One day, producer Steven “Flying Lotus” Ellison was on the tour bus with Kendrick, running through instrumentals he’d been working on for his own project. Lotus was considered a pioneer in the famed L.A. beat scene, where like-minded producers like Tokimonsta, the Gaslamp Killer, Samiyam, and Ras G whipped funk, jazz, hip-hop, and electronica into a cosmic blend of dance music. Lotus was a disciple of his great-aunt, Alice Coltrane, whose mix of spiritual jazz was meant to elevate the mind beyond the trappings of this planet. Lotus had been known to embody the same ethos. On albums like Los Angeles, Cosmogramma, Until the Quiet Comes, and You’re Dead! the producer piled all sorts of genres into one pot, leading to a kaleidoscopic blend still rooted in the astral jazz that Coltrane used to create. There was one track in particular that caught Kendrick’s attention, a driving funk loop with quick drums and a thick, wobbly bass line. It was a weird hybrid with the oversized knock of a Dr. Dre beat and the kind of spacey electronics you’d hear on an early seventies Funkadelic track. It was squarely within Lotus’s wheelhouse; Kendrick’s, not so much. “I asked him, ‘What is that?’ ” the rapper once told the Recording Academy. “He said, ‘You don’t know nothing about that. That’s real funk.… You’re not going to rap on that.’ It was like a dare.”
The music was conceptualized by Lotus and frequent collaborator Thundercat, whose frenetic style of bass playing made him a go-to musician for rapper Mac Miller and singer Erykah Badu. Lotus and Thundercat were at the computer studying George Clinton. “He became the fuel for creating,” the bassist once recalled. “I was really blown away that Kendrick was so into that song.” Lotus and Thundercat were Clinton disciples, and in 2008, Lotus launched his own record label, called Brainfeeder. With artists like Thundercat on his roster, Lotus’s imprint became a go-to source for the same sort of esoteric funk that Clinton used to create. It also screamed L.A., just like Kendrick’s music, but it captured a side of the city with which many outside it were not familiar. Largely because of the gangsta rap movement of the eighties and nineties, and due to newer rappers like Kendrick, many outsiders viewed L.A. as a rap town, but Lotus’s and Thundercat’s style was tailored to urban alternative kids who listened to artists like Clinton but also metal, punk, and indie rock. So, on the surface, Lotus and Kendrick was an odd pairing, but that showed just how deep the rapper wanted to dig on his new work. In fact, Kendrick asked Lotus who he envisioned on the track he played on the tour bus. “I laughed and said George Clinton,” the producer said. “I never thought it would actually happen.”
In its finished form, “Wesley’s Theory” opens To Pimp a Butterfly—with Clinton as a feature—as a cautionary tale about the perils of success and the recklessness it could bring. The “Wesley” here is actor Wesley Snipes, who in 2010 was convicted of tax evasion and sent to federal prison for three years. Yet Kendrick wasn’t evoking Snipes’s name as a diss, but as a symbol of what can happen to black men in the United States without proper financial education. Kendrick suddenly had more money than he’d ever had before, and with that came the impulse to spend it, especially if you had grown up where he did. If you came up broke, on and off food stamps, you felt like you’d arrived once you earned thousands, let alone millions, of dollars. But public schools never taught you how to manage money—at least not in black neighborhoods—so Kendrick had had to figure it out on his own, and fast. Because he’d always kept to himself, and because his rampant tour schedule led to even deeper insulation, “Wesley’s Theory” made Kendrick sound paranoid, like Uncle Sam was coming any minute to wash away his good fortune. Though if making it big scared Kendrick as a black man, at least he had one major ally who’d been through something similar. “Remember the first time you came out to the house? You said you wanted a spot like mine,” Dr. Dre recalled via voicemail on the song. “But remember, anybody can get it, the hard part is keeping it, motherfucker.”
“Wesley’s Theory” inspired To Pimp a Butterfly’s album art, which made a powerful statement on its own. Against foreboding shades of gray, Kendrick and his friends—most of them shirtless—flash stacks of cash with their faces beaming. They’re expressing the utmost joy and reassurance, as if they’d endured hell and achieved their own version of the American dream. They’re in front of a photoshopped White House; on the ground before them is a dead, white judge with his eyes blacked out. In the middle is Kendrick, smiling wide and holding an infant child. He looks relaxed, comforted, free. For him, this was real life and what fame was all about: sharing it with the Day Ones who still called him Dot.
The song and cover represent the very moment Kendrick signed his major-label deal, right when the sense of achievement sets in and he felt he needed to spread the wealth. “It’s going back to the neighborhood and taking the folks that haven’t seen nothing and taking them around the world,” Kendrick told MTV News of his mind-set. “Whether you want to call them ignorant or not, they need
