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King Kendrick
As Kendrick toured the U.S. with Kanye West in 2014, he started opening his mind to new forms of music. “You would have thought it was a tour bus for someone over the age of 55,” producer Sounwave once told Spin. Kendrick had grown up listening mostly to West Coast hip-hop, and by his own admission, he had missed out on transcendent rappers like Nas and the Notorious B.I.G. at the height of their respective powers. To find new inspiration, he went further into the pantheon of revolutionary black music, to iconic jazz trumpeters like Miles Davis and Donald Byrd, and funk legends like Sly Stone and George Clinton. Kendrick was exploring freedom in his life and in his music, and these creators personified that. Miles had changed the direction of jazz at least three times, first in 1959 with his breakthrough album, Kind of Blue, then in 1969 with In a Silent Way and in 1970 with Bitches Brew Blue is lauded for ushering a more modal sound into jazz; Silent Way and Brew marked the beginning of Miles’s electric period, where he broadened his music to include traces of funk and rock into the mix. Sly and George were outlandish at a time when America wasn’t open to such black artists. In the late 1960s, when mainstream music took a psychedelic, acid-fueled turn, they crafted sounds that were equally uplifting, acerbic, and iconoclastic.
Miles, Donald, Sly, and George were all free black men, creatively and spiritually, who indirectly showed Kendrick that he could be the same type of musician. But such freedom is challenging to obtain in rap music, a genre indebted to bravado and street cred. Sure, he was more visible now, but he was still his own man, and TDE was more inclined to do their own thing, not what fans expected them to do. Kendrick wanted to innovate, but he had to do it within a genre among stars who’d rather rap about flashy cars and bedazzled jewelry instead of depression, Christianity, and the trappings of fame. Kendrick played this music so much that he started to become one with it. That, combined with the South Africa trip, made his soul even older and wiser.
For his next album, Kendrick wanted to discuss these topics by using jazz, funk, and spoken word as the backdrop. Jazz and funk were forgotten genres that hadn’t been blended into mainstream hip-hop for at least fifteen years, when the rapper Common did so for his 2000 masterpiece, Like Water for Chocolate. Yet while Com’s blend felt brighter and more tethered to the jazz-rap hybrids of early nineties luminaries A Tribe Called Quest and Gang Starr, Kendrick envisioned something a little darker and more esoteric. “Tribe was the beginning of it, and they also changed the temperament of rap at the time. Rap was pretty aggressive and they took it back a little bit, and they created a wave of artists who were headed in that direction,” says Hank Shocklee, a Hall of Fame record producer who, in the 1980s and ’90s, was the main architect of Public Enemy’s bombastic sound. “I’ve always thought jazz was the next evolution for hip-hop. Before, it was more funk.” Shocklee had seen the blending of hip-hop and jazz firsthand. In the late eighties, the producer took A Tribe Called Quest’s first six-song demo to Def Jam Records creator Russell Simmons: “He didn’t get into it because it wasn’t aggressive and they weren’t yelling. The beats weren’t hard. There were those groups of people who didn’t understand it because it was a divergence from what they were listening to. That’s where music is always gonna go. It’s about moving things forward and not looking backwards, and those are the artists who tend to last throughout time. Those who are not afraid to push the envelope in areas where no one was willing to go.”
Kendrick wanted an ambitious mix of bebop and psychedelic jazz, James Brown–centric funk, atmospheric soul, and off-centered beats. And most important, it had to be black—real black—from the music to the topics it addressed. Kendrick started brainstorming ideas for his next album right after he finished good kid, and knew immediately that it needed to address the black community as a whole. Our people needed healing; the rapper wanted “to help put a Band-Aid on the things that’s been going on in our communities,” collaborator Terrace Martin once told Revolt, “and just to do something legendary.” Kendrick wanted the album to be for all of us, though with his own personal awakening at the center. He was going to call it Tu Pimp a Caterpillar, or Tupac for short, as yet another way to honor a rapper who had such a profound effect on him. But he soon renamed it To Pimp a Butterfly to reflect the challenges of his newfound celebrity and the music industry’s stronghold on its artists. “The word ‘pimp’ has so much aggression, and that represents several things,” he told MTV News in 2015. “For me, [the album title] represents using my celebrity for good. Another
