To Pimp a Butterfly: A Ten Year Retrospective.

Ten years ago Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly, his third studio album. Receiving almost universal critical acclaim, it has grown to become a mainstay on all-time greatest album lists. While the Compton rapper’s 2024-25 run has reinstated him at the top of the rap game, this album remains his magnum opus. The work, released on 15 March 2015, blends jazz and soul influences, threaded together by its more traditional west coast elements. 

The melding together of these diverse African American musical traditions echoes the album’s lyrical focus. Although Kendrick’s sense of internal conflict is present throughout, it is situated firmly within racial issues in the US. This is epitomised in the song u, a self-flagellating expression of survivor's guilt written after the rapper’s friend was killed as the result of a drive by shooting. In this sense, the ultimate struggle presented in the album stems from the lived conditions of urban America and the gang violence that impacts many black Americans there.  

This sentiments bleeds into the depictions of general attitudes in these communities and the conditions they help to perpetuate, as demonstrated in Hood Politics and institutionalized. In the former, an aversion to working towards overcoming the issues facing this section of society is expressed, as the cyclical trauma of violence and social dysfunction prove too overbearing to attempt to do so. Kendrick’s most visceral expression of this can be heard in The Blacker the Berry. Playing the unreliable narrator, he espouses an aggressive and impassioned articulation of black pride in the face of systemic oppression, before confessing that his own perpetuation of violence in black communities undermines the manifestation of any such collective empowerment. 

In this sense, the rapper asserts that the crux of social change among African American communities lies in the destructive tendencies which exist in these settings. The album’s penultimate track i seemingly offers a perspective on addressing this issue. It’s overt expressions of self-love exist at an extreme end of the album’s struggle between nihilism and optimism. The latter ultimately prevails as the takeaway message of To Pimp a Butterfly, with the defining moment of his message of hope coming in the form of Alright, a song which the rapper strives to overcome the trials of contemporary America with a sense of pride and resilience. In the years following its release, this song would grow synonymous with the Black Lives Matter movement, frequently being sung at protests following the murder of George Floyd. 

While TPAB’s hopeful message is clearly one which has resonated strongly with many, it’s insight into how exactly complex racial issues might be resolved reflects the dominant discourse of its time. For Kendrick, the route to achieving this lies in a mixture of self-love, religious salvation and a strong sense of black pride. The latter is a recurring feature throughout the album and is presented as the primary element in overcoming the social issues described therein. In this respect, the identity politics which had come to ubiquity by the 2010s permeates the perspective of this work. Economic and productive factors do not feature in Kendrick’s struggles to improve the conditions of his peers. Rather, his recurring lyrical focus on black identity fuses with a blend of African American musical styles to drive home the notion that such cultural expression can provide a source from which to negate racial oppression. 

Despite the power with which this sentiment is expressed, Lamar’s approach is limited in its potential by the surface level insight of identity politics. The fundamental aspect of this meditation on change lies in individuals feeling empowered by the distinction which differentiates them socially. Instead of collective movements towards economic or political change, the impetus is placed upon inner city African Americans to change their perspective as a means to overcome. The album does not acknowledge, much less encourage, class consciousness or a sense of common interests among those on this economic rung of American society.  

In many ways, this echoes the ultimate shortcomings of the BLM movement with which Alright came to be so closely associated. The existence of race as a social construct and its continued function in modern society never came into focus. Doing so could have highlighted its historical purpose in dividing European indentured servants in the Carribean from their African slave counterparts, despite their shared interests and lived conditions. While the genetic theories on race which subsequently emerged have been easily disproven, its existence continues to differentiate sections of the working class on purely superficial grounds. This critical view of race as it related to production was a theme of Martin Luther King’s rhetoric, which incorporated an anti-capitalist message as a necessity. While Black Lives Matter was largely critical of state policing, it failed to offer any tangible view on constructively addressing systemic racial issues. It remained restricted to the same notion of changing perspective within individuals that is present in TPAB. 

A decade from its release it has evidently and deservedly earned its status as a modern classic. Its intended message, however, perfectly encapsulates an outlook on socio-economic issues which dominated the 2010s, one which was severely limited in its potency.