:55 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark

king kunta is openly awesome i have no idea what you guys are talking about

I got a yam to splain

I took a bite, finding it as sweet and hot as any I'd ever had, an
d was overcome with such a surge of homesickness that I turned away
to keep my control. I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly
overcome by an intense feeling of freedom -- simply because I was eating while walking along the street. It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper. To hell with all that, and as sweet as the yam actually was, it became like nectar with the thought. If only someone who had known me at school or at home would come along and see me now. How shocked they'd be! I'd push them into a side street and smear their faces with the peel. What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with
something we liked...
This is all very wild and childish, I thought, but to hell with
being ashamed of what you liked. No more of that for me. I am what I am! I wolfed down the yam and ran back to the old man and handed him twe
nty cents, "Give me two more," I said.
"Sho, all you want, long as I got 'em. I can see you a serious yam
eater, young fellow. You eating them right away?"
"As soon as you give them to me," I said.
"You want 'em buttered?"
"Please."
"Sho, that way you can get the most out of 'em. Yessuh," he said
, handing over the yams, "I can see you one of these old-fashion
ed yam eaters."
"They're my birthmark," I said. "I yam what I am!"