Behind those intentions, however, To Pimp a Butterfly was shaping up to be stellar or messy, grand or disappointing. Though Kendrick had a lot to say about his new life, about black pain, and what he had seen in South Africa, it was not entirely certain that the album would be a classic. In the months leading up to its release, Kendrick gave an interview to Billboard that didn’t do him any favors. The interviewer asked the rapper’s thoughts on the killings of unarmed black men by police—in Ferguson, specifically. And instead of showing sympathy for what had happened to Mike Brown, Kendrick’s answer made him sound like an “All Lives Matter” proponent who blamed the victim and not the aggressor. “I wish somebody would look in our neighborhood knowing that it’s already a situation, mentally, where it’s fucked up,” he said. “What happened to [Michael Brown] should’ve never happened. Never. But when we don’t have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us? It starts from within. Don’t start with just a rally, don’t start from looting—it starts from within.” The response spoke more to Kendrick’s own childhood as a traumatized black boy than the struggles happening in Ferguson. That he wasn’t far removed from his own upbringing in Compton and still grappling with trauma was the essence of his comment.
The response ignited a small firestorm on social media, and triggered harsh criticism from fellow artists who wondered why, as a black man, Kendrick would say such a thing. On Twitter, rapper Azealia Banks said Kendrick’s comments were the “dumbest shit I’ve ever heard a black man say.” Then Kid Cudi, who’d been credited with ushering in a hazier, emo style of rap, criticized Kendrick indirectly with a subtweet asking black artists not to “talk down on the black community like you are Gods gift to niggaz everywhere.” Then there was the third verse of “The Blacker the Berry.” Now finished and released as the second single off To Pimp a Butterfly, it appeared to blame black people for their own mistreatment—the notion, on the surface, was that we couldn’t be upset with police shootings when black people in gangs shot and killed each other all the time. At the end of the song, Kendrick raps: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? / Hypocrite!” That, too, set off a firestorm of emotions from listeners online who lambasted the rapper for respectability politics.
In an interview with journalist Rob Markman for MTV News, Kendrick said that he wasn’t trying to put down the black community. “These are my experiences,” Kendrick said. “This is my life that I’m talking ’bout. I’m not speaking to the community. I’m not speaking of the community. I am the community. It’s therapeutic for myself because I still feel that urge, and I still feel that anger and hatred for this man next door… that ill will to want to do something.” He had a history of such ambiguity, like these lines on “m.A.A.d city”: “If I told you I killed a nigga at sixteen, would you believe me? / Perceive me to be innocent Kendrick that you seen in the street.” And this one from “Hol’ Up”: “As a kid I killed two adults, I’m too advanced.” Then, on “Institutionalized,” from To Pimp a Butterfly: “I’m trapped inside the ghetto and I ain’t proud to admit it / Institutionalized, I could still kill me a nigga, so what?” There’d also been the question of whether or not he’d ever been in a gang. Kendrick grew up on the west side of Compton—Piru territory. Over the years, he’d denied being affiliated on songs and in interviews, but lyrics like “Step on my neck and get blood on your Nike checks”—which appeared on “good kid”—left the door open for such inquiry. The line could mean that he was indeed in a gang, or that the crew had his back because he was cool with them.
“I’ve only been in this industry three or four years,” Kendrick told MTV News. “I can’t forget twenty years of me being in the city of Compton. When I say these things, [it’s reminding me] that I need to respect this man, because he’s a black man, not because of the color that he’s wearing. I did a lot to tear down my own community.”
Kendrick had never been a leader before, at least not on this level. It was one thing to be revered in Compton, but to be admired throughout the country and the world was something else entirely. Nothing in the celebrity handbook can prepare you for the day when a teenage kid says that your music legit saved his life, and shows you the slits on his wrist to prove it. Then the parasites come, the newfound friends and hangers-on who simply want to be around someone famous, and they need “just a couple dollars” to get through. And you can’t mask the guilt of not being there physically for your family. Homesickness kicks in, and living out of a suitcase quickly loses luster. Before you know it, the home and the people you once knew have changed forever. Kendrick was torn between his new and old lives, and he wanted To Pimp a Butterfly to reflect this
