Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly (2015)

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!"

scuse the fucked up formatting, but the first thing i thought of was this scene from Invisible Man

I've lived with the album 10 days and still know, what, a half dozen lyrics? I'm having too much with the tracks.

achebe and ellison acknowledged and not to belabor the point or rapgenius this to death but yams are also
1) slang for drugs stored in balloons/condoms
2) an integral component of american soul food cooking and many traditional african culture's cuisines
so their usage on king kunta reads to me as a multi-faceted signifier of wealth and power and potential illicit activity and blackness

and yes, white critics discussing Kendrick lyrics shall forevermore be "yamsplainers"

http://food.malaysiamostwanted.com/photos/89249/yam-coin

I'm p stoked about thundercat's future

I got a yam to splain

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, March 26, 2015 3:51 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

Lmao

1) slang for drugs stored in balloons/condoms

ok I knew the food thing (duh) but this is news to me

Oh, I'm writing the most yamsplaining post on this album for my Danish language blog. He's just announced for Roskilde Festival, and I want press credentials, so I pretty much have to. It's gonna be so worthless and wrongheaded, you can't even imagine!

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

In the context of the album's narrative, I heard the intro spiel more like the voice of Compton (really his own queasy conscience), a self-doubting voice in his head that he amps himself up to fight against. With the sources of that doubt obviously sunk deep in race, history, economics, etc.

re: the last post & Raymond's post before it I think it's not a stretch to suggest that he's working in a layered meaning, that what DJP is describing is the real source tension but that it manifests itself in ways like KDot vs. his audience particularly, or KDot vs his neighborhood, etc ... like it doesn't have to be a concrete symbolic translation

sure! that's art!

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

― Οὖτις, Thursday, March 26, 2015 2:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think Yams is the dead guy from the Aesop crew

cover of the album should have been something like...

http://images.sodahead.com/polls/001846587/942494372_InkBlot2_xlarge.gif

woah...come to think of it, why don't people have ink blot covers more often?

http://cdn.playbuzz.com/cdn/d4949f2c-f263-4b29-8c76-6131cc231f9e/1b2e18a4-2778-45ec-9b4d-1bc651889137_560_420.jpg

that last one is obviously batman coming out of my mom's head...

your mom is The Joker?

OK so after a lot of listening, current thoughts (which will keep changing as I listen more). Love this album. And contra my early comments about not-enough-fun, I think it's a lot of fun to listen to, it's just a different kind of fun (i.e. not pop-rush fun, though it has some of that -- more the fun of watching/listening to a virtuoso who can do so damn many things). I'm most ambivalent about the Devil and God tracks -- I don't really need to hear the narrative to "How Much a Dollar Cost" anymore, but would love to have the instrumental track. I love "Mortal Man," but I turn it off once the music stops.

I love "Mortal Man," but I turn it off once the music stops.

This is a mark of sanity IMO

Also, totally agree with above comments about the instant-classicness of "King Kunta." It's an all-time jam.

"Mortal Man" need be listened to just once.

The musical portion of "Mortal Man" is fantastic, though. And honestly, the 2Pac conversation is pretty easy to ignore if you're on the train reading Facebook.

basically any spoken word parts of almost any musical album can be skipped after a second listening if not sooner

The poem couplets sprinkled throughout the rest of the album and the "negus" poem at the end of "i" are great IMO

i can cope with the mellifluity of the throughline poem just fine but i've taken "i" (revised or otherwise) out of play

Yeah, I dig "Mortal Man" minus Pac. And I think the poem actually works really well, even though it's the most self-consciously "This Is Art Do You Get It" thing on the album. It helps that it's short.

By poem, I mean the through-poem. The "Negus" poem is good too, even though it kinda makes me go ...

http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/014/033/knowing.jpg

we need more words like "mellifluity" in this thread

after sitting with this all week, im now at the point where i wish the beats were maybe more interesting in places, and less like the kind of stuff i would have heard on an old common album (more LWFC than EC i think).

at the risk of further yamsplaining, an issue with kendrick's "negus" poem is that it's not really etymologically accurate.
"Nigger" is a fucked up word with an appropriately fucked up history; the roots are murky but tend to be directly attributed to the matter-of-fact Latin "niger", French "negro" or Spanish "negre": black.
Here's an excerpt from Randall Kennedy's brisk and readable book on the subject:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/nigger.htm
That said, Kendrick's point here obviously is one of reclamation, which is an idea that was old when Dick Gregory floated it in the '60's.
I'm wary of hearing K's take spouted as gospel by both lazy kids and racist apologists and the resultant blowback tainting the album.

hopefully this doesnt sound reductive, but i feel like this album is more interesting/important for the form, the technique, and the sheer writerliness of kendrick than the actual points being made - if youve been listening to rap/R&B for longer than 10 years, you are prob familiar with most of the concepts and ideas on the album regarding black politics/race. he def avoids black power cliches, but im not sure theres that many new ideas being proposed either. though as someone who liked git up git out, i feel like some of his comments about taking responsibility are not necessarily victim-blaming, more just recognition that always assigning power to someone else diminishes your own.

the negus thing is something i keep thinking i heard tupac say, though i might just be imagining that.

I don't think he's trying to claim the n word is literally derived from 'negus'.

I don't think so, either.

i don't either, hence "Kendrick's point here obviously is one of reclamation" but it certainly can (and i'd argue, inevitably will) be read that way:
"The history books overlooked the word and hide it / America tried to make it to a house divided / The homies don't recognize we be using it wrong"

yeesh guys the pac interview isn't that bad

xp then why the concern trolling?

xp

It's not that bad, but how many times do you want to listen to any interview, real or imaginary? The first time through, Kendrick's whole "our only hope is music" thing resonated, because he'd just spent 70-odd minutes proving it. But point made, I'd rather hear it demonstrated than articulated.

xp, "I'm wary of hearing K's take spouted as gospel by both lazy kids and racist apologists and the resultant blowback tainting the album"; if voicing a concern of a reasonable reading of the lyrics is concern trolling then i'm concern trolling i suppose. I was mostly responding/understanding tipsy mothra's "the more you know" star banner response as being a "oh that's where that word comes from" interp.