Kendrick’s road hadn’t gotten any easier; with great success came the pressure to top it, and to always be on. The TDE team had spoken openly about this notion of “hustling like you broke,” of never ever resting on your laurels and to keep working in silence. And while Kendrick was already thinking about his next record, he had let his guard down just a little to receive praise. If President Obama liked his music, he must’ve been doing something right. As he told Billboard, “Even the president has got to hear that snare drum.” That Kendrick became acquainted with the nation’s first black president was a dream that he wished his grandmother had been there to see.
The accolades were beginning to roll in for To Pimp a Butterfly. Pretty much every major publication lionized it, even if they were still trying to unpack all its density. By early 2016, it’d been almost a year since the album’s release, but the record just sort of stuck around, even with the lightning-fast speed of the web-driven music industry, where albums are considered old just a few months after their release. That was because musicians were largely focused on singles, not full albums as a body of work. We were in the streaming era, and there was a notion that fans didn’t listen to albums as art anymore. So some musicians put their full attention into one song that could secure millions of plays and land on someone’s playlist. Kendrick harkened back to the likes of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, both of whom saw the album medium as a listening experience meant to transport souls from one point to another. They created full suites of music, bending the culture toward them and not the other way around. At the time of this writing, Marvin’s 1971 opus, What’s Going On, was forty-nine years old and still incredibly relevant; its denouncement of war, poverty, and child neglect applied equally to the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Stevie’s 1976 double album, Songs in the Key of Life, is still volleyed as perhaps the greatest record of all time (though one could argue that any of Stevie’s albums from 1972 to 1976 are in the conversation). These albums didn’t conform to the arbitrary notion that mainstream records should cater to what was popular on the radio; in fact, those albums showed that they weren’t overly preoccupied with mainstream acceptance. To Pimp a Butterfly was very much of that ilk, and Kendrick’s music should be held in the same canon as Marvin and Stevie, as artists who shifted the culture, and made everything before them feel obsolete.
Post-Butterfly, it seemed every record had some elements of jazz or creative freedom, which led to the most fertile period of socially conscious black music since Marvin and Stevie ruled the terrain. You had records like Freetown Sound by the New York musician Blood Orange, which unpacked the fragility of black life over a wide-ranging soundtrack of eighties-centric funk and pop. The Barbados-born, British-based saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings traveled to Johannesburg, linked with a group of local jazz musicians, and released an album called Wisdom of Elders, which, much like Kamasi Washington’s The Epic, reflected the tenor of black people through murky sonic textures and chants. The Knowles sisters had the most powerful records of the 2016 set—Beyoncé with Lemonade (Kendrick was a guest on album cut “Freedom”) and its theme of empowerment for black women, and Solange’s A Seat at the Table, a sprawling soul opus that helped calm the black rage burning outside. In part, Kendrick’s album made it okay for his peers to go in, to create and release whatever their vision desired regardless of what the public and critics expected. Through artists like these, a heightened black awareness began to emerge in pop culture, and thus a new class of protest music began taking shape. They were the new vanguard.
The scene was a familiar one: Kendrick Lamar was at the Grammy Awards, back at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. This time it was 2016, two years removed from the 56th annual awards, which had now become a legendary tale. Kendrick wasn’t the baby-faced newcomer who’d barely entered the industry. He was a little older, a little wiser, and walked into this year’s ceremony with eleven nominations. He had been nominated for seven awards two years prior and hadn’t won any. This year, To Pimp a Butterfly was nominated for Best Rap Album, Album of the Year, Best Rap/Sung Performance for “These Walls,” and Best Rap Song, Best Music Video, Song of the Year, and Best Rap Performance for “Alright.” This wasn’t like 2014; because Kendrick had seen a lot more of the business, the rapper—at least professionally—was no longer the demure creator who just seemed happy to be there. He was coming to take everything. Simply put, “I want to win them all,” Kendrick told Billboard before the awards show.
He was up against history, though: only two rap albums before his—Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999, and OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in 2004—had won Grammys for Album of the
