Tracks
People who bought this release also bought
It's hard to make sense of Kendrick Lamars new album. Perhaps because neither head nor tail? How Compton rapper's already canonized 'good kid, Maad city' was a clear conceptually and stylistically rigorous album is 'Two Pimp a Butterfly' frenetic fluttering like a butterfly. Kendrick called 'good kid, Maad city' for a short film, but here's the movie broken. What happened?
Basically was breakthrough album retrospective: Kendrick looked back on his childhood and his immediate environment from distance and created a coherent, meaningful narrative about his life. Now he arrived in the present, with all that implies in terms of uncertainty and chaos. Before, the good boy from the ghetto the omniscient narrator overview - now he orienteringsløs and captured in fact he barely even understand. The result is one of the most overwhelming intense and fearlessly experimental hip hop album ever out of.
It all starts on the opener 'Wesley's Theory'. Funk icon George Clinton buzz a few lines, producer and bassist Thundercat sings a bit, and Kendricks mentor, Dr. Dre, the finger-wagging in sentence form. Amid all the different voices is Kendrick who use Flying Lotus' bubbly and frantic beat for a few extremely compact verse about how a rich African American marginalized. The rapper's rejection of the life he has achieved, and here is 'Two Pimp a Butterfly' nothing less than an existential search for meaning and identity. The album is a process that never reaches a definitive answer, and therefore never compromises with its own complexity.
Nothing is clear: Two of the album's best tracks - 'King Kunta' and 'These Walls' - sounds at first listen respectively as an assertive' A Milli'-banger and classic smooth sexrap but one sinks deeper is' King Kunta 'suddenly a black battle cry (the song is named after slave Kunta Kinte rebel), while the last verse of 'These Walls' is about the prison and the mind's walls.
Opinion and action are blurred, coherence is lost - which is emphasized by the majority of the voting expression that Kendrick uses. He raps with manic James Brown-voice (late 'Momma'), through tears ('u') and also has the whole verse, they rap from a number of different characters' perspective - as the second verse of 'Institutionalized' where he raps as his own friend, explaining why he robber people.
It makes Kendrick to the first truly polyphonic rapper - because this is not comical voice theater as with Nicki Minaj and Eminem. It is a genuine attempt to create a polyphonic work.
The music accentuates voice diversity. There's funk a la Parliament and floating jazz productions that refuse to be reduced to typical hip-hop samples - a feeling that is emphasized by the fact that not only is sampled by artists such as The Isley Brothers, Parliament, and James Brown, but also alive guest appearances by George Clinton and Ronald Isley.
The result is a radical sonic twist that puts "Two Pimp a Butterfly 'in the same category as Erykah Badus' New Amerykah' album, Kanye West's 'Yeezus' and perhaps especially D'Angelos 'Black Messiah': Album from artists who have made classics of a genre and then create masterpieces by breaking out of the same tradition. It's all uncompromising album that puts artists in a darker, more powerful context, and greatly thematises how it is to be black in America.
'Two Pimp a Butterfly' is extremely compact and extremely violent - Kendrick could not have created anything that deviates more from the coherent expression of 'good kid, Maad city'. The film is broken, but reality intervened.
Basically was breakthrough album retrospective: Kendrick looked back on his childhood and his immediate environment from distance and created a coherent, meaningful narrative about his life. Now he arrived in the present, with all that implies in terms of uncertainty and chaos. Before, the good boy from the ghetto the omniscient narrator overview - now he orienteringsløs and captured in fact he barely even understand. The result is one of the most overwhelming intense and fearlessly experimental hip hop album ever out of.
It all starts on the opener 'Wesley's Theory'. Funk icon George Clinton buzz a few lines, producer and bassist Thundercat sings a bit, and Kendricks mentor, Dr. Dre, the finger-wagging in sentence form. Amid all the different voices is Kendrick who use Flying Lotus' bubbly and frantic beat for a few extremely compact verse about how a rich African American marginalized. The rapper's rejection of the life he has achieved, and here is 'Two Pimp a Butterfly' nothing less than an existential search for meaning and identity. The album is a process that never reaches a definitive answer, and therefore never compromises with its own complexity.
Nothing is clear: Two of the album's best tracks - 'King Kunta' and 'These Walls' - sounds at first listen respectively as an assertive' A Milli'-banger and classic smooth sexrap but one sinks deeper is' King Kunta 'suddenly a black battle cry (the song is named after slave Kunta Kinte rebel), while the last verse of 'These Walls' is about the prison and the mind's walls.
Opinion and action are blurred, coherence is lost - which is emphasized by the majority of the voting expression that Kendrick uses. He raps with manic James Brown-voice (late 'Momma'), through tears ('u') and also has the whole verse, they rap from a number of different characters' perspective - as the second verse of 'Institutionalized' where he raps as his own friend, explaining why he robber people.
It makes Kendrick to the first truly polyphonic rapper - because this is not comical voice theater as with Nicki Minaj and Eminem. It is a genuine attempt to create a polyphonic work.
The music accentuates voice diversity. There's funk a la Parliament and floating jazz productions that refuse to be reduced to typical hip-hop samples - a feeling that is emphasized by the fact that not only is sampled by artists such as The Isley Brothers, Parliament, and James Brown, but also alive guest appearances by George Clinton and Ronald Isley.
The result is a radical sonic twist that puts "Two Pimp a Butterfly 'in the same category as Erykah Badus' New Amerykah' album, Kanye West's 'Yeezus' and perhaps especially D'Angelos 'Black Messiah': Album from artists who have made classics of a genre and then create masterpieces by breaking out of the same tradition. It's all uncompromising album that puts artists in a darker, more powerful context, and greatly thematises how it is to be black in America.
'Two Pimp a Butterfly' is extremely compact and extremely violent - Kendrick could not have created anything that deviates more from the coherent expression of 'good kid, Maad city'. The film is broken, but reality intervened.