Levi Justin Rogers

To Pimp a Butterfly—Kendrick Lamar

In the late hours of this last Sunday evening, fading quietly into early Monday morning, Kendrick Lamar’s latest, and highly anticipated album, To Pimp a Butterfly dropped, the early release surprising and throwing off everyone. The album (originally slated to release the next week) was heralded with joy and excitement by Lamar fans everywhere (if not the entire internet) and our normally expected dreary Monday morning turned into something fresh and exciting.

We had already heard two singles—the surprisingly optimistic “i” and the aggressive and angry, “The Blacker the Berry.” What fills in the gaps of the rest of To Pimp a Butterfly is unexpected, fresh, and sometimes strange. The album begins with a smooth horn note from George Clinton and bass from Thundercat, Lamar unleashing his strong and unbeatable verse and voice. The next song is like some sort of spoken-word jazz piece and the rest of the album layers Kendrick’s unbeatable lyricism with jazz/funk inspired undertones. It’s not particularly bass heavy or even “single” heavy. There are less cameos from folks like Drake or Dre (Snoop Dogg makes an appearance though) than on good kid m.A.A.d city and the album is nuanced in the way jazz usually is and occasionally jarring (Lamar’s appearance on Flying Lotus’ track “Never Catch Me” was a good preview for the feel of Butterfly).

It’s very much an album, with a beginning, middle, and end; and it has a repeated theme of depression and black oppression throughout. Butterfly is not a particularly accessible album, if anything the opposite. It’s complicated. Kendrick implicates white oppression and then himself, and does the same with love, faith, race, and so on. It’s definitely about something, which is more than you could say about most hip-hop today, even gargantuans like Kanye and Drake. Whatever it’s reception; it’s a marked step forward for rap and an impressive follow-up to his last.

The night descended beautifully. The golden haze of autumn simmering to a dark-blue aura of October nip. The air fresh, free and unfettered from the thick stale heat of summer, the always hovering and pressing down of summer—like a heavy, unwashed blanket. The leaves on the sidewalk made a soft noise, like the turning of the pages of an old book, audible and comforting in their newfound death, nostalgic even. Some leaves were fresh, as crisp and pressed as a shirt from the dry cleaners. Others ground to fragments, dust even, from the myriad of feet that pressed upon them. The feet making their way from human obligation to human obligation, from sunrise until now.

As the moon peaked above the horizon, or more specifically, the rundown white brick house across the street in front of him, he felt a shiver down his spine. How strange it was to feel the ripple, from brain to spine to his anxious fingertips, the beauty of his central nervous system in full voluminous force.

Still, he knew what it meant, or feared what he thought it might mean. For days he had been free. The wind, once absent, now blew ominously through the trees. The trees, shaking and shuddering from the encounter. Or were they trees?

He could feel it happening. Again.

Could he face another winter? Could he face another day? Another hour?

He ran inside from the deck of his vacation rental cabin. An idea that at the time seemed so utopic, so perfect and necessary. A weekend away from the kids. His job. The duties and responsibilities of society which, though minimal, (and which he even found gratitude in compared to the annals of men before him), at the same time constricted and strangled him. He felt barely more than a skeleton. He ripped the cupboards open and poured himself a drink. Downed a valium and two capsules of Nyquil. Anything to escape what was coming. He knew it might not act fast enough. He took another drink.

Blood, he thought. Thinking of course, of alcohol and how it enters the blood stream. He immediately knelt down and did some push-ups. Push-ups which he had not done in years. Then he got up, took a swig, and ran around his cabin, his arms flailing like an inflatable car-sales-balloon-man.

“You will not get me!” he screamed.

He continued this for some time. These…reps I guess you could call them. Of alcohol, running, and sweating.

After thirty minutes of intense alcoholic and aerobic exercise he sat down in his chair.

I am ready he thought. I am ready.

So he sat there and waited for it. The plea to kill oneself. To think of yourself as a failure, as worthless and meaningless. The urge to destroy oneself.

He fell asleep even, which was what he wanted.

But then he woke up. And he saw the bottles and his sweat-stained chest, his lonely surroundings, his daily fights with madness. And he succumbed.

It’s tricky. How destruction, bitterness, and fear creep up on you.

He made his way out the door, past the fake pumpkins and kitschy Halloween decorations. He wandered into the street. Down past the pines. Through the fresh pressed leaves, the fragmented leaves. The air crisp and cool. He wandered. With the moon in his eye. He wandered for some time.

They say he had other intentions. They say he didn’t mean it. They say he was crazy, was on one for the night. He only hurt himself, and some others I guess, if you’re including counseling from the witness of such an event.

Before the moon rises full, when the trees are still calm, there is a sense of peace. If only the sense was not so finicky, so transient. We could be whole. The sinew of human life stitched onto a skeleton. At once new, and alien.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU]

The breeze picks up, blows leaves, fresh curly tree buds. It’s hot, but not too hot. The clouds cover the sun. The people stream in. A most diverse gathering in Salt Lake City, the most.

“The fuck who threw that?” says a man, as he picks up a beach ball, crumples it with his bare hands.

“Is that Lauryn Hill?” A white woman asks with jean shorts and her hubby husband, of the only clear main singer on stage. A black woman wearing a white dress. “Yes,” I say. That is Lauryn Hill. The person who you came to see tonight? No? You don’t even know?

The man beside us smokes weed, fine. The woman gabbing on her cell phone, not so fine.

Three teenage girls push their way wearing not much more than their Neanderthal ancestors.

Three teenage boys push by with polo’s and flippy-flip hair cuts. Does a fifteen year old with a haircut like Justin Bieber really know who Lauryn Hill is? Maybe? Doubt it? I don’t know.

“Do you people know The Fugees, what the word ‘Fugees’ even stands for?” I’m not trying to be pretentious, I just genuinely want to know.

A man dives on stage, tries to rap. Security throws him off.

2-3 people cram into a porter potty at once. Can girls play swords?

We are water bobs in a current of the crowd, best not fight it, let the wave lift you, carry you.

Five people stand in a circle, chatting away loudly like it’s the middle of July on a Saturday afternoon and there’s no one around for miles.

Oh , and Lauryn Hill was great just, you know.