Kendrick Lamar fans have been anticipating the release of his good kid, m.A.A.d city follow-up since Top Dawg Ent head honcho Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith announced the Compton rapper would be releasing new music last March. The album was originally slated to be released in September of 2014 but fall came and went and winter nearly did, too with no album from K. Dot, until last night.
The conscious lyricist offered up a snippet of the album's creative direction with the release of "i" and the rest of the album follows suit with more upbeat and thought provoking bars.
NY Daily News gave the album five stars calling it an "instant classic."
When Lamar exploded onto the scene in 2012 with "good kid mAAd city," the Compton-reared emcee re-wrote the rules of West Coast hip-hop. Instead of inhabiting the gangsta characters in the Death Row mold, he played the brainy observer. He was both a product of the area and an outsider - one armed with the skills, and will, to transcend any ghetto limitations.
On "To Pimp A Butterfly," Lamar expands from regional concerns to address general issues of race, power, madness and desire.
It's an album meant to be lived with for a long time, making it one of the few recent hip-hop that's built to last.
Alex Macpherson of The Guardian offered up a similar review with a four star rating.
You're left disorientated and thrilled, which turns out to be the perfect preparation for a densely layered album on which any given song is liable to end up in a completely different place from its beginning. To Pimp a Butterfly is a musical tour de force, a confounding and distinct artistic and political statement along the lines of Erykah Badu's landmark 2008 album, New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War or D'Angelo's long-awaited 2014 comeback Black Messiah. The languorous victory lap of Momma is jolted into unexpected, urgent uncertainty on its final verse; Lamar - who is, along with Nicki Minaj, one of the most vocally creative rappers of this generation - uses the full repertoire of his voices to create a cacophony of self-loathing on U.
USA Today predicts the album's content will be taught in college courses and that may not be too far fetched considering his major label debut inspired a course taught at Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Georgia.
Check out To Pimp A Butterfly below and let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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