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In 2011, a brazenly confident Drake rapped the line, “I know that showin’ emotion don’t ever mean I’m a pussy” over a decadent, soul-laced Just Blaze beat, and thereby solidified the reason he was the new pacesetter in the post-Jay-Z era of hip-hop. And although he followed that line with an immediate re-assertion of his masculinity—”Know I don’t make music for niggas who don’t get pussy/So those are the ones I count on to diss me or overlook me”—his validation of going against the traditionally hypermasculine hip-hop grain stood firm. It always did, really—proclaiming it outright was just the victory lap.
Drake is the rapper that praised the beauty of a girl wearing “sweatpants, hair tied,” and “chillin’ with no makeup on,” at a time when his own mentor Lil’ Wayne was still fetishizing lap dances and rapping about literally fucking “every girl in the world”. That the hip-hop mainstream would always be dominated by images of gangsta rap, drug trap politics and immortalized ideas of controlling women like pimps was finally beginning to crumble—and while portraying street life to a world that systematically ignored its realities was indeed a noble effort when artists like NWA, Public Enemy, 2Pac (and yes, even Jay-Z) undertook the role, the end result of gangsta rap’s peak (you know, somewhere in the last decade when 50 Cent gained so much momentum that MTV ranked him the 9th Hottest MC in the Game in 2009) was to reward rappers for sounding thuggish, even if there was no real substance or story behind it. It’s why Lil’ Wayne could get away with consistently claiming Blood gang ties, and it’s why “Young Thug” passes for an acceptable rap moniker in today’s industry.
Of course, the industry owes much of the rise (or return) of the non-thug backpack rapper to Kanye West’s “The College Dropout” in 2004, and critics can contend that West’s “808s and Heartbreak”—an album about a mother’s death, lost love and a sense of life’s fleeting nature—marked a paradigm shift in the game in 2008, but there have always been emotional rap songs. 2Pac’s “Dear Mama”, various Bone Thugs ‘n’ Harmony songs and yes, even 50 Cent’s “21 Questions” are evidence of that. No matter how much of a role West played, Drake’s unprecedented rise to fame is the true marker of the paradigm shift from thugged-out rappers running the game by default to a new standard of real: a realness based on emotional hardships of all kinds, and how well a rapper can portray them.
It is in this climate that Kendrick Lamar has risen to the top of hip-hop’s post-2008, post-808s era. The so-called freshman class of rappers from the end of the last decade—Wale, Kid Cudi, J. Cole and Drake—have all showed varying degrees of promise in leading the new school of backpack-esque rap, and have all fueled a more emotional, more thoughtful, more multidimensional hip-hop style (Cudi’s “Day ‘n’ Nite” getting radioplay anywhere in 2004 would have been a pipe dream, and J. Cole’s riffs on staying true to oneself and appreciating unconventional beauty would have never competed with “In Da Club”). But Lamar has jumped on that pattern and taken it to its fullest extent.
It was clear from the beginning that Lamar was in the game for purposes that most rappers wouldn’t dare approach. Lamar’s first studio effort “Section.80” found the rapper weaving expert lyrics with diatribes on the consequences of the Reagan administration, reconciling Christianity with the fallibility of human nature and the suspicious nature of society itself. Lamar’s 2012 blowout album “good kid, m.a.a.a.d city” painted a picture of Compton more vivid than any rap album that came before it—the thing might as well be a novel, and yet Lamar, even in storytelling mode, proved that no one was touching him in terms of skill.
If “good kid” was classic, Lamar’s most recent creation, “To Pimp a Butterfly” is a masterpiece. The album could earn crazy praise for its literacy alone—in the single “King Kunta”, Lamar references James Brown, the 1970s slave-drama “Roots,” Jay-Z, legendary funk band Parliament, drug slang and possibly Chinua Achebe’s famous Nigerian-English novel “Things Fall Apart,” all without sacrificing the song’s vengeful, all-eyes-on-me tone. And throughout the album, Lamar could be singlehandedly bringing jazz rap back to the mainstream, enlisting critically acclaimed jazz-fusion bassist Thundercat and throwing freakout jazz into the slam-poetry-tinged tirade “For Free? (Interlude),” as well as smoother horns and keys on “How Much a Dollar Cost.”
“For Free” by itself is one of the most eccentric and clearly winning tracks in rap’s past couple years, pitting an indignant Lamar up against a scorning semi-love interest who dismisses him as a pitifully poor “off-brand nigga.” Lamar responds with a slam-poetry-like flow that would make any poetry cafe or competition fold in on itself, as he proceeds to explain why “This dick ain’t free,” which signifies Lamar’s anger at money-grubbing women who expect to give nothing in return except sex, as well as—get this—his rebellion against the most leeching “bad bitch” of all: America itself. “Oh America, you bad bitch/I picked cotton and made you rich/Now my dick ain’t free,” he snarls. The last 30 seconds of that song call into question whether Lamar should be crowned the best rapper of all time, and even Rakim probably couldn’t protest.
“Butterfly” isn’t as much a linear story as “good kid”—and this lack of cohesiveness is why the album falls short of being as perfect as historically acclaimed hip-hop icons like “Illmatic” or “Reasonable Doubt”—but it’s because Lamar aims to put forth a scattered, hyperpersonal, hypocritical picture of himself with this album. As usual, he dons many hats and accents, playing role of his friends from Compton on “Hood Politics,” the role of an apparently Latina love interest named Lucy (who’s actually a manifestation of the devil—what else would you expect?), his own mother on “You Ain’t Gotta Lie,” and his own conscience, sober and drunk, on the visceral “u,” which finds Lamar criticizing himself as irresponsible, a false leader, a fake friend and someone who deserves to have committed suicide. The thing about living in “the Drake era” of hip-hop is that the genre’s challenge is all about who can be the most aggressively personal, relatable, and forthrightly hypocritical: Lamar calls himself “the biggest hypocrite of 2015” on “The Blacker the Berry,” in which Lamar puts his gang-violence-filled background right next to his socially conscious reputation and tells the world to look.
But where Drake is rapping (and singing) at once about letting people down, trying to pull his family together, caring for Mrs. Right, chasing exes and both embracing and hating fame on his last two true studio efforts, Lamar is going much, much deeper, delving into everything from the evils of materialism in American culture (he literally is attacking “Uncle Sam”) to the risks of big-headedness as someone who left the hood, to the pitfalls of losing one’s religion and selflessness. Drake is dubiously trying to be a better son, friend and boyfriend; Lamar is urging us all to be like Nelson Mandela.
He has a technologically reconstructed conversation with 2Pac himself at the album’s end about the title’s butterfly metaphor (which deals with the process of getting out of the institutionalized hood mentality and spreading wisdom to the people), and he throws in Pac’s near-prophetic words about race riots in America, and even then, Lamar doesn’t seem daunted. It’s easy to chalk up Lamar’s dominance of the rap game to his wealth of life experiences on which to draw—growing up in Compton is a life that Drake, or even J. Cole, can’t compare their experiences to. But Lamar is also indisputably putting out lyrics, flows and overall song concepts better than anyone else in the game today, and that’s what puts the album over the top. Lil’ Wayne once had to make a song entitled “Best Rapper Alive” to assert his claim. Kendrick Lamar no longer has to say it—the music speaks for itself.
Contact CU Independent Opinion Section Editor Ellis Arnold at ellis.arnold@colorado.edu.
