The rapper’s knotty and apparently uncommercial album found a mass audience by capturing the mood of its time: bleak,desperate and broiling with angerSee our countdown of the best albums so farMore on the best culture of 2015Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 breakthrough, Good Kid, and MAAD City,was a remarkable album: meticulously crafted, weighty, and hugely entertaining,a platinum seller that topped critics’ best-of-the-year lists. But it still couldn’t fairly prepare you for what he did next. To Pimp a Butterfly was sprawling, anguished, or wilfully opposite. It certainly wasn’t the first latter-day album to be compared to black music’s legendary,turmoil-riddled state-of-the-nation addresses – Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On, Curtis Mayfield’s There’s No Place Like America nowadays, and Sly and The Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. But for once the association didn’t seem like hyperbole. Just as Sly Stone’s decision to strip away his music’s bubbling,gleaming optimism perfectly caught the pessimism of 1971, To Pimp a Butterfly was the right album by the right artist at the right time. Broiling with post-Ferguson anger and despair “You hate my people, and your arrangement is to terminate my culture / You’re fucking evil – complicated and claustrophobic,riddled with disquiet and self-doubt, desperate to work out what the answers might be but unable to advance to any genuine conclusions, and any meaningful reaction beyond a scream of horror. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com