The Butterfly Effect

cuts.” Porter, Martin, and Glasper describe frenzied scenes full of nonstop creativity. They’d be off playing somewhere, and in another part of the studio, Washington was writing out string arrangements and letting the producers hear what he’d drafted. There were nights where Kendrick would pop up to see how the live instrumentation was beginning to sound. “Once it got to the point where it was almost done and sounding good, that’s when Kendrick started coming in like, ‘I wanna hear how this track came out. Because I know it was hot before I left and I want to hear what these people did,’ ” Porter says. “He’d come in later and the energy would change. These instruments started giving these tracks a different spirit, a different energy, so he’d have to write according to that now. He started coming in and checking out the vibe of these songs, like, ‘Oh, he got Thundercat on this one!’ All these different things were adding all these different colors.”

While To Pimp a Butterfly was as much about the musicians as it was about Kendrick, everyone agrees that he deserves more credit as a producer. He had a very clear vision of what his music was supposed to sound like, and how to let air into his verses so the compositions could breathe on their own. Where some rappers tend to suffocate the beats with rapid-fire flows to demonstrate their vocal prowess, Kendrick has been called a jazz musician himself, or a spoken-word poet who approaches words with the same vigor as Martin and company did with their instruments.

For the musicians, it was never about playing all the notes; they were careful and measured, and played the best notes. Same thing with Kendrick. “He was just like one of us,” Porter says. “Everything doesn’t have to be written down and formatted. If we had to go with the unknown, and make something out of what’s happening right here, then we were all gonna be together and make something out of this situation. He wasn’t like, ‘Stop it, let me write something for this.’ Kendrick was going to talk about how he was feeling right now, and he’s such a good poet and storyteller that it worked.” By all accounts, Kendrick was very much involved with the beat construction of To Pimp a Butterfly and treated the music with the same vigor that he’d treat his rhymes. He’s very much a jazz musician who employs the same intricate technique to his vocal delivery that Miles Davis would to releasing notes from his trumpet. Kendrick was a scientist or a grand painter, and To Pimp a Butterfly was to be his masterpiece. The album had heavy themes within its bright, prismatic soundtrack, which wasn’t surprising for a Kendrick record. Much like “Swimming Pools” from good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick peppered his third album with personal narratives about coming home to tell his friends what he’d learned overseas. That explains the song “Momma,” a heartfelt tribute to the journey of going to South Africa and bringing lessons back to Compton for his friends and the younger generation. People from Kendrick’s side of town don’t often get to see the world outside of their immediate surroundings. But because he had seen how the world moves, and had actually set foot inside Nelson Mandela’s jail cell, his perspective broadened and he wanted to share the knowledge. He was thinking beyond the confines of Compton and bringing a new way of thinking back to the community. “The album means so much, not only to Compton, but to Los Angeles as a whole,” Lalah Hathaway tells me. Hathaway is a noted soul singer and daughter of soul music legend Donny Hathaway, whose voice is sampled on “Momma,” and was called in by Martin to add backup vocals to several songs on To Pimp a Butterfly. “Speaking as a person who lives in this community, it means so much for him to reach back and give these kids their dreams in the palms of their hands. It’s amazing that he’s still so in touch with his community because a lot of people are not. The fact that he’s so brilliant at making kids listen to what’s important, while also making it so they’re not even paying attention to what they’re listening to. It’s hard to get kids to listen to smart shit.”

But change is difficult—Kendrick said that a few times himself during To Pimp a Butterfly’s press run—and one man can’t change an entire gang culture with one album. Red and blue is ingrained through the city, and it’s tough to convey the wonders of the Motherland to people who can’t see beyond their own blocks, and can’t fathom life in Africa beyond what they’ve seen on the news. American media likes to portray Africa as poor and downtrodden, the so-called “Dark Continent,” a place that’s scary and where you couldn’t possibly live. Of course, race has a lot to do with that, but Africa is full of beautiful black people on the cutting edge of literature, art, business, and technology. They are proud, and whether it’s Lagos, Nigeria; Johannesburg, South Africa; or Nairobi, Kenya, Africa is a bustling continent with people just as ambitious and creative as Kendrick. “Momma,” with its silky bass line and woozy, off-kilter drums (courtesy of J Dilla disciple Knxwledge), is an ode to blackness and a celebration of his own ascendance. On this track and others throughout Butterfly, Kendrick toes the line between reality and surrealism, wrestling with his own disbelief at just how far he’s come in such a short period of time. For years, Kendrick toiled away in the TDE studio—working, grinding out mixtape after mixtape, album after album—sharpening his writing ability to the point of near mastery. Now suddenly he was there, far removed from the high school cyphers in 2003 and the sidewalk freestyles with Matt Jeezy. Now he could pack basketball arenas, though he had a much different struggle to conquer: the