West Coast rapper is No1 in our Top 50 albums of 2015 with his masterpiece To Pimp A Butterfly.
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In time-honoured fashion, 28-year-old Lamar comes “straight outta Compton,” California, to sit at hip hop’s top table. Now he’s gone one step further (joke!) by securing SFTW’s accolade of No1 album of 2015 and proving rap still has something to say.
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Though some know him best for his cameo appearance on Taylor Swift’s remix single Bad Blood, this album is his main event. Lamar has even caught the ear of President Obama who, it seems, can’t get enough of How Much A Dollar Cost.
The song takes you straight to the mean cityscapes that dominate his world. It amplifies how a confrontation with a homeless beggar brings out a range of conflicting emotions in him. In a country still blighted by prejudice, Lamar also tackles racism head on with equal doses of anger and compassion.
He charts his own rise from hardship to fame, summoning the guilt he feels over those he left behind on the streets. The album comes at a time when America’s black community is taking a long, hard look at its place in society.
The shootings of teenage African Americans Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, and the subsequent riots in Ferguson, Missouri, sharpened Lamar’s focus. He began writing the ferocious The Blacker The Berry well before previous album, “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” in response to Martin’s slaying.
In a recent interview, he said: “It’s already in your blood because I am Trayvon Martin, you know. I’m all of these kids. “It’s already implanted in your brain to come out your mouth as soon as you’ve seen it on the TV.
“I had that track way before that, from the beginning to the end, and the incident just snapped it for me.”
Crucially, To Pimp A Butterfly isn’t just about acute observations brilliantly told, but the epic scale of the music. He draws on America’s soul and funk greats such as James Brown, George Clinton and Sly Stone while the likes of Jay Z, Kanye, Eminem and Drake will be in no doubt that Lamar, the scene’s latest true superstar, has emerged as the one to beat.
He has lived and breathed hip hop since he was a child growing up in the same neighbourhood as N.W.A. (whose members included Dr Dre, Eazy-E and Ice Cube) as well as The Game and DJ Quik.
Rap is Compton’s life force and at the age of eight, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth witnessed his idols, the late Tupac Shakur and Dr Dre, film the video for their seminal hit California Love. By 16, the straight-A student released his first mixtape, which served notice of a burgeoning talent and led to a deal with indie label Top Dawg Entertainment.
Now he’s come full circle by ending To Pimp A Butterfly with Mortal Man, which fades to a “conversation” between himself and a sampled recording of Tupac. Other cultural references abound the sultry funky standout King Kunta alludes to the rebellious slave Kunta Kinte from the Alex Haley novel, Roots.
Forrest Gump comes into play on Institutionalized, featuring among others another member of West Coast’s rap elite, Snoop Dogg. “Life can be like a box of chocolate,” he insists, dropping the plural of chocolate.
Snoop ends the song with a verse that transports listeners to West Side Compton, including a statement that could be about Lamar: “You can take your boy out the hood but you can’t take the hood out your homie.”
There’s humour among Lamar’s dazzling wordplay, too.
On Complexion (A Zulu Love), he includes a Star Wars quip: “Enforcin’ my dark side like a young George Lucas.” Later, he endorses black actors like Idris Elba when he says: “The new James Bond gon’ be black as me/Black as brown, hazelnut, cinnamon, black tea/And it’s all beautiful to me.”
I could go on because there’s so much wonderfully rich material in this astonishing piece of work by a driven artist. Other contenders for SFTW album of the year included a superlative electro pop comeback from Manchester originals New Order, a dazzling display of studio skills by sonic adventurer Jamie xx, and a fiery debut from a precocious Aussie folkie with punk attitude, Courtney Barnett.
In the end, though, we agreed it just had to be the most meaningful and creatuve effort of 2015, Kendrick Lamar’s future classic To Pimp A Butterfly.
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