Kendrick had the idea to transform his chain gang into a crew of African dancers when he transitioned to the gig’s second sequence, and to have them bathed in paint that was only visible in black light. In the third part of the performance, Kendrick unveiled what was then an unreleased verse, one that delved into his true feelings on the killing of Trayvon Martin and the piece of his soul he lost on that fateful night four years ago: “On February 26, I lost my life, too… / And for our community, do you know what this does? / Add to a trail of hatred / 2012 was taped for the world to see.” As the song progressed, and the instrumental grew more furious, Kendrick matched the energy with equally fervent bars that rose almost to the point of collapsing. Right as he concluded, the lights dropped out. Behind him was a life-sized geographical picture of Africa; in the middle, in regal font, read one word: Compton. It was the one true capital of Kendrick’s heart.
The people spoke loudly that night: when Kendrick stopped rapping and the lights clicked off to illuminate the Motherland, the audience—made up of industry types and fellow musicians—stood with a thunderous ovation that rippled through the room: Common clapped and hollered like a proud father; Rev. Run peered toward the stage with a slight look of disbelief etched across his face. Kendrick just stood there, motionless and stern, taking in the moment. He was studying the crowd, looking at the expressions and hearing the adulation. His face remained serious, focused, still in character. In that moment, in those six minutes in the Staples Center, again just a few miles from Compton, Kendrick’s life changed forever. It was when he became royalty, when he rose to the pantheon of cornerstone greats, when his visage seemed destined for the Mount Rushmore of music. But this was hip-hop and it was black as fuck, the type of hip-hop that hasn’t always been supported by the academy. This wasn’t the sort of rap made to be palatable. It was Kendrick bending the culture yet again, stamping his card as a once-in-a-generation talent, the likes of which we’d never see again. It was the night that America finally caught on to what Kendrick was all about. On this night, he became the king.
No one was supposed to hear the secrets, at least not in their semifinished forms. Leading up to To Pimp a Butterfly’s release, Kendrick had teased the project by performing tracks that wound up not even being on the album. Those songs felt even more casual and bathed in warmth. It was the first glimpse into his thinking for To Pimp a Butterfly, even if the ideas weren’t fully formed as yet.
After the Grammy performance, professional basketball legend LeBron James tweeted “Top Dawg” Tiffith to release the untitled tracks that Kendrick had been performing on TV. James was easily the most influential figure in the National Basketball Association and one of the most visible celebrities on the planet. So when he pressed Tiffith to release the tracks, the Top Dawg CEO listened. “Dam my nigga u on my head 2.…” he tweeted. “The fans been killing me.… Give me a few days 2 think.” A little more than a week later, Tiffith took to social media to announce the surprise release of untitled unmastered., an eight-track EP of demos recorded during the Butterfly sessions. Presented in rough form, the record finds Kendrick sketching out ideas over acoustic guitars and in spoken-word form. At times playful, the EP offered a rare peek into Kendrick’s creative brain and just where he was going for To Pimp a Butterfly. But these weren’t throwaway tracks: the song he performed on Colbert lands here as “untitled 03 | 05.28.2013.” The song “untitled 05 | 09.21.2014” sprawls into an expansive jam session, produced by Terrace Martin, with Anna Wise on vocals and Thundercat plucking the bass. Martin started hearing the whispers the Thursday before the EP was set to drop. “There was word around the camp like, ‘Yo, we’re about to drop the secrets,’ ” the producer told Billboard. “We’re about to drop the blueprints,” he recalled Sounwave telling him. That was a rare occurrence for Kendrick and for TDE as a whole: they never gave peeks behind the curtain, but untitled unmastered. offered the sort of fly-on-the-wall perspective that fans craved of Kendrick and the squad.
The rapper had been serious-minded in recent years, but on this project, he was toying with the idea of head being the answer (to what is still anyone’s guess), and commanding more attention as a producer fully in charge of his artistic vision. “Who doing the drums?!” he shouts from the vocal booth near the end of “untitled 02 | 06.23.2014.” “Man, put that nigga on the drums, man!” The songs were recorded fairly early in the Butterfly process, before Martin called his friends Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington to take part in the album’s creation, so he was pretty much the everything-man for the record’s jazz-centric elements. The track “untitled 08 | 09.06.2014.” was coproduced by Thundercat and Mono/Poly, both of whom had connections to the L.A. beat scene and have created music together for a decade as friends. Mono/Poly, who’s known for otherworldly blends of psychedelic trance music, one day got a text from Kendrick to send him some music for To Pimp a Butterfly. Through Thundercat, the duo sent the rapper a batch of instrumentals, and the rapper jumped on a simple loop of vintage funk drums with the bassist playing chords atop it.
“That was the simplest thing I’d ever did,” Mono/Poly tells me. “It wasn’t anything I was super psyched to show Kendrick, but that’s the thing he jumped on.” Neither this song nor the other instrumentals he coproduced with Thundercat made
