“Alright,” and To Pimp a Butterfly as a whole, wasn’t just of the moment; the song and album were instant classics that lobbed Kendrick into the pantheon of rap’s all-time greats. Critics openly wondered if he was now the greatest rapper the world had ever seen, and whether his body of work was the best catalog ever compiled. That’s lofty praise for someone who hadn’t been in the game that long, who by his own admission hadn’t made his best work yet. He was still working, still keeping his head down in search of the perfect project. But when To Pimp a Butterfly was released—by surprise on March 15, 2015, a week before it was supposed to come out—it rocked the foundation of hip-hop and music overall, from its cover art, and the flurry of unabashed black music that tumbled from the speakers. It sounded far different from good kid, m.A.A.d city—a fact that angered some fans who craved that record’s opulent, wide-open soundscapes and tightly woven story line. To Pimp a Butterfly was more sprawling and more ambitious, a complicated patchwork of themes and ideas. It was angrier, denser, and made for headphone listening. More than anything, it was the sound of Kendrick battling his demons in front of his biggest audience, which not only alleviated the pressure he faced, but also somehow enabled him to connect it with all sorts of listeners. “Kendrick had so much respect from everybody,” Robert Glasper tells me. “He spoke to the jazz cats, to the music nerds, to the backpack rappers, the gangsters. That album touched everybody.”
That included New Jersey teacher Brian Mooney, who in 2015 dropped everything to teach a course on To Pimp a Butterfly. He had been teaching an English course based on Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye, but when he heard Kendrick’s opus, he thought the rapper’s work could connect with more students. “There was a lot going on in the world,” Mooney says. “And to think what that meant for teachers in the classroom with urban youth, how we were unpacking that with a lot of kids who are living through very real traumas. The things that they have to deal with—whether it’s violence in their communities, or poverty, or an addicted parent, or gun violence. Kendrick is addressing a lot of that stuff, through talking about mental illness and his own battles with his own demons.” In class, Mooney and his students analyzed many of the album’s songs and spent an entire class period looking at the cover. “I remember how incredible that was,” Mooney exclaims. “The kids were so engaged. We had a whole conversation about, well, ‘Why is it in black and white?’ The kids went home, they wrote commentary responses on the class blog page, and responded to songs like ‘King Kunta.’ ” Mooney wrote a post on his personal blog about his decision to teach classes based on To Pimp a Butterfly. That caught the attention of TDE, and soon after, Mooney got an email from the collective that said Kendrick had read the post and wanted to connect with him. Two weeks later, he’s on the phone with Dave Free to coordinate Kendrick’s visit to the school in June 2015. “I had this mind-set like, ‘He should want to come see this work in action. He should want to see the brilliance of our kids.’ ” To make Kendrick feel comfortable at the school, Mooney instituted a cipher in which the students and teachers rapped. They all rhymed over a beat once used by the rapper Ghostface Killah; that caught Kendrick’s attention. “It broke the ice,” Mooney says. Still, he remembers some teachers not wanting to come to the welcoming assembly for Kendrick’s arrival because they felt it wasn’t worth it. They had misperceptions about him and his art, and “there were definitely some racist attitudes going on,” he says. In the end, Mooney drew comparisons between The Bluest Eye and To Pimp a Butterfly, calling Morrison’s work a parent to Kendrick’s album.
Upon its release, it was somewhat tough to describe Butterfly’s impact; it simply had that thing, that certain gravitas that you couldn’t
