Kendrick Lamar - "To ? a Butterfly"

All of this Sean Wale talk. Let's talk about how this album has damn near zero social political viewpoint.

BobOblah wrote: »

On my 4th listen, this is a great album. Kendrick is 2 for 2. Jazz sax infused hip hop is like my favorite ? ever so obviously this will be in heavy rotation. Major respect to Kendrick for being fearless and putting out an album that sounds nothing like GKMC and is unapologetically black music. Favorite songs right now are:

Wesley's Theory - extra funky.

King Kunta- This the muthafuckin jam. Kendrick is not 2pac by any means but for some reason I picture Pac when he's screaming "AH YEA ? THE JUDGE/ MADE IT PAST TWENTY-FIIIIVE AND THERE I WAS"

(minus the making it past 25 smh) lil homie caught Pacs spirit for a minute

These Walls, For Sale?, Momma all super smooth. Even though Kendrick's voice on For Sale reminds me of Nas on "Who Killed It" lol

Hood Politics, Blacker The Berry, i, that Pac convo is a classic outro. ? it i rock with almost the entire album. "Alright" is cool but not feeling it as much as yall. Not a standout track to me.

Powerful album. All that said, some people are going overboard of course. Did I just read the phrase "album of the decade" earlier in the thread?

I'll put The Roots How I Got Over and Undun on the same level or higher than TPAB, to name a few off the top. I'm not even sure if it's better than GKMC yet. They're so different it's hard to compare and it's too early. This is in the AOTY conversation. And I'm not even sure it takes that title, with Lupe and maybe Kanye in the mix. My opinion could still change but I really don't think this is going to knock Lupe out of the top spot on my list for 2015. I'm already stressed about voting in that poll though lol because they are both crazy dope.

To ? a Butterfly is at least 8/10. Also nosign whoever said this is headphone music. I been enjoying this most in the whip on the ride home from work the past 4 days.

IMHO...

Undun
How I Got Over
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
The Martyr
Distant Relatives
Life is Good
Section 80
Good Kid Madd City
Control System
Black Histori Project
Tetsuo & Youth
B4.DA.$$

Some of the best projects since 2010 that get good rotation years later. We'll see if To ? a Butterfly lasts.

It will definitely get album of the year the way this album is getting praised

nj2089 wrote: »

It will definitely get album of the year the way this album is getting praised

IT SHOULD. But we all know how dat goes my G

On Kendrick Lamar and Black Humanity



By Carvell Wallace, March 19, 2015 at 12:15 p.m. EDT

Photo by Ari Marcopoulos

It is said that depression is anger turned inward. And if that’s true, then the entirety of Black America suffers from a depression. The collective emotional toll of the violence and abuse of the last nearly 500 years shows up in a lot of ways. Sometimes outward, sometime inward. But always present. So much so that it takes an unusual amount of skill emotionally, spiritually, and mentally, just to show up as a normal adult, to survive growing up without destroying ourselves or anyone else. But then again to be angry at the world around us IS to destroy ourselves. For when we are even perceived as a threat, the response is swift, violent, and institutionally excused. If we are angry, then we are checked, but to remain silent is to eat our own flesh from the inside out. It is a maddening proposition. The only way to not go batshit crazy or unable to function is to become deeply powerful at living.

Kendrick Lamar is deeply powerful. He is deeply powerful because he can flow and flow is, in many ways, the magic ingredient that turns despair into hope, pain into action. As long as you can flow, you can do something. Just listen to the transition from the rueful mirror monologue of "u" to the exhilarating rapid fire of "Alright" on the new album To ? a Butterfly which dropped unexpectedly on Monday. Notice what it feels like to be riding that momentum, carried along by waves of harmony, nearly but not quite crashing, so soon after digging so deeply into the earth of your own despair. You will understand a little bit about why black people make music.

Kendrick makes the kind of music that can lead you to fight for your own survival. He is not a savior or a leader, as some have attempted to cast him. He is a man who can flow.

I don’t know Kendrick Lamar. This is important to say because in most articles about rappers the author tries to act like they know the guy. Like they’re homies. It must have something to do with the fact that hip-hop in its essence is a genre about localities. Communities. It’s about familiarity. "You already know what it is," the aphorism goes.

If I was a white guy, I would probably like this aspect of hip-hop the most. The idea that I can become an honorary member of blackness just by listening. Hip-hop makes that easy. The songs are readily available. The hood is explained to the uninitiated. No longer would I have to feel that the Blackness of Black People represents mystery or the unexplained. And if I was the kind of white guy who thought about the fact that Black people have experienced a sustained and relentless brutality in the name of protecting people like me, then I would seek reassurance from every black face I saw, every black voice that I heard, that we were cool. I would look to hip-hop to absolve me. To help me breathe. I would need to know "what it is" the way I need to make sure my dog, strong, sharp-toothed, and potentially dangerous, still looked to me as its trusted and unassailable human.

With Kendrick you don’t already know what it is. You can’t unless you’ve lived it. What he tells is honest and therefore entirely devoid of tropes. On the track "Momma", he lists all the things he knows about growing up poor and black in Compton and then admits that he doesn’t know ? . If he can admit that, it makes me wonder why so many music writers can’t.

Listening to To ? a Butterfly, I thought about genius (Kendrick has it) which, in turn, made me think of Kanye. Maybe because My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the last time a hip-hop album so confessional and idiosyncratic was greeted on such a grand public scale, but, unlike Kanye, Kendrick cannot be dismissed, even if you wanted to.

Kanye gives people a chance to say "yeah, but." As in yeah he’s a genius, but he’s so full of himself. Yeah he’s good, but his fashion show was terrible. Yeah he’s good but he’s an ? . Yeah he’s good, but he was unbelievably rude to that pretty and innocent white girl that one time. This is Kanye’s shtick. He’s easy to not like. And by not liking him you immediately become "Get Off My Lawn" Grandpa. That’s part of what makes him so awesome. It’s also what keeps him from being as dangerous or compelling a symbol of black power as he might be. He’s a brilliant troll. But he’s still responding to the original post. If you want to you could feel justified in simply blocking him.

Kendrick, on the other hand, is not commenting on your post. He didn’t even read it. And he’s not rumored to be an ? . There are no secret stories of him beating women or throwing people out of windows. He doesn’t threaten record executives, come across as a goon. Nor does he assuage white guilt by preaching peace and unity and colorblindness and one love. Meaning, he doesn’t do any of the things that allow you to put comfortable limits on how seriously to take him. This is what makes him the most hopeful and threatening rapper of all.

To be honest and black is, by nature, to be a threat. To be honest and black and poor is to know deeply and personally how racism and capitalism works.

To be honest and black and poor and smart is to know who is at fault. To be honest and black and poor and smart and gifted is to know how to move others to action.

Kendrick cannot be easily dismissed.

Unlike other artists whose juxtaposition of hip-hop bluster with confessional vulnerability feels like shtick, Kendrick does not do performative honesty. Rather, he performs honestly. And expertly. Do not buy it when critics will inevitably try to sell you that his work is rough or unbridled, the magic work of a hood savant. It is precise and skilled, as perfect in technical execution as it is uninhibited in content. Butterfly is not the recording of a natural genius. It is the record of a working artist who has been visited by genius and who has a deep and earned mastery of his form.

It is not fake, it is not afraid, and it is not accidental. Kendrick’s hip-hop is not the hip-hop that allows white guys to breathe. He does not break off pieces of blackness as a hood souvenir that you can post on your wall or bump in your car in order to feel like it’s all good. He doesn’t even mention you at all. It is not about you. It is about him and his complete humanity. It is about the humanity of every other black person whose face is painted on the mural of this wall of sound. The question then becomes how hard and for how long will America continue to fight, deny, or ignore this humanity.

That is for you to decide when you are listening to his work in its completion. When you are alone with his words, do you hear them? Do you believe them? Or do you attempt to lump them together with whatever hackneyed and two-dimensional concept you have of "Compton?"

Rather than reviewing this album, let's review what we do with it.

Kendrick’s music cannot free us. But how we respond to Kendrick’s music just might.

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/704-on-kendrick-lamar-and-black-humanity/

linkage? this would be my first time to listening to anything by dude i was watchin MHP and they mentioned the album and the subject matter im intrigued.

Obama say what it do?!?




http://youtu.be/8bnzfGyha5E

King kunta sound more james brown influenced than quik just being honest i love quik but he name is not in the credits at all

Pause

? kills me if you dont like the album ok cool your entirled to your opinion. We get it. now move on, that trying to force your opinion ? is extra corny b lmao